We’re going back to the early nights of good ol’ Vampire: the Masquerade, having previously read the first edition core and a pair of quickstart adventures. Now, we’re heading into the meat of it, with Ashes to Ashes, the first serious adventure installment. This is the one that really set the tone for the entire World of Darkness behemoth, folks. Let’s dig in.
Ashes to Ashes follow directly on the sample scenario in the core, where the characters were residents of the dreary seen-better-days vampire community of the dreary seen-better-days city of Gary, Indiana. After attending a party at Prince Modius’ mansion full of sinister undercurrents, they were ordered to get their undead asses to Chicago and meet with Prince Lodin. They weren’t told where to find him, only that Chicago vampires hang out at a place called The Succubus Club, so off they went into the night with insufficient direction and flimsy guarantees of support.
The players go to The Succubus Club and run into one hellraising Anarch and one snooty Elder loyalist, both of whom can offer suggestions for where to go next, so we have a bit of a branching path here. If they take the Anarch’s advice, they stumble right into the play example from the core book, meet Sheriff (who still isn’t the sheriff because that’s not a thing yet, just a guy whose nickname is “Sheriff”) and almost get burned alive alongside a bunch of Anarchs. If they go the Elder route, they get directed to another club where they have a run-in with vampire Harry Houdini (yes, really) and get directed to someone who says he’s the Prince but isn’t actually.
I can’t help it notice that clubs and night hang-outs play a considerable role in all these modules. They’re always lovingly described, too, with a lot of detail about what sort of music they play, what the ambience is like, and what sort of people come here. You feel like the writers were warm to the subject. In fact, you get the distinct impression that the writers thought that the main appeal of being a vampire was that you got to sleep all day and go clubbing all night, forever…
Anyway, the players eventually get sent to a sports arena just before dawn, where they get kidnapped by a bunch of armed guys who arrive in a chopper, and they wake up at a restaurant being interrogated by a Fat Bastard (TM) named Ballard, who scarfs down copious amounts of food while accusing them of having kidnapped the Prince. I love it, it’s so Gothic-surreal. Anyway, Ballard isn’t convinced by the players insisting they’ve never even met Prince Lodin, but says that they’d better find him or he’ll call a Blood Hunt on their asses, so they get sent off with Sheriff to investigate the disappearance.
The players get to examine Lodin’s haven, but before they can get very far an Anarch shows up to rescue them from Sheriff. They can either go along with it (in which case the Elders will hate them) or defend Sheriff (in which case the Anarchs will hate them). It’s kind of not-so-subtly implied that siding with the counterculture against The Man is what any cool person would do, though.
If they do side with the Anarch and let themselves get rescued, they get sent to a supposed safe haven for the day, but find out that it’s an active crime scene – someone found an ancient corpse there. They can also find some very old and potent vampire blood on the premises that can give them temporary Disciplines if they drink it, because this was the early days and White Wolf wasn’t as psychotically determined to gate the players off from anything deemed overpowered yet.
They can decide that it must be Lodin and try to get hold of the corpse, which the police has handed over to a “specialist” who’s actually a vampire hunter and who has his house trapped from top to bottom with anti-vampire traps. If they do take possession of the corpse, though, they end up mind-whammied and black out, coming to after they’ve apparently hidden the corpse somewhere but can’t remember where. Mysteeeeeerious.
With the help of a quirky tabloid journalist, the players eventually find out that Lodin was kidnapped by a rogue ghoul who’s leading a pagan cult out in the sticks and needed a new source of vampire blood after the police nabbed his last one (that’d be the corpse from the last paragraph, natch). They head over, fight a ghouled goat along the way, and finally confront the ghoul (who’s got a ton of Disciplines, because again, these were early days and White Wolf was more generous with letting characters get superpowers) and hopefully save Prince Lodin before he gets eaten by a swarm of ghouled rats. Good times all around!
There’s also a sort of sub-adventure for True Roleplayers, where everyone plays ghouls of Lodin back in the 60s where they have to bust their butts and risk their lives getting Lodin to London so that he can… play a game of chess with a friend of his. It’s meant to further bring home just what massive jerks vampires are and how shamelessly they use them for their own convenience, and that’s meant to hint at how everything in the main adventure has been informed by people’s hidden agendas and opportunistic exploitations.
All in all, this is pretty damn awesome. The story is colourful, there are a ton of fascinating setpieces, most of the NPCs are well-realised, and the plot is meant to get the players feel jerked around and unfairly treated at every step while still giving them plenty of agency and opportunities to be cool.
One thing that really stands out for me is how down to earth it all feels – all the overblown Gothic imagery is rooted in prosaic realities, and everything has an explanation no matter how bizarre it looks. And that also helps with doing something that I’m afraid the World of Darkness entirely lost its knack for later on, which is making the mortals interesting. It’s a story about vampires, sure, but the mortals they run into, all the cops and journalists and hunters and clubbers, are interesting characters in their own right, with their own foibles and goals and capabilities. The simple stuff matters, here, and the complicated stuff is ultimately built on a foundation of it.
I’m actually tempted to run this, if I could find some players who haven’t been exposed to any thirty-year-old spoilers…
I don’t feel up for anything ambitious this week, so let’s read a fairly short little booklet, namely the Gamemaster Screen Adventures for the first edition of Paranoia. As the name implies, they’re really just an add-on to the, well, Gamemaster screen. Still, it’s the first supplement released for the game, so it might be interesting to see what direction it set off in.
So trust no one and keep your laser handy, because we’re going back to Alpha Complex!
There are three different adventures. In the first one, Robot Imana-665-C, the players get sent to repair an ailing robot. Precisely what is wrong with the robot and what it’s supposed to do when it’s functioning properly is, of course, beyond their security clearance, but it is heavily implied to them that it’s some sort of super-dangerous combat bot. It’s actually a sort of ambulatory fridge, but a series of mishaps and accidents have led to that information getting lost along the way, so now the people in charge of the robot have no idea and can’t afford to admit that they have no idea, so they’ve called in some Troubleshooters to either fix it or take the blame for having irrevocably broken it.
The actual problem with the bot is that its visual sensors have broken down, and it’s under strict orders to not cooperate with anyone without verifying their clearance level (which in Alpha Complex means, check which colour their clothes are), and it can’t verify anyone’s clearance levels because its visual sensors aren’t working. It can, however, be broadly reasoned with if some tact and patience is employed, and then all that remains is to replace the visual sensors. Which means first requisitioning a replacement, and getting the wrong parts, and arguing with requisitions about whose fault it was, and then getting the right parts but with the wrong installation instructions, and arguing with requisions about that. Alpha Complex!
Anyway, if the players manage to persevere and try ridiculous plans for long enough, and none of them succeeds at sabotaging the mission for their secret society, they might actually get through the whole thing alive. Oh, and anytime someone acts suspiciously, they get strabbed into a “Debriefing Station,” which is to say a human-sized enclose pod that measures their vital signs to check for duplicity while the Computer very gently and cheerfully questions them.
The second adventure is called The Trouble with Cockroaches. In it, the players are scrambled to deal with a fiendish act of sabotage in the form of some secret societies unleash cockroaches in Alpha Complex before the saboteurs try to shoot their way clear and escape to Outside. They get outfitted with some ridiculous experimental weaponry, including a few that places the operator well within the area of effect (as well as one weird… thing that fires one bullet straight up and another straight down, then pulls them both back again before being rendered useless), and sent to hold the line against the traitors.
This is basically a combat scenario with much shooting going on, but it’s got a Paranoia flavour through people shouting silly slogans, seeming allies turning on the players at the least opportune moment, and the Computer broadcasting helpful encouragements like, “with modern medical care many of you may once again lead at least marginally productive lives!” Cockroaches aren’t actually involved, but there are drawings of them peppered all over the pages, including an especially thick bunch right over a section titled, “WARNING! READ THIS CAREFULLY!” Heh.
The final adventure is called Das Bot: Nearly a Dozen Meters Beneath the Sea. The players get sent in a leaky old “u-bot” to investigate suspicious underwater activity just off the coast. They have to bring along an entitled, high-strung arteeest of a filmmaker as part of their cover story, and the u-bot’s brain shortcircuits at the worst possible time, forcing them to have to figure out the controls for it by trial and error before they all drown. There’s supposed to be a chart for the u-bot control panel included, but it’s not part of my PDFs. And I actually bought these off drivethroughrpg like a good boy and everything! Shameful.
Anyway, should the players survive that, they arrive at an undersea lab occupied by a bunch of explorers from a race of acquatic mutants who have built a civilised, pacifistic, enlightened, and all-around un-Alpha-Complex-like society on the ocean floor. The players might try to capture one of them for interrogation, or might even find common cause with them if they belong to the right secret societies.
All in all, these are all fun and set the tone for Paranoia. I note that they’re already rather less serious than the adventure in the core rules were, with ridiculous gadgets and clueless rebels rather than stone-cold killer combat vets and grimdark cyborg overlords. Also, apparently amphibious underwater civilisations are canon, insofar as Paranoia has anything as structured as canon.
So, we’ve read through the Cyberpunk 2013 core rules, getting our first taste of the game. So what’s the first thing the R. Talsorian Games decided to release for this property, now that they’d presumably gotten people excited for this dark, edgy new setting?
A guide for how to use the rules to run a different setting.
Which is, er… a choice.
Okay, so it makes a little more sense in context, because the novel Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams is in fact the main inspiration for Cyberpunk, not the more famous works of William Gibson. And the fact that they got Williams himself to write a supplement for it might have felt too good to pass up. So let’s have a look.
First off, the novel is about a dreary future where the nations of Earth has gotten thoroughly stomped by corporations who rule from space stations in orbit and tightly control the supply of things like medicinal drugs. A special breed of smugglers called “panzerboys” have taken to make runs of contraband across America using heavily armoured hovertanks. Global warming has caused the ocean levels to rise to the point where every sea-side city has a “venice” of half-submerged ruins attached to it. People upgrade themselves with cybernetics, work convoluted stock exchange schemes using global computer systems, assassinate each other by puking mechanical snakes, and just generally live on the bleeding edge of the dark future and so on and so forth.
It’s actually pretty cool stuff, and you can see how the game is based on it – it’s got the same sense of perverse glee in just how hopeless it all is, with people really reveling in their moral compromises and gradual loss of humanity. The man is gonna get you, but you’re going down guns blazing! And a lot of the worldbuilding is similar, too – there are characters in the book that are effectively Nomads, for instance, with the mechanised agriculture that has driven traditional farms out of business being given a poignant look in both the book and games.
As such, the supplement really does help with fleshing out the feel and themes of the game, even if some of the details are different. The stomping boot of corporations, desperate people banding together to survive, criminals that are in some ways heroic but also deeply morally stained… this is very much what I think Night City is meant to feel like.
Still, there are differences. Trauma Teams aren’t a thing, so if you get shot, you just get shot. If you do make it to the hospital, though, cloned limb replacements mean that anything that’s fallen off can be replaced so that you’ll never even know the difference. Hacking is a big one – there is no cyberspace, hackers (“crystaljocks,” as they are known in this setting) function very much like hackers in real life in that they exploit human carelessness far more than they make use of super-cool firewall-breaking software. Cyberpsychosis exists here too, but the rules for it are a little more unpredictable than “you go kill-crazy at Empathy 0.”
There is also an implant called a “cybersnake.” Remember what I said about how people get assassinated? Yeah, it’s super-gross and makes very little sense and is all the more awesome for it.
Unlike the core rules, here there are rules for drugs. I may have sold Mike Pondsmith short by assuming he was just afraid of moral guardians – here he mentions that he doesn’t like glamourising drugs because he’s lost friends to overdoses. Aoch. Okay, I suppose I can see why he didn’t feel like emphasising them in his own setting, then. But, in the world of Hardwired routine drug use is a thing that people engage in, so here there are rules for both short and long term effects.
There is a system for quickly generating NPCs, complete with cyberware, which is definitely something I can see coming in handy. In fact, the way NPCs are statted up here seems like it hung around for a while.
Hacking gets a long section explaining how you do it realistically and how a hack can be run like a sort of long-distance detective story – you piece together clues about who your target is, use them to guess his passwords and to figure out where else you could look for data, and then piece together more clues from what you find. It’s pretty cool, though I still have to snicker a little at the breathless way the text describes how you can write a program that does things automatically. Ah, back when it was all shiny and new.
There is a sort of loosely described campaign set in the Hardwired universe. The characters start out going over the wreckage of a cargo shuttle that crashed at sea, find themselves in the possession of a terrifying genetically engineered super-plague, and get drawn into the fight between two different corporations that sets up the events of the novel. It’s pretty good stuff, nothing special but it gives you a good idea for what cyberpunks are supposed to get up to and what problems they’ll run into while doing it.
All in all, the book was kind of enjoyable, and it actually fleshed out a few things for the main game in the process of setting up an alternate one. Still not sure I’d use it, but it’s definitely worth mining for material.
Having made our start on the hyper-90s roleplaying game of Torg here, let us embark on the first of its many supplements! It is the worldbook for the first of the six (later eight) cosms that are competing with boring ol’ Earth for the right to define reality: the Living Land, world of dinosaurs, giant bugs, and AUTHENTIC!!!! experience.
For those who don’t remember, the premise of Torg is that the Earth has been invaded by six hostile parallel realities that transform parts of the world into a different genre, all in the service of their tyrannical High Lord and his quest for the possibility energy that Earth is rich in. The Living Land is the “lost world” cosm, based on the sort of Tarzan-style pulp novels of mysterious hidden valleys and wildernesses full of primordial beasts. It is populated by three sentient races: edeinos (lizard men), stalengers (flying jellyfish) and benthes (emotion-manipulation slug things). Humans never evolved, so all humans in the Living Land realm are Core Earth natives who have either switched over or are trying very hard not to. The Living Land is also animated by the power of the nature deity Lanala, whose believers can perform miracles.
We start with a fiction piece about a Storm Knight who drives into the now-overgrown town he used to live in, looking for his daughter. He ends up fighting some edeinos and gets taken captive, and it turns out that his daughter has joined the tribe and now wants him to do the same. He refuses and gets painfully killed. It’s all kind of chilling and really brings home the fact that just because you’re a Storm Knight it doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed a happy ending.
There’s a fairly detailed description of the cosm of Takta Ker (which just means “the Living Land,” but they’ll still use that name for the cosm and “the Living Land” for its realm on Earth), which is basically one big warm, misty jungle. It used to be home to both the edeinos and a sentient insect species that were developing a civilisation, but the edeinos found civilisation to be an abomination unto Lanala and so wiped them out.
Later, an edeinos named Baruk Kaah found a stone seed that had fallen from the sky, and when he planted it it grew to a great big petrified forest called Rec Pakken. Rec Pakken is a Darkness Device, one of the infernal contraptions that roam the cosmverse and bond with people to turn them into High Lords. So Baruk Kaah became the High Lord of Takta Ker and conquered the whole thing, declared himself Saar of the Edeinos, then went on to conquer a few more cosms for good measure, including those of the stalengers and benthes. Everyone was either converted to Keta Kalles, the worship of Lanala, or wiped out. Baruk Kaah plans to become Torg, a sort of super-High Lord, and become the mate and equal of Lanala. This is, of course, the blackest heresy by the teachings of Keta Kalles, so he has hidden his ambitions from all his followers.
The next chapter is on Keta Kalles itself. It teaches that Lanala created the universe to experience it, but the effort wore her out so much that she became insensate and numb. So with her last strength, she created living beings to experience it for her. Thus, the purpose of life is to experience as intensely as possible so that Lanala can share your sensations. Jakatts (followers of Keta Kalles, of whatever species) disdain all things crafted or manufactured, because crafted things are smooth and utilitarian, and that means that they have been robbed of all personality. On the other hand, a Jakatt will sit and stare at a tree moving in the wind for hours, relishing its organic unevenness.
Death exists because Lanala saw that some creatures did not want to truly live, and therefore it was better for them to die. Therefore, Jakatts will look at anyone complaining or cowering and decide that they find life to be a burden, and so should be killed. It’s horrifying, but it makes a kind of twisted sense.
There are two kinds of priests of Keta Kalles – optants, the priests of Life, and gotaks, the priests of Death. Optants worship Lanala in the straightforward way, for good or ill. Gotaks, on the other hand, are a perversion of the religion by Baruk Kaah. Gotaks exist to deal with all the things that can’t be spun as life-affirming, but which need to be done in order to carry out Baruk Kaah’s eternal inter-cosmic war. For instance, they can handle “dead things” like mechanical weapons, and perform dark rites to draw on the power of Rec Pakken (which, as a petrified but still-growing forest, is itself a perversion of what Keta Kalles is meant to stand for).
Like all High Lords, Baruk Kaah expands his realm by planting “stelae,” objects created by his Darkness Device that mark the boundaries of the realm. Rec Pakken’s stelae take the form of dried bones wrapped in vines that get buried in the ground.
Jakatts can perform miracles of Lanala through a combination of intense experience and a sort of invocation of Lanala promising her more of the same if only she grants some power. Lanala is neither male or female, but is always the opposite of the person speaking of her. This is because she is first and foremost a lover, and to worship her is to court her.
There are actually three Living Land realms on Earth, one in Canada (the Northern Land), one on the American west coast (the Western Living Land) and one of the American east coast (the Eastern Living Land). Baruk Kaah has expanded quickly, flipping more and more areas to the Living Land’s axioms, and then easily defeating modern armies whose weapons and vehicles won’t work under those axioms. He’s only slowing down after three months because he’s run out of stockpiled stealea, so now he can just take new areas as quickly as he can manufacture new ones. He’s also had a setback in failing to take Silicon Valley, since it’s a Core Earth hardpoint, a place that can maintain its own axioms even when in the middle of the realm of a different cosm. Prying the high-tech toys out of the hands of nerds takes more than just godlike cosmic power, I guess.
Baruk Kaah keeps sending covert groups of gotaks sneaking into Core Earth territory to plant more stelae (and a sort of magic land mines called “pain sacks,” to discourage people from digging for stealae). He distracts the US military by launching frontal assaults, making use of expendable gospog shock troops. The real action is in the covert ops to plant stealae, because Baruk Kaah can’t win against modern weapons where Core Earth axioms hold sway, and humans can’t win against dinosaur stampedes where Living Land axioms rule. Which does rather conveniently mean that the war will be determined by small-group actions of the sort that the player characters can take part in.
Gospogs are plant-zombie soldiers grown from fields of corpses. Baruk Kaah has his armed with looted modern weapons and driven at the enemy by gotaks. So yes, Swamp Things with machine guns are a thing in this game. I just want to make that clear. Anyway, gospogs are another one of those things that are abominations unto Lanala but that gotaks have special dispensation to interact with because Baruk Kaah says so. Some Jakatts have gotten thoroughly fed up with Baruk Kaah’s self-serving exceptions to the rules and have turned rebel.
Baruk Kaah and Doctor Mobius of the Nile Empire are surprisingly chummy, mostly because both of them really hate Cyperpope Jean Malraux of the Cyberpapacy and resent the way he keeps offering to protect Core Earth people from the two of them (not that anyone ever seems to take him up on it, mind you). Baruk Kaah also used to get along with Angrad Uthorion of Aysle, but since Uthorion lost his Darkness Device and civil war erupted in Aysle, Baruk Kaah is inclined to ignore him.
Of the three Living Land realms, the Eastern Land is fully under Baruk Kaah’s control and has the most forward momentum. The Western Land is home to those Jakatt rebels and the site of Baruk Kaah’s humiliating defeat at Silicon Valley, so things there are a lot more messy and complicated all around. It’s also where the most Core Earth humans decided to throw off their clothes and run naked into the woods to become Jakatts, because, y’know, California. The Northern Land isn’t actually intended to expand, but just serves as partly a diversion keeping Canada from coming to the US’ aid, and partly a place for the gotaks to experiment with dark shamanism that normal, Lanala-fearing Jakatts would be offended by.
New York is part of the Eastern Land and is ruled mainly by gangs, including one called the Links who are former computer geeks who act like they’re in a video game. There is a holdout zone ruled over by the mayor where things are kept as civilised as possible, though. Also, a lot of museums had Eternity Shards (cultural artifacts that are loaded with possibility energy, and can thus grant various powers to Storm Knights) that have since been looted and are now in the possession of various gangs. Oh, and the Statue of Liberty is rubble, because what’s an alien invasion without some destroyed landmarks?
Philadelphia is a Core Earth hardpoint and are under constant attack by Jakatts. Getting supplies in to feed the refugee population is a constant problem. The Living Land also contains “resistance communities” who are characterised as noble, square-jawed pioneer types who refuse to be driven off their land by “survivalists” who are characterised as knuckle-dragging macho-men who like guns to an unhealthy extent. See what I mean about the whole game having somewhat of a black and white morality?
The Northern Land is home to two major dark evil rituals. One of them creates a sort of giant being of water that is controlled by a gotak. Those water beings are dead things infused with artificial life, thus abominations unto Lanala. Another infuses a Jakatt with an inner fire that makes them powerful, but which eventually kills them – effectively, it requires a Jakatt to commit slow suicide, which is also an abomination unto Lanala. Baruk Kaah has spread some convenient lies and rationalisations to make it seem like he’s still toeing the line, but a lot of Jakatts would be very upset if they ever learned the full story of what is happening in the Northern Land.
There is a brief mention of the Land Below, which is a sort of subterranean realm that seems to have been created through interaction between the Living Land and the Nile Empire – think Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
The US is reeling from losing a third of its territory and dealing with hordes of refugees because of it. It has also been secretly taken over by the Delphi Council, who are a bunch of cynical politicians and military officers. They have special forces called Spartans who roam around doing shady things for the supposed greater good. For one thing, they don’t like resistance communities (since every person living in one constantly bleeds possibility energy for Baruk Kaah to soak up) and keep trying to forcibly relocate them, or kill them all when that’s not possible. They also don’t believe that some Jakatts have turned on Baruk Kaah but consider all Jakatts to be the enemy, and consider humans who have become Jakatts to be traitors. You get the idea, they are hardasses who hate all compromise.
Los Angeles has been all but abandoned since the Living Land is getting perilously close, so the movie industry has mostly moved to Florida. Movies about daring explorers venturing into the Living Land to fight edeinos are becoming popular, some of them shot on site by enterprising Storm Knights. There is also a lot of academic interest in exploring the Living Land and cataloguing the dizzying ecological diversity that has sprung up there, so biologists tend to launch expeditions into darkest Pensylvania.
Canada is trying to remain unruffled, and have at least politically weathered the changes better than the US. The Cyberpope is making overtures and promising Quebec his protection, but no one is listening to him very much because he’s a loser and everyone hates him.
Laws of the realm! The Living Land has absolutely no magic, very little social organisation, and even less technology. Things like currency and time keeping are impossible to even think about without creating a contradiction, and machinery simply will not work there for anyone who isn’t a Storm Knight. It’s got a very high spiritual axiom, though, making very powerful miracles possible (though only Lanala’s, since she’s the one true god of the Living Land). Lanalan miracles revolve mainly around granting strength, speed and heightened senses, as well as dealing with animals and surviving in the wilds.
The Living Land is also covered in a mist that gradually decomposes all dead things (canned goods stay fresh while sealed, but you need to eat the contents very fast once you open them), and compasses simply fail to work in there, even for Storm Knights. Both are adjustments Baruk Kaah has made to make the place as inhospitable as possible for invaders. A Jakatt can use a miracle to see through the mist without problem.
We get a section on creatures, of which there is obviously a considerable number. Most Living Land creature are either great big lizards, great big insects, or great big amoebas. There are spiders so large that when they stand still their bodies are shrouded by the mists above you and their legs can be mistaken for tree trunks. You may scream now.
There is a section of adventure design, starting with the oft-repeated claim that the Possibility Wars can’t be won through military means or through the hard-men-making-hard-choices shenanigans of the Delphi Council but only by true heroes doing good and heroic things. The stated reason for that is that you need to spread tales of heroism to re-energise the people in a realm before you can remove the stealae without killing them, but, er… I kind of feel like you could in fact win the war by yanking stelae left and right and writing the deaths off as “unavoidable collateral damage”? I mean, that’s very bleak and clearly not the tone the game designers wanted to go for, and fair enough, but I would have liked something a bit more solid. Like, maybe you cannot yank stelae if too many people within its zone have given up hope, because it feeds on their desperation? Something like that might work.
There are a bunch of adventure ideas, like escorting convoys through the Living Land, searching for Eternity Shards (which are sometimes living creatures in the Living Land), sabotaging a gotek site of human sacrifice that strengths Rec Pakken, and exposing a conspiracy by the Delphi Council to exterminate an edeinos tribe who’s rebelling against Baruk Kaah and are therefore potential allies. All good stuff.
Finally, there are a bunch of character templates, including (as I mentioned in the post about the main game) both human converts to Keta Kalles, edeinos and stalenger converts to Core Earths’ axioms, edeinos and stalenger Jakatts who oppose Baruk Kaah for his religious hypocrisy, and Core Earth humans who hold to their own axioms in the face of the Living Land. Which is still pretty cool.
All in all, I really liked this book. The Living Land was, I understand, not very popular with the fanbase, who preferred to go off to the Nile Empire and have pulp adventures. I guess I can see why, but it’s a shame. This was the first book released for the line and the one that dealt most closely with the writers’ own home country, and you can see that a lot of love and care went into really expanding on every detail of it and stuffing it shock full of plot hooks, characters, and political and social complexities. It honestly feels like you could make a whole campaign without ever leaving this part of the setting, running any number of stories verging between post-apocalyptic survival and mystical-wilderness exploration, with some gritty political intrigue at the home front for salt.
Oh well. History has spoken, and the lost world of Torg, appropriately enough, got left behind.
Today, I thought I’d continue my readthrough of Vampire: the Masquerade with two early adventure supplements that are each meant to work as stand-alone introductions to the game: Blood Nativity and Alien Hunger. Both are also set in locations other than Chicago and neighbouring cities, where the game seems to have otherwise stayed pretty focused in the early days.
Blood Nativity is the shorter and simpler one. The players start out as humans in Cleveland who are blissfully unaware of the existence of vampires, but a bunch of Elders have decided that they’re going to sire a bunch of neonates as part of a power play, so the players get invited to dinner at a fancy Blues club. The idea is that things will get progressively stranger over the course of the evening until the Elders all choose one player to embrace, whether by hypnotism, seduction, or force.
The Elders are a fairly fun bunch. They include such individuals as an opinionated afro-sporting Brujah grrrrrrl, a Gangrel sportsball fanatic, a beer-bellied Nosferatu, and a Malkavian who thinks that the entire world is a dream she’s having. Though there’s a mention that the Tremere of the group won’t embrace anyone he hasn’t apprenticed for years since that’s not how the Tremere do things. Fair enough, but then why is he even in the story given that the premise is that the guys are going to pick some unaware people off the street and embrace them?
Anyway, the players wake up the next evening thirsty for bloooooooood. The Elders have left a few ghouls to give them basic instructions, but it’s now their job to get themselves fed for the first time. So it’s out on the street and start stalking some late-night pedestrians. This is really messed up and I sort of love it.
Okay, so I admit that I’m prudish enough to squirm a little at the description of two high school cheerleaders who the GM is instructed to describe in lavish terms how delicious they look…
Anyway, when stalking around on the street looking for someone to munch on, the players get attacked by a couple of Anarchs and their pet street gang, since the players have unknowingly been poaching on their territory. Once they wrap up that fight, one way or another, the police shows up and arrests anyone who’s still standing.
The players end up in jail, with dawn approaching. How easy it is for them to get out again before it’s too late depends on how much restraint they showed – if they were caught snacking on a gangbanger, it’s not looking good. If they do get out, their behaviour has also been noted by the Elders and the Prince, and will determine their future as vampires in Cleveland.
Honestly, I think if I was a vampire in Cleveland, I’d be inclined to move just from how stupid I’d feel saying “a vampire in Cleveland,” but never mind.
This one is longer and more complicated. It starts with the players being, again, unknowing people, this time in Denver. There are pregenerated characters, or you can make your own if you prefer. Either way, they have all having been kidnapped by Vampire Louis Pasteur…
… no, really, in the World of Darkness Louis Pasteur faked his death and became a vampire and he’s been working on a way to reverse vampirism ever since then, look, I told you that these early books were kind of silly…
… anyway, Vampire Louis Pasteur has kidnapped them and administered an array of serums to turn them into vampires (of different clans, since they got different serums). He plans to later administer another array of serums that are supposed to turn them back to human again, but before that can happen he gets attacked and killed by the Prince of the city and his two cronies, who have been fooled by one of his enemies into thinking that he’s conspiring against them. They set the house on fire and leave. The players wake up in the basement of a burning house, feeling weird and not knowing why, in the company of three oddly tasty-looking people (three other experimental subjects, who experienced Rebirth when Pasteur, as their effective sire, died and became human again – at this point in the game line, that was still a thing that could happen).
The players manage to get out and have to try to figure out what the hell is going on. They get saddled with an annoyingly persistent – and clever – police detective who thinks they had something to do with the murder and the fire. They get contacted by another vampire who explains a few facts of the world to them, but before they can get too chummy he gets nabbed by the Prince as well. They also get a Blood Hunt declared against them and have to duck opportunistic vampires at every turn until and unless they can convince the Prince that they’re not part of some kind of enemy action.
They can also investigate Vampire Louis Pasteur and find out that he was doing some kind of experiments, and that he had a human partner who they can find. They can also discover that a rogue ghoul has stolen the last remaining samples of the turn-back-to-human serums, and if they find him, he might hand them over if they turn him into a vampire first. Finally, if they have put all the clues together right and haven’t lost a ton of Humanity and/or bought a ton of Disciplines, they can administer the serums and regain their humanity… if they still want it.
All said and done, I really like these two adventures. They’re vivid, they’re immediate, and they work by really making you think about what it would be like to become a vampire and suddenly have amazing powers, inhuman urges, and a ton of potential enemies out to get you. The NPCs, likewise, are quirky and fun, and have intricate and slightly unwholesome relationships to each other – it all feels very much like the social circle of a bunch of angsty, maladjusted twenty-somethings, which is where I think the WoD games always really shine.
So far so good. Next up, whenever I get around to it, is Ashes to Ashes, where we go to Chicago and settle in to stay there for a while.
All right, being entirely too tired, depressed and headachey to post anything innovative, this week I’ve decided to read a little more of the classics. A while ago, I read the very first roleplaying game ever published in Swedish – Dragonbane, first edition. This time, I thought I’d move on with the only two supplements ever published for it before the second edition kicked in.
Starting with the very first roleplaying adventure published in Swedish: Spindelkonungens Pyramid (“The Pyramid of the Spider King”).
There’s actually three different version of this thing: one for the first edition, one technically that was sold along with the second edition but actually runs on first-edition rules, and one that was sold on its own where they had translated it to the second edition. Yeah, I don’t quite know what’s up with that.
In this adventure, the players find themselves in the caravan city of Cerand, which lies at the edge of the Toora Desert (which is a pun, by the way: in Swedish torr means “dry”) beyond which lies the exotic land of Faar. Get used to the punny names, by the way, because there’s going to be a lot of them. At one point the players get attacked by two giant spiders named “Spinn” and “Dell” (from the Swedish spindel, “spider”), there’s a demon called Puutch (from puts, “polish”) who has been bound to polish a pole for eternity, there’s another, crocodile-like demon who is hanging around in a pool of soggy goo and is called Träsck (träsk = “swamp”)…
Anyway, they’re hired by a one-legged dude named Assar the Sorcerer to break into a nearby pyramid and get him three particular doodads from it – all other loot they can keep. I kind of like the fact that there’s a built-in reason why he can’t just go with them and help them with his presumably uber-strong magic skills… The pyramid is the burial site of Arach the Spider King, who I think we’re quite free to picture as The Rock, and is guarded by, well, a whole bunch of giant spiders, including a big bugger called Lepera.
So it’s a dungeon, basically, with a lot of quirky traps like a room that starts spinning wildly when you enter it, a paper floor with the aforementioned crocodile-demon beneath it, a bucket that contains a liquid that’s harmless in itself but makes you smell delicious to spiders… And yes, there is a really big spider guarding the final treasure room.
Something that gives it all some extra flavour is that there are ways to circumvent the main path, but that it’s not necessarily a good idea. If the players look around, they can find a hidden stairway in one place and a pole to slide down in another, and if they follow them all the way down they end up in the catacombs beneath the pyramid. And there they can find a bunch of trolls and goblins, under contract of a nearby tyrannical king, have dug themselves in and are now working on setting off an explosive under the main treasure chamber so they can get at the goodies. The adventure notes that these rival adventurers aren’t necessarily hostile and that some arrangement might be made with them, so there’s a possibility for some diplomacy in the midst of the spider-squashing.
All in all, it’s really colourful and funny, but I also can’t help it note that, much like the sample adventure in the rule book… that this thing is a meatgrinder. Like, every monster has a gazillion hit points and hits like a truck, and this is a game that’s very unforgiving about how many hits you can take. You’d want to have a whole bunch of big guys in plate armour if you were going to push straight through. Possibly you could finesse it, but that would require a lot of creativity and an agreeable GM, because there’s not really that much you can do about a monster coming at you through a narrow corridor.
Oh, and the second two editions of the adventure comes with a bonus adventure called The Secret of the Skeleton Village. It was originally published in the company’s newsletter, Sinkadus, before turning up here. It’s kind of forgettable, so I’ll spoil the ending: the secret is that there’s a chest with gold and silver in it in the church. Which is guarded by skeletons. So… yeah. The only two things that stand out is that one, there is a reference to a priest casting a spell, which is a thing that only happened in the first edition, and two, there’s another mention of the chivalrous god Eledain and his noble knights. The latter actually gets picked up in a second-edition adventure, making it quite possibly the only example of consistent worldbuilding for the game’s original and rather sketchy setting.
Tvillingbergen (“The Twin Mountains”) is a more bog-standard dungeon crawl. The players hear a rumour that two bickering wizards were buried together with their treasure by their sons, who got along rather better and who later left the area. They investigate, and sure enough, there’s a tomb full of skeletons. And a ghost (this edition was big on ghosts. I think there was at least one in every published adventure). And also, the mummies of the wizards will rise and attack if you disturb one of them, but if you disturb them both at once they’ll both rise and attack each other, which is a fun touch.
Along the way, there are trolls, a newly introduced race called reptile men that were totally D&D troglodytes with the serial number filed off, some will o’ the wisps, and a couple of new spells that get dutifully described for player use. Also, the loot includes one of those demon weapons that were mentioned in the core.
I’ve actually run this one, but I got to admit that I nerfed the whole thing shamelessly to avoid killing my players. Because again, the NPC stats are kind of ridiculous. I kind of feel like there is a certain mismatch between the tone of the game, with its pleasantly pastoral Swedish Astrid Lindgren descriptions, lovably silly NPCs, and punny names, and the absolutely brutal rules. Like, I can get behind some dark and dangerous gameplay, but then I’d expect the setting to be described as less… cosy.
Still, maybe everyone just did precisely what I did, and scaled down the opposition to something the players could handle. Certainly I don’t remember the game as exceedingly lethal back when I played it. Of course, for some reason my players were always walking around in full plate armour and swinging claymores, so maybe I was just way too nice about starting equipment…
This week in my habit (I don’t want to overestimate my future attention span by calling it a “series”) of reading classical RPGs, I’ll be turning my attention to a game near and dear to my heart for its sheer earnest ridiculousness. Presenting Torg: Roleplaying the Possibility Wars, published back in 1990. Quite possibly the most 90s game of them all, it featured things like ninjas fighting dinosaurs on air ships hovering above the Nile. Possibly to rescue a captive wizard. With his spells uploaded in a cybernetic implant. It’s glorious.
So, when we first open the box, we find the now-familiar holy trinity of a Rule Book, a World Book and an Adventure Book. Opening the former, we are told that this game will allow us to roleplay in the world of the much-renowned The Possibility Wars trilogy of novels…
Wait. Stop. What?
Yeah. There were novels that you were assumed to have read going into this. I don’t mean that they were an existing property that someone made a game for. I mean that someone actually decided that their game needed three complete novels just to introduce it. Like, you can’t just read the novels, because they stop just when the story is getting interesting, and you can’t just play the game without reading the novels, because they explain a ton of the background for the current situation that the games only go over in a cursory manner.
I guess it’s oddly comforting to know that my generation wasn’t the first one to think that spreading a story over multiple forms of media was a good idea…
Getting hold of those novels, by the way, used to be impossible because, surprise – they weren’t exactly leaping off the shelves, so they’d gone out of print in a big way. But, lately they have resurfaced online, so I’ve finally read them. They’re called, in order, The Storm Knights, The Dark Realm and The Nightmare Dream (yes, really).
So let’s take a step back…
THE POSSIBILITY WARS
The books concern the invasion of Earth (later called “Core Earth” for convenience) by six alternate realities, or “cosms.” Each cosm has its own “axioms” that determine what is and is not possible in them – in some, magicians casting spells is completely normal but any technology more advanced than a broadsword is pure fantasy, in others neither one works but there are gods who routinely grant miracles in return for prayers, in other still all three may exist in a mad kitchen sink. Some cosms have the misfortune of being ruled by a High Lord, a sentient being who has bonded with a piece of primordial evil called a Darkness Device and become the arbitrator of what is and isn’t possible in that cosm. They are uniformly not nice people, because Darkness Devices are sentient and malevolent and refuse to bond with nice people.
High Lords are greedy for something called “possibility energy” that they can extract from other cosms by invading them and gradually converting their axioms to their own. As these acts of metaphysical imperialism progresses, causing one geographical region after another to make a genre switch, possibility energy is released and absorbed by the High Lord through his Darkness Device.
Of the six invaders, the two that get much screen time in the books is Baruk Kaah, High Lord of the Living Land, and the Gaunt Man, High Lord of Orrorsh. The Living Land is a sort of lost-world setting where humans never evolved and humanoid dinosaurs called Edeinos rule the Earth. Technology and magic are both “impossible” in the Living Land, but it has a ridiculously high spiritual axiom that makes the land literally… well… living and responsive to the prayers of those who live in harmony with it. Orrorsh is technically a world of Victorian horror, but it’s actually more like a particularly edgelordy brand of D&D – think dark jungles, bizarre monsters that want to eat you, and a scheming necromancer behind every bush. Which has poisoned thorns that dissolve your flesh if you get pricked by them. You get the idea.
Baruk Kaah starts spreading the Living Land over North America, and we get some nicely flavourful scenes where the heroes are trying to survive, zombie-apocalypse-style, in a world where technology no longer works and people keep Lord of the Flies-ing into neo-savages at the slightest provocation. Orrorsh turns up in Indonesia. Meanwhile, a cliched 1930s supervillain named Doctor Mobius appears in Egypt and declare a new Nile Empire, Britain becomes linked with a high fantasy world called Aysle, France falls under the sway of evil Catholics (because again, it was the 90s so Catholics were considered almost per definition evil… okay, so admittedly one of the protagonists is a Core Earth Catholic priest, so I guess it’s not quite as bad as all that, but still…) from a theocratic Dark Age world and Japan becomes a high-tech cyberpunk dystopia but no one notices because the writers kind of assumed that Japan was already a high-tech cyberpunk dystopia. Again again, it was the 90s.
The heroes are a bunch of random survivors who turn out to be Storm Knights, a sort of special people who can maintain their personal axioms even where another reality holds sway – so essentially, a Storm Knight from Earth can still shoot dinosaurs in the Living Land because when the Living Land says that crude dead objects have no power, the Storm Knight can just say, “sez you!” and start blasting. They come together and blunder through a few different cosms, mostly the Living Land and Orrorsh with a bit of the Nile Empire and Aysle towards the end. Along the way, they find an Eternity Shard, a special cultural artifact infused with possibility energy that make for potent weapons against the High Lords.
There are three major developments from the novels. Firstly, the Gaunt Man becomes trapped in a “possibility storm” in his Indonesian lair, and it’ll take him 30-odd supplements to finally free himself. His treacherous second-in-command takes over and issues orders in his name, but he can’t find the Gaunt Man’s Darkness Device, so he’s not a High Lord yet. In Aysle, likewise, the High Lord Uthorion gets ousted from the body of the cosm’s rightful ruler that he’s been possessing for the last few centuries, so now that nice lady is technically the High Lord and a civil war breaks out between the two of them. Catholic strawman Pope Jean Malraux, finally, gets his personal axiom scrambled with that of a cyberpunk cosm called Kadandra, so now he’s the Cyberpope and France pivots from having been shunted back into the middle ages to being shunted into a dark future full of circuitry-engraved crucifixes and an Inquisition that can sentence you to simulated purgatory.
Yes, that all sounds ridiculously messy and over-complicated. Because it is. Welcome to Torg.
As for the quality of the books? Ehhhhh. They’re… not good. They’re of about the same quality as a lot of fiction pieces in roleplaying books, except here they go on for hundreds of pages. The descriptions are so-so, the characters behave only vaguely like human beings, and the understanding of narrative tension is limited at best. The way the villains are presented suffers especially from this, because we keep being told that they’re nightmarish monsters that we should tremble in fear of, but they still keep toppling over whenever a protagonist flicks them on the nose.
Also, I hate Ace Decker. He’s an obnoxious Gary Stue of the first order. See, he’s called “Ace” because he’s so incredibly good at everything! War hero, sports hero, charismatic politician, considerate lover, there is no end to his awesomeness! At one point, he manages to steal his brother’s girlfriend despite being in a coma at the time, because he’s just that incredibly sexy and fascinating. Also, his brother promptly turns evil out of mad jealousy, just in case we were tempted to sympathise with him. Aaarrrgggghhhh.
All that said, the books are definitely useful for setting the tone of the game and showing you what you’re meant to be dealing with – car chases, pulse-pounding infiltrations of enemy territory, exotic locations, and of course six different genres (seven if you count Core Earth as having the genre of “semi-realistic contemporary action movie”) all mixing together and being played to the hilt. The GM should probably read them, but not more than once.
THE RULEBOOK
All right, so now let’s get to the actual game!
The rulebook starts by introducing us to the system, and hoo boy, it’s a doozy of a system. See, the developers apparently decided that since they had a game where you could run into such a startling variety of things, what they needed as a system that could model absolutely freaking everything, from two kittens play-fighting to the Death Star blowing up a rebel planet. And they tried. By God, they tried!
The basic way they set about it was by having an logarithmic stat progression, where an increase of 5 points means that the value has been multiplied by ten. If your Strength is 8 and mine is 13, then I’m ten times as strong as you. This means that you can model a wide range of things without going into ridiculous numbers. A car still only has Toughness 20 or so compared to a person’s Toughness 8, even though something that would almost certainly mortally wound the person would cause a slight scratch to the car at most.
Die rolls are d20 roll-over, but you don’t just read the number you rolled and add it to your stat – no, each number on the die corresponds to a particular value that you have to look up, with a 1 being -12 and a 20 being +7. 10s explode, and so do 20s if you’re a Storm Knight who is trained in the action you’re attempting, so you always have a chance at succeeding at anything that is remotely physically possible even if it’s a tiny one (the highest stated difficulty, 25, is called “never tell me the odds!”). All of which is terribly complicated, but it does mean that most rolls are going to result in something close to the related stat – if you have a First Aid score of 12, then you can expect a result around 12 most of the time. It makes eyeballing your stats easier. Which is nice, though I feel like you could probably have managed something similar by using some kind of dice pool instead…
But that’s just the beginning! See, now that we have a generic system, we need to create specific cases for every freaking thing that can possibly happen! In particular, one thing that the writers were apparently very keen on was to avoid fights where everyone just kept repeatedly rolling to hit, so there’s a ton of ways to intimidate, distract, misdirect or trick your enemies, all of which have their own complicated subsystems. There are three different kinds of damage (shock, wounds and KO) that are tracked separately. There are mechanics for negotiation and getting into someone’s good graces, with possible risks for trying to push too hard. There are rules for how you can push yourself to the limits, and how far you can push depending on your stats and the maximum stats for your species, and what the consequences in fatigue will be. And and and and and and…
And we haven’t even gotten to the cards yet. See, Torg comes with a special deck of cards that are used in two ways. Firstly, a card is drawn for each round in combat to determine who goes first (it’s always all the good guys first or all the bad guys first) and also introduces some additional circumstances to that particular round – again, to keep two rounds from just being repetitions of each other. Secondly, cards are dealt to the players, and each card provides some special buff or ability when played. You can’t just play them because you have them, though, first you have to move them from your “hand” to your “pool.” You can move a card into your pool once per round, and you get new cards when you successfully perform an action in a round that’s the “favoured” action (which is determined by the initiative card). Once a card is in your pool, you can play it at any time, in any combination.
Are you whimpering on the floor yet?
I’ve never actually dared to run Torg, but I’ve tried some test fights on my own, and yeah – I will admit that it seems like it could kind of be fun once you got the hang of it. The cards give you more shiny buttons to press, and it is nice to have some added incentive to not just do the same thing every round but to mix things up and interject your attacks with witty insults and fancy footwork. But man, the sheer amount of complexity here…
Anyway, the final part of the basic rules (yes, these are still “basic”) is the use of possibilities. Storm Knights have those as a special resource pool, and they can spend them to resist injuries, roll an extra time for an action and add the results together, or ignore the axioms around you for a short while. Between possibilities, cards, exploding 20s and taking less damage from the same combat result, Storm Knights have a lot of advantages over “Ords,” or boring normal people. The idea seem to be that they’re action heroes; not superhuman per se, but events kind of conspire to give them openings and let them escape by the skin of their teeth.
There is one of those choose-your-own-adventure chapters that seems to have been in vogue around this time. You play as a mercenary flying a plane over the Living Land but having to make an emergency landing and make your way to safety. It’s nice enough, though I keep failing at it – they put in a time limit at one point, and I’m not sure if it’s meant to be impossible to overcome, because I never manage to get anywhere before it runs out…
Then we get an exhaustive account of just how possibility-physics work and what the logistics is of the High Lords’ invasion. See, a High Lord first has to send some agents into a cosm to place “stelae” that marks out boundaries between two areas that can have different axioms despite being in the same cosm. At this point, both the area contained within the stelae and the area outside of it will have the native cosm’s axioms, so no one will notice anything at first. But then, the High Lord creates a portal called a Maelstrom Bridge, which takes the form of some sort of physical path that drops down from the sky (Baruk Kaah’s, as described in the books, looks sort of like a giant tree or vine). That connects the area within the stelae to the invading cosm, and the axioms begin to fight. Since the area within the stelae is smaller, the axioms there lose, and the invading cosm inflicts its axioms – it becomes a “realm” of the invading cosm.
After that, what happens depends on the exact strategy of the High Lord, but he’ll always try to extend the stelae network and spread the realm further. To conquer successive areas he needs to flood them with people who accept his axioms, which he can do by just sending armies of his own people into them (which is what Baruk Kaah does), or by converting the natives to his way of thinking (which Jean Malraux tends to be big on). Ords who spend time in a realm all eventually disconnect from their home cosm and become denizens of the realm’s cosm. This has the side effect of releasing their possibility energy, allowing the High Lord’s Darkness Device to gobble it up. Having transformed once, they are now without possibility energy, so if they for any reason transform again – for instance, if the realm switches to a new set of axioms – they simply cease to exist.
This last part adds another wrinkle. Once an area has been taken by a High Lord, just uprooting the stelae so it switches back to its original axioms is problematic, since it will cause the death of a number of innocent people. The only way to avoid that is by a complicated procedure whereby a Storm Knight has to play a Glory card, something that can only be done when rolling a result of 60+ on a single die roll (something that is just vaguely possible with a combination of a favourable condition from an initiative card, playing a card that allows an extra roll, spending a possibility for an extra roll, and/or rolling a 20 on one of all those rolls. And remember, you need to have first drawn a Glory card and moved it to your pool for it even to be possible!). Having done that, they can spread tales of their heroic deeds, thus giving the people hope and letting them regain some possibility energy. All of which does give you an all-purpose reason to go adventuring, but it seems a little overblown and overly mechanical, especially since it’s so freaking hard to pull off. I mean, it’s not like yanking a stela is easy in itself, given that the High Lords tend to defend them with everything they’ve got…
We also get the first mention of gospogs, which are a sort of all-purpose shock troops that the Gaunt Man have invented and shared with his High Lord allies. Gospogs need to be planted on a field of corpses, and grow up to a sort of plant-zombies. A field can be planted more than once, and each time it yields a smaller harvest of more powerful gospogs. Gospogs of the first planting are all the same kind of Swamp Thing lookalikes, but later plantings take on unique appearances based on the cosm they grow in.
We finish up with chapters on magic and miracles. Those have a lot in common, in that they are both distinct powers that can be attempted, though spells have to be learned separately while holy people of a given religion tends to know all its associated miracles. Spells rely on one of four different magical abilities (conjuration, divination, apportation and transformation), while miracles depend on a single one (faith). Spells cause damage to the caster in proportion to how far beneath a particular target number he rolls (this target number is usually higher than the one to just succeed at the spell, so a casting will likely hurt a little even if you pull it off). Miracles, on the other hand, can be enhanced by the cooperation of other people who share the miracleworker’s religion.
All religions are true in Torg. That is, they are true in some cosm, somewhere, and the gods reach out across the cosmverse to aid their believers in other cosms, insofar as those cosms’ spiritual axioms allow it. Fair enough.
Core Earth has low magic and spiritual axioms, incidentally, but they’re not zero (whereas the Living Land has no magic at all, because there the idea that Man could impose his will on Nature in any way is ridiculous. Also, Nippon Tech – the Japanese cyberpunk cosm – has just enough to make some super-ninjitsu possible but no more, because there the idea that you can make anything happen just by willing it is ridiculous). Things like levitating marbles or speaking in tongues are possible there, just not things like teleportation or faith healing. Oh, and there is one character in the books who’s psychic (she’s part of a Soviet parapsychological institute), which I’m not sure where it fits in. Possibly it got covered in a later book, they certainly published enough of them. Anyway, suffice to say is that while Core Earth is presented as our world, it isn’t, not quite.
THE WORLDBOOK
The Worldbook starts with a description of the state of Core Earth. North America is obviously in a state of upheaval what with large swaths of it having turned into Jurassic Park. The leadership is also in some disarray, with the sitting President and Vice President both believed dead (there were some hints in the novels that they might be alive, but nothing came of it), and the guy who took over the Presidency after them being assassinated by a sinister cabal known as the Delphi Council. South America is mostly uninvolved.
South-east Asia has Orrorsh sitting smack in the middle of it, spewing out monsters. Australia is battening down the hatches to hold it off. Japan has turned into Nippon Tech and its shadowy High Lord is doing vaguely described sneaky things to conquer the world through economic manipulation. He does have the benefit that most people haven’t even realised that he’s invaded yet – at most, they’ve noticed that something called the Kanawa Corporation managed to come out of nowhere and capture a lot of market value oddly quickly.
Europe has had a number of shocking turnarounds, with Aysle under Uthorion overrunning Great Britain and Scandinavia (though Sweden managed to rebuff him – not sure if the writers were aware of just how much absolutely nothing we had as a national defense back then…) and then suddenly getting friendly under Pella Ardinay, and France first losing all technology later than the printing press and then rebounding all the to cybernetics and virtual reality. Germany has reunited (because remember, this was written before that, y’know, actually happened) and is the world’s most properous nation at present, and the Soviet Union is sort of ineffectual and in confusion despite being the only country to immediately repel its invader (of a seventh cosm called Tharkold). The Cyberpope has his eye on Spain and Italy, but he’s more interested in becoming seen as the “true” pope there than in physically invading.
Africa and the middle east has the Nile Empire under Doctor Mobius. He’s waging a fairly typical war of conquest, trying to expand in every direction at once. So far he’s on the advance, and a lot of people are worried at how close he’s getting to both Jerusalem and Mecca.
We also get a rundown of something called “the Still World.” See, it was a plot point in the novels that the Gaunt Man had created a machine that would drain the physical energy from the planet by stopping its rotation, which he would then absorb alongside all the possibility energy, and that would turn him into the Torg, which is a sort of super-High Lord (and yes, there are rules for what kind of abilities the Torg would have. No, it’s not meant to ever happen and the game would effectively be over if it did, but this is Torg so there will be rules!). Obviously he can’t do that right now, but the rotation-slower was never stopped, so the game helpfully provides rules for what happens if nothing is done about that. Spoiler: it results in the world ending within a few months and the whole game becoming unplayable. So no GM is ever going to allow that to happen, but this is Torg, so there will be rules!
Anyway, then we move on to individual realms. Orrorsh is a world where things are rather like nineteenth-century Europeans thought they were. That is to say, Europe is the sole bastion of civilisation in a world of darkness, savagery and black magic, which can be combated by stiff-upper-lipped gentlemen with bushy moustaches but can never be fully overcome. However, it’s actually like that because that’s how the Gaunt Man likes it, and he’s intentionally kept Europe relatively clear of the madness because he finds it useful to have some people around who hasn’t gotten too desensitised to a proper scare. In the leadup to the invasion, he tricked the Victorians (the alt-British empire who dominates Europe in Orrorsh) that they had inadvertantly let the monsters escape from their world into an innocent world of helpless heathens, and that therefore they, as men of honour, had no choice but to run over and White Man’s Burden the crap out them. Of course, the Gaunt Man’s monsters didn’t actually need the Victorians’ help crossing over to Core Earth, but since the Victorians were native to Orrorsh’s axioms, the moment they streamed into Core Earth they started flipping areas over to Orrorsh.
So yeah, south-east Asia has now lost 100 years of technology and is being conquered by a bunch of snooty, condescending white guys who honestly think they’re helping. While the nights have gotten filled with vampires, werewolves, serial killers and black magic. The Gaunt Man is a clever bastard… though of course, he can’t really benefit from it right now, since he’s stuck in that possibility storm for another thirty books or so.
The Living Land is spreading over the US and Canada. It’s covered in eternal warm mist and full of Edeinos. The Edeinos have a religion called Keta Kelles that center on the worship of the nature goddess Lanala. Worshippers of Keta Kelles are called Jakatts, and they strive to always live authentic lives, without anything artificial or anything that stands between them and the full experience. Danger and struggle is good, because it causes you to live intensely (dying isn’t good, per se, but it’s preferable to die than to live less than fully), whereas leisure and comfort are bad, because they mean you’re wasting your life.
… so basically, Jakatts have the same apparent philosophy as the White Wolf writing staff always espoused. But the refreshing thing is that while in World of Darkness games, the desirability of AUTHENTIC!!! struggle and pain was always treated as self-evident… here the whole thing is treated a lot more neutrally.
See, Keta Kelles isn’t portrayed as inherently bad, though Baruk Kaah’s crusade to convert everyone to it (for his own selfish purposes) is. There are heroic Jakatts who have turned against Baruk Kaah without turning against Keta Kelles. There are heroic humans who have converted to Keta Kelles and gone back to nature but who are fighting Baruk Kaah because he’s perverted Lanala’s way.
But the thing is, it’s not treated as inherently good, either. There are heroic ex-Jakatts who have abandoned Keta Kelles and gone over to Core Earth because hey, cars are cool! There are heroic humans who absolutely do not want to go back to nature and are fighting Baruk Kaah for that reason.
I don’t know, that always struck me as nice. Like, we can agree to disagree on indoor plumbing, just as long as we’re all on board with Baruk Kaah being a big fat jerk!
Anyway, in addition to edeinos, the Living Land also have stalengers (big flying jellyfish) and benthes (little squishy things that can attach themselves to other creatures and manipulate their feelings). Both are sentient beings from previous cosms conquered by Baruk Kaah who converted to Keta Kelles. It’s also full of freaky animals who are any variety of reptilian, insectoid and amoebal, for extra nasty surprises when taking a walk in the woods.
Aysle! It’s a high fantasy realm, though it’s a little less Arthurian romance and a little more Warhammer-only-cleaner, with flintlock pistols, academies of stuffy wizards, and noble houses scheming against each other. It has a wide variety of sentient races (“folk” in the game’s parlance) including humans, elves, dwarves, trolls, giants and… Vikings. Yeah, apparently those are considered a species of their own, and they’re also evil and still obey Uthorion. Pella Ardinay is the Lady of Light and the wise high queen of the realm, and is cooperating with the local governments in regards to getting rid of Uthorion, but some people are noticing that she doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to pick up and go home… Also, she’s technically the High Lord, meaning that she’s got a Darkness Device whispering in her ear. Basically, imagine if Galadriel had taken up the One Ring and now Sauron was scheming to get it back while it was slowly corrupting her – that seems to be the idea behind Aysle.
Marauding dragons are another thing that exists in the realm, and so are Cockney-speaking goblins who got transformed by the axiom wash and are now lurking in unused subway tunnels. Dwarves and giants are fighting street to street across Belfast. Trolls are running wild in the Scottish highlands. I got to admit, that does sound sort of fun.
The Cyberpapacy! This is the cosm that there’s the least information about in the novels – it didn’t actually exist in its final form until the last chapter, after all – and all in all, it’s a bit underwhelming. The idea is that it’s cyberpunk, but instead of evil corporations you have an evil church who sends cybernetic soldier-priests to persecute unbelievers. There’s a giant virtual space called the GodNet, which is full of secret church data for daring hackers to steal, guarded by virtual gargoyles and simulated warrior angels.There are also rules for cybernetics, most of which seem suspiciously close to the ones from Cyberpunk (which was published two years earlier), complete with retractable razor claws and chips that can give you basic fluency in skills that you are pristinely untrained in. Cyberware poses the risk of suffering “cyberpsychosis” that increases the more hardware you have installed, though you can lessen the risk by using a drug called Jaz.
There’s a French Resistance, because of course there is, and also an orthodox, technology-hating faction of the Cyberpope’s church who aren’t happy about how he’s pivoted from “technology is bad” to “give me AAAAAAAAALL the technology!” That’s about it, though, and it’ll be quite a few books before the cosm gets its dedicated book.
The Nile Empire… is a little hard to explain. It’s supposed to be the pulp cosm, but the problem with that is that the whole game is pretty pulpy as it is. It’s all two-fisted heroes fighting scheming villains at the top of speeding trains, probably over a map to an ancient temple in the middle of a dinosaur-infested jungle, so how do you add more pulp to that? Likewise, the book tries to make a big deal about how everyone in the Nile Empire is either Good or Evil with nothing in between, but, er… I can’t actually think of a single character anywhere in the books I’ve read so far that wasn’t very clearly either a hero or a villain. There are some characters who might be on the shady side of good or on the redeemable side of bad, at least if you squint a little, but they are few and far between.
A better way of putting it might be that the Nile Empire is a cosm where 1930s gee-wiz gadgets, mystical secrets of the ancient world, and all-around pseudo-scientific “just pretend it makes sense” handwaving are facts of life. It’s not quite a superhero cosm, because it never quite gets that garish or self-contained; it’s more like a proto-superhero setting, one where there is still some sort of connection between the fantasy and the reality. You might have a woman who can turn invisible, but she won’t also project indestructable force fields; she’ll fight by sneaking up on people and punching them. The technology can do amazing things, but it’s not otherworldly space-age artifacts covered in glittering circuitry but big, clunky contraptions with oil stains and grinding gears. Wizards don’t throw fireballs, they breed monstrous animals and cook up strange poisons. There is a slightly grubby, self-made look about it all.
Anyway, the epitome of this mish-mash is Doctor Mobius, who is a mad scientist who was originally an Egyptian Pharao’s treacherous brother who tried to become a god through usurping the divine office of the pharao before being killed and ultimately resurrected by the descendants of his followers through a magical ritual. Which is… even Torgier than all the rest of Torg, I must admit.
Nippon Tech is the other cyberpunk realm, the one with evil corporations and ninjas but without cybernetics and hackers. It’s a cosm of intrigue and corporate warfare where everyone is always stabbing someone in the back for vengeance or gain. In fact, it’s an actual cosmic law that a certain percentage of any group of people are always scheming to destroy it from within. It has slightly better technology than Core Earth, but no more than it can be disguised as being the cutting edge of development. The rich always get richer and the poor always get poorer, again by inescapable cosmic fiat. The combination of a very low magic axiom and a spiritual axiom that’s not high enough to compensate makes the cosm feel creepy and dead. I feel like the writers didn’t like Japan much – the sheer negativity here is kind of noticeable given the even-handedness that the Jakatts were portrayed with.
Martial arts make things a bit more interesting, though. They work by channeling chi which it turns out is just another word for possibility energy. Martial arts are special skills that gives you semi-magical abilities. To learn one, you need to overcome certain ritual tests and swear to certain restrictions. The one outlined is ninjitsu, because everything needs more ninjas.
The book is concluded with a series of character templates. See, the writers were for some reason not thrilled with the idea of people just making characters up, so instead you’re supposed to choose one of a bunch of templates and then just distribute some skill points. There is a grudging note of how you could make up your own templates, and how to do that, but clearly they consider it to be ill-advised.
And these templates are, in parts, kind of weirdly hyper-specific. As in, some of them are really just the protagonists from the novels with their names erased – I don’t think there are that many Ayslish knights who were killed by Uthorion but who vowed to return and were eventually reborn in a Core Earth body! Like, it feels like that was just that one particular character. And there is definitely only one character as disgustingly perfect as Ace Decker, oh yeah, I recognise you, you smug jerk! “The National Hero,” verily and forsooth…
I mean, it’s not a big deal, especially since it’s actually really easy to just create your own character from scratch, but… I almost wonder if the original intention was that you’d just play the protagonists (and possibly also that the game would only ever be an add-on to the books, which were to be the main event?) and they only made things more generic at the last minute.
THE ADVENTURE BOOK
The first half of the adventure book is general advice on GMing. Most of it is what you’d expect, but there’s also a lot of stringest insistence on making an interesting story – to cheat as much as you have to to make sure that the dramatic beats are kept. And, look, I’m not necessarily hostile to that, but… it just seems like a waste to have a super-complicated system and then just overrule it whenever it spits out results you don’t like. Like, if it’s all going to be used as a rough guideline anyway, why not just create something that’ll provide a rough guideline and trust the GM to adjust it as needed?
I also feel a little like the game is trying to be all things for all people. The kind of player who wants a stringent physics-engine that perfectly simulates the setting in every particular is not going to like a luck-based card game that can completely mess up the realism of it. The kind of person who wants to play a luck-based card game isn’t going to think it’s fun that some enemies can’t be beaten by any combination of skill and luck, because their Toughness is just too high for your weapon. And neither is going to be happy when the GM just steps in and overrules the outcome of the game to make a better story. I dunno. Maybe I’m wrong and it all makes a delicious combination that’s more than the sum of its part, but it just looks a bit like the writers got over-enthusiastic and threw in everything all at once… which, let’s face it, would fit in quite nicely with their design ethos as a whole!
Anyway, there are some handy pointers on how to handle the different genres of the cosms and how things are supposed to feel and work in each one. That’s all good.
Then follows a sample adventure called Before the Dawn. Remember that rotation-stopping machine that the Gaunt Man left behind? This is about doing something about it. So the players have to succeed, or you bought the game for nothing because the setting will be unplayable! No pressure or anything…
The adventure starts with the players driving through the Living Land to deliver emergency supplies to a human settlement when they run into a damsel in distress chased by a bunch of edeinos. Having rescued her, they find out that she’s a brilliant scientist’s beautiful daughter (she’s from the Nile Empire, where every brilliant scientist is required by law to have a beautiful daughter) and her father has been strong-armed by Doctor Mobius into building a digging machine that can traverse the planet’s crust. The evil doctor has now sent them with a bunch of minions to the Living Land to make some sort of exchange with the edeinos there.
The players proceed to free the scientist and can then meet with the edeinos themselves, exchanging Mobius’ weapons for what turns out to be a Fabergé egg. Or they can just fight the edeinos and steal it, though the edeinos have a pet dinosaur along that might stomp on them if they try. Either way, they follow what scant clues they are given and take the digger back to the Nile Empire, where they have to sneak into a military base and hijack a plane. After a dog fight against some Nile Empire aircraft, they fly the plane to a spot in the Pacific Ocean, where they find a sunken ship guarded by one of the Gaunt Man’s demons, who can however be bribed into leaving without a fight with the egg. In the ship is the machine, guarded by some animated pirate skeletons, and if they can put it into reverse it’ll get the world back to spinning properly again.
All in a day’s work.
Well, I again feel that there are a lot of points where the GM is expected to really force the players to go along with the plot because otherwise they won’t get to the other cool setpieces. But in fairness, a lot of those setpieces are really cool and flavourful, and at the end the players should have gotten a pretty good idea about how three different cosms work. Plus, I will grant you that for a game that started with an actual series of novels, Torg is so far showing no signs of the dreaded “the uber-NPCs do all the important stuff” syndrome. When the first adventure published is about averting the actual end of the world, it certainly puts the player characters front and centre – in the passenger seat, perhaps, but in the spotlight even so.
FINAL THOUGHTS
My constant snarking aside, I am extremely fond of Torg, in all its overdesigned glory. There is just such geeky, sincere love shining through every fussy, meticulous special case and detailed description of something that will never actually matter in the game. There’s a lot of stupid stuff in it, but it never feels lazy or phoned in. Someone cared an awful lot when writing this. It’s honestly kind of sad when you look at games from even ten years later on and see how listless and by-the-numbers they are in comparison.
One thing that does bother me a bit is that the situation never feels quite as dire as the text tries to make it out to be. The invasion is meant to be the literal end of the world unless heroes can somehow avert it, but none of the High Lords honestly feel that threatening – sure, most of them feel all but impossible to budge in their own realms, but none of them ever feel like they’re in much danger of spreading further. Two of them (Uthorion and the Gaunt Man) start out hobbled, two more (Jean Malraux and Kanawa) just sort of sit there twiddling their thumbs while trying to enact some sort of non-military strategem that doesn’t feel overly likely to work, and of the two who do have armies marching (Baruk Kaah and Doctor Mobius), they both seem to be militarily outmatched and unlikely to get much further now that they’ve lost the element of surprise.
The second edition did seem to try beefing up all of them, while also fixing some other problems, but it honestly leaves me cold. I think the best way to ignore the overarching strategic situation and look at it from a frog’s-eye perspective; millions of people have been displaced, everything is in chaos, enemy agents are scheming behind the scenes everywhere, and even if Core Earth will probably win in the end there’s still room for heroism. The Axis were at a disadvantage for most of World War Two, after all, but that hasn’t exactly prevent the writing of a thousand stories set within that conflict. It’d be nice if the books didn’t push the “we’re all doomed, really!” angle so hard, but… yeah.
Of course, I also have no idea if I could ever run this thing, because the hyper-complexity of the rules would seem to make it a nightmare whether I had players who were new to it (which would mean I’d have to advise them every step of the way, which would be burdensome) or players who were familiar with it (which would mean that they’d frequently know better than I would, which would be insufferable!). Still, it’s one of those games that keep calling to me. We’ll see.
Continuing our wallowing in nostalgia, this time we’re going back to 1984. In more than one way, as it happens – because we’re going to be looking at Paranoia!
Yes, Paranoia, to this day the world’s premier comedy roleplaying game! It’s got a special place in my heart, in fact, since lazily snarking at stuff is my default mode of commentary, and Paranoia is written entirely in that tone. In fact, I wouldn’t wonder if I didn’t semi-consciously imitate it for a lot of sections in Monstrous Mishaps. It’s honestly a bit odd that not more games lean into the ridiculousness that always seems to creep into roleplaying, no matter how straight-faced it tries to be; let’s face it, when you have half a dozen players who are barely paying attention to what the GM is saying and whose most immediately accessible mechanic is rolling attack, things are always going to be primed for farce.
The game came in a box, because again, we’re in The Before Times here, and games always came in a box with a few pamphlet-sized books in it. Possibly by the time the 90s rolled around, it was realised that the GM might need something heavy and sturdy to hit players over the head with if they got rowdy? But regardless, the books presented here are the Player’s Handbook, the Gamemaster’s Handbook, and the Adventure Handbook.
PLAYER’S HANDBOOK
Straight off the bat, we’re introduced to Alpha Complex, a massive underground bunker existing after some vaguely defined disaster, where a population of survivors endure under the guidance of a deranged Computer. People are no longer born, they are vat-grown in batches of six identical clones, and once they’re old enough to work they are assigned a colour-coded security clearance from INFRARED (black), through RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE to ULTRAVIOLET (white). Any and all information is available only if you meet its security clearance, and knowing too much is treason. All equipment and vehicles, likewise, are painted in the colour of its minimal security clearance, and using (or wearing) something beyond your clearance is treason.
Treason abounds just generally. Some people have hidden mutations, which is treason (did the Computer say you could diverge from the regulated human genome?!). Some people are members of secret societies, which is treason. A nefarious force known as “the commies” is constantly scheming to overthrow the Computer, and lending them any sort of aid and comfort is definitely treason.
The Computer employs special agents called troubleshooters for odd jobs. Troubleshooters are sent at intractable problems and frequently get shot full of holes in the line of duty. Nonetheless, it’s a great honour to be a troubleshooter. The Computer says so, and disagreeing with the Computer is treason. The PCs, needless to say, are going to be troubleshooters. They are also going to be mutants and members of secret societies. This will make their lives very interesting, and probably quite short.
We’re given a brief example of play, which includes the players shooting a squirrel on the assumption that it’s an alien invader (knowledge of anything outside of Alpha Complex is treasonous, you see) and we’re informed of three ways that this game differs from those: firstly, it’s comedic, secondly, the other players are not on your side and in fact probably more dangerous to you than the NPCs, and thirdly, you have five “spare characters” in the form of your character’s clones that means that getting killed isn’t quite so much of a big deal.
Character creation involves rolling a bunch of stats, your Service Group (basically your day job – none of them are all that interesting), your mutation and secret society, and then putting some points into your skills. Stats are your basic ones: Strength, Resilience, Dexterity, Agility, Moxie (intelligence… but this being Paranoia, it’s more like low cunning) and Chutzpah (effectively charisma, but technically more like shamelessness). Skills have an interesting system whereby the first few points you put into them go into increasingly narrow categories before you reach the point where you have skills like “laser pistols” or “fishing.” That’s nicely realistic, in a way that is admittedly probably wasted on this game.
Speaking of fishing, a lot of these are outdoor-survival type skills, actually. I guess getting sent “Outside” and having to scramble to survive in an inhospitable environment without any training was intended as a frequent occurrence?
You make skill rolls by rolling under a percentage with a d100. You can also make straight stat roll, in which case you roll a number of d10s depending on the difficulty and try to roll under a target number. Seems like there was no need for two different mechanics there, but okay. Certain stats also give you bonuses or penalties to certain groups of skills.
Character can acquire five kinds of points over the course of play: skill points that they can invest in more skills, credits that they can use to buy stuff in the limited market economy of Alpha Complex (and in the more extensive black market), commendation points that lets them get closer to a higher security clearance, treason points that lets them get closer to getting put in front of a firing squad, and secret society points that lets them aspire to higher rank within their secret society. The player is not informed when they gain any of the last three kinds.
Before every mission, the players will be given their official orders from the Computer. Each player will also be given secret orders from their secret society, which will likely contradict the official orders. They will also be assigned their equipment. This equipment will often be experimental, faulty, or something entirely different from what it says on the box. Losing or damaging equipment is treason.
The players may be assigned robot helpers, in which case one of the players will be their operator and they won’t take orders from anyone else. The operator can assign an “heir” who’ll take over as operator in case of their demise. This will give the replacement even more reason to accidentally-on-purpose push them over a cliff. However, if the mission failed because the operator didn’t assign a replacement and then got killed, he will be guilty of treason (which doesn’t sound like a big deal given that he’s dead, but his next clone will get treason points for being related to such a vile saboteur!).
The Gamemaster’s Handbook is forbidden for players to read. This is not to say that they shouldn’t, but if they admit to having read it, or show signs of knowing what’s in it, their characters will get assigned treason points for it.
The book wraps with a choose-your-own-adventure segment. Heh. I miss those. Guess we won’t be seeing them ever again, now that video games have gotten able to do the same thing only better. Ah well. Anyway, here it’s a fun way to give a taste for how the game might run. Also, I totally managed to get brownie points from my secret society for killing a guy and also turn in my other teammate for killing him, so that was fun. I got a treason point for asking how my gun worked, though. Apparently that showed a suspicious interest into classified information.
GAMEMASTER’S HANDBOOK
In this book, we get something more like the real score. Turns out, Alpha Complex started out as one of many bunkers built to survive an asteroid impact, but the asteroid’s actual impact confused the Computer responsible for ensuring its safety and made it default to some very old legacy code. These antiquated data banks gave it the impression that it was under attack by “the commies,” whoever those were. It desperately tried to warn all the other Computers running all the other bunkers, but they soon started bickering among themselves and ended up certain that everyone had been co-opted by the commies but them. The result? A hundred different Alpha Complexes, run by a hundred different Computers, all considering themselves at war with each other and all certain that enemy infiltrators are everywhere.
The interesting part here is that there is explicitly more than one Alpha Complex, which I don’t remember as being the case from later books. I think the idea here is that you can blow up one of them and then set the next time in another one without skipping a beat, and that you can change whatever you like from one campaign to the next since it can be set in a similar-but-differing-in-detail complex next door. I think the game eventually decided that it didn’t really need an excuse to have no serious continuity, though.
Clones in Alpha Complex are kept asexual by a drug regimen, and indeed have no idea that sexual reproduction is even a thing – again, new citizens are grown in vats. In fact, everyone is just generally drugged to the gills all the time, all the better to keep them happy (or at least happy-looking enough not to be executed for being treasonably morose).
Living quarters range from barracks where INFRARED citizens live, to dorm rooms for RED to ORANGE citizens, to personal cubicles for YELLOW and then increasingly snazzy digs as a citizen climbs the ladder. The Computer has cameras everywhere (whether they work or not is another issue). Food is algae-based and served in communal cafeterias, with “real” food being available only to high-ranking citizens or through the black market. Personal possessions are limited for most citizens; you can carry all your worldly goods around with you without problem (so much like an adventurer, then).
ULTRAVIOLET citizens are known as High Programmers. They are allowed to actually edit the Computer’s code, so technically they could fix the whole mess if they wanted to… but of course they’re every bit as inept and deranged as everyone else in Alpha Complex, so most of their edits are in pursuit of their own selfish, short-term goals and only manage to create more and more contradictions and inefficiencies to make the Computer even crazier and more erratic.
Next up, stats and skills get detailed a bit more. I’ll note that social skills include such items as bootlicking, con, fast-talk and spurious logic (the latter of which is the only social skill that works on robots). There are also a lot of skills for repairing or modifying equipment (the latter is, of course, treason). You end up with a pretty good idea of what you’re going to be doing, I think.
I do feel that the rules are, again, kind of crunchy and nitpicky for a game that runs mostly on rule-of-funny. I think later editions streamlined things considerably – when your chance to succeed at most things is going to be, approximately, “a snowball’s in hell,” remembering whether to add a +5% to it seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
One skill that stands out is Communist Propaganda, which is kind of like a mental virus. See, if you successfully spout Communist Propaganda at someone, you have a chance to inflicting a few points in the same skill on him… so now he’s a traitor by definition and you can blackmail him. Of course, if it doesn’t “take” then he absolutely knows that you’re a traitor and he will probably turn you in to be executed. Fine times.
The combat section starts with the declaration that Paranoia combat is intentionally simple and streamlined for easier fun! Then it goes on for ten pages of modifiers and weapon types and cover and stun and… uff. Okay, what they mean with it being simpler seems to just be that the damage system is simplified. Rather than having to count hit points, you just note your current state of being. An attack can merely stun you, it can inflict a wound, it can incapacitate you, it can kill you, or it can vaporise you (the difference between the last two being, in the former case reccussitation might be possible. In the latter… not so much).
Different kinds of armour reduce the impact of different kinds of weapons by such-and-such amount. Of particular note is reflec armour, which protects against laser… but only if the armour is partly made from a colour that’s the same as the laser’s. Remember how lower-clearance citizens can’t wear anything of a colour above their own rating? Yeah, turns out that socio-economic boundaries determine how zappable you are.
There are instructions for what happens when you die and one of your backup clones get activated, which all seems a little overly complicated and involves redistributing some skill points and making other adjustments. All very realistic within the premise of the game, but… again again, it seems to halfway ruin the whole point of having clones in the first place, since it means you still have to do some of the work of creating a new character. Again something that I think later editions dropped.
If your treason points rise too high above your commendation points, the Computer will try to execute you! You can attempt to run away and flee from Alpha Complex, but of course even if you succeed that clone is out of the game for good. However, your next clone will get a nice boost to his secret society rank, since he’s related to a hero of the resistance who the Computer could not catch.
Paranoia has insanity rules. Okay, that’s a bit unexpected. They’re not especially well-defined, though; mostly, you have to roll when the GM thinks you’ve had a serious shock, but it can’t be every time you have a serious shock, so… just when the GM feels like maybe having you temporarily cuckoo, I guess? It’s temporary, though; the Computer may be nuts itself, but it’s apparently quite good at getting troubleshooters back into some kind of working order through liberal applications of psychopharmaca.
The mutations get listed… yeah, they weren’t listed in the player’s section except by name. What, you expect to know how your own mutations work? That’s the sort of thing only a commie mutant traitor would know! Take a treason point for even contemplating it! Anyway, mutations strike a balance of being decidedly unimpressive and with a lot of inconvenient caveats while at the same time being soooooort of useful with some creativity. Which tends to be how most RPG powers are, but here it’s presumably intentional. There are things like super-senses, pyrokinesis, mind-reading, the ability to eat and digest any sort of organic matter no matter how tough or toxic.
Secret societies! There are a bunch, and they’re set up to be at each other’s throats far more than they manage to be at the Computer’s. There are hyper-capitalists, machine worshipers, nature nuts (who have only the vaguest idea of what “nature” is, since they’ve never actually been Outside), mutant supremacists, and of course a few who just want to smash things up in interesting ways. Not all secret societies are even anti-Computer, per se – there is even one that worships it as a god. Membership in those is still treason since it’s unsanctioned, but you won’t get executed if you’re found out to be a member. Instead, your superiors will just file it away for if they ever feel like executing you for some unrelated reason and need an excuse. Stalin would be so proud.
There is a section of GMing advice, which is basically to do a lot of things that would make you a bad GM in other games. None of that “remember, you’re not the players’ enemy” here – you are absolutely supposed to be out to get the players and screw them over in every inventive way you can think of. In particular, you know how it’s usually best practice to set the players up and make sure they understand the situation, and interpret their actions in light of the fact that their characters are competent and non-suicidal? Yeah, we don’t do that here. The player characters are ignorant, frantic, drugged up, and the products of a dysfunctional society where everyone works at cross purpose. When they try to do anything the least bit complicated, you should demand specifics of their approach. And if they ask someone for help, then so sorry, but that information is not available at their security clearance.
Still, you are cautioned to not go too far with it. The players should usually have a chance to pull off some kind of win, just an exceedingly slim one.
It is suggested that inspiration from Paranoia scenarios can come from five genres: detective mysteries, spy thrillers, war stories, future sci-fi, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi. Hmm, okay. I suppose I can see what they mean, but coming up with scenarios for this game strikes me as the hardest part – there is only so many directions you can take a setting that’s mostly a bunch of guys in identical overalls running around a bunch of sterile steel tunnels. That said, the sheer amount of scenarios that have been published for the game suggests it is possible to stretch it pretty far, even if I understand that the writers got sort of desperate during the late second edition…
ADVENTURE HANDBOOK
The adventure handbook, finally, starts off with a long equipment section. This game really does love its freaky high-tech toys, even if it also loves to have them malfunction. There are a ton of weapons, vehicles and bots, and rules for how to include them in combat. Like in most games, it leaves me sort of cold.
Then follows the sample adventure, Destination: CBI Sector. In it, a bunch of pre-gen characters of RED clearance are sent to an abandoned part of Alpha Complex to retrieve a missing robot. Each one, of course, also has been fed some disturbing rumours (accurate and otherwise) about the others and have their own agendas from their secret societies. They are sent along with a powerful NPC who is fully intending to get them killed along the way so they can’t rat him out for not having any intention of going through with the mission.
The mission, even aside from that, is probably impossible. It involves dealing with a rogue High Programmer turned cyborg overlord who has fortified CBI Sector to the teeth. There will be killer robots every step of the way. The players are walking into a near-guaranteed TPK. So… again, pretty much par for the course, as introductionary adventures go, except here it’s probably intentional.
Still, while I appreciate the honesty in admitting that the players aren’t supposed to get very far… I do feel like running the game that way would be kind of unsatisfying for the GM? I mean, if the players don’t get to the end, you don’t get to show them the cool stuff you’ve prepared. Or, in this game, the funny slapstick stuff you’ve prepared. It means they’ll miss the joke. That seems like a shame.
Still, I guess that’s a nitpick. The only other comment I have is that the villain, Menlo, stands out for being actually competent and terrifying. I think he might have been the first and last Paranoia villain who was played straight – in every other product I’ve seen, the bad guys are as hapless and fundamentally screwed as the players.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Honestly? Paranoia is probably not my cup of tea, at the end of the day. I’m too soft-hearted to really try to hurt my players, and I’m just not interested enough in the sort of sci-fi that the game parodies – gear porn tends to bore me, and you can’t properly appreciate a parody of something you don’t like on at least some level. Likewise, while I appreciate that the game proves that you can take a fairly limited premise and make a lot out of it, I feel like I’d get bored with Alpha Complex pretty soon. I prefer a setting that’s not quite such a challenge to put some variety in.
Still, it’s certainly fun to read, and I do appreciate it in concept.
I’ve been too listless to finish another character this week, so let’s take another nostalgic dive into the past instead. This time, let’s look at another grand old game, Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk from back in 1988. For one that was never in the big leagues, it’s actually doing pretty well for itself even today – there’s been a big-budget video game that seems to be pretty well-liked (once they fixed all the bugs, at least) and an anime Netflix show. It ain’t Shadowrun, but that’s the price you pay for taking yourself halfway seriously when your target audience are all about making a complete mockery of everything.
Here’s how old this game is: it came in a box.
In the box are three slender little volumes: one for rules, one for settings, and one for combat rules, though all three are honestly spread sort of haphazardly through all three books.
RULES: VIEW FROM THE EDGE
The rules book, View From the Edge, starts out with a cursory description of the setting (see what I mean?) and what it means to be a cyberpunk. Basically, it’s the distant future of 2013 and technology has taken such a huge leap that most people can’t keep up – cybernetics, human/machine interfaces, artificial tissues and orbital stations are commonplace, and that has made most people so overwhelmed that they just sit back and let governments and corporations (insofar as there is a difference anymore) have their way with them. But not you, for you are a cyberpunk! You embrace the metal! You charge full thrust into the future! And you’re probably going to die horribly in a futile bid to make your mark on an uncaring world, but by golly you’ll look awesome doing it!
So that’s basically the mission statement here. Look cool, stand up and be counted, and never ever play it safe. Heh. That might just be the exact opposite to my personal way of life, but okay, I can dig it in theory.
We’re also given the nine basic character classes right away: rockers, solos (who are assassins or mercenaries), netrunners (hackers), techies, medias (journalists), cops, corporates, fixers (wheelers and dealers) and nomads (your rootless bikers roaming the land). The presentation of them all felt a little confusing to me the first time I read it, since they all seem framed to be idealistic crusaders of one sort or another, while the game seems to be more about an amoral quest for getting more money. But, knowing a little more of the genre now, I think I get it – you’re supposed to have some ideals that you want to chase, but you also have to keep yourself fed, and you’re meant to be angsty and tormented about the conflict between the two. I think in a modern game that would have been better explained, but this was ’88 and the unspoken assumption was still that you were going to get most of your narrative direction from fiction.
Having chosen your class, you then roll for how many character points you get and distribute them over your nine main stats: Intelligence, Reflexes, Cool, Technical Ability, Luck, Attractiveness, Movement Allowance, Body Type and Empathy. You also get skills, but those are gained through a quirky lifepath system where you choose and roll for various parts of your upbringing and background, and get to pick up some skills depending on what you end up with – for instance, if you grew up on the street, served a stint in the military, got a formal education, and so on. You also roll for a special incident for every year of your adult life, which can result in you gaining enemies, connections, extra money, heartbreaks, and such things.
I like it in theory – you can see how it’s meant to set up a checkered past with lost loves, friends in unexpected places, simmering resentments, and all the sort of things that a cyberpunk character definitely ought to have. I do feel it’s a little barebones, though. It kind of assumes you’re really familiar with the setting, so that you can come up with characters and situations in it on the fly. Great if you’re very into the genre or if you’ve played the game before, but a bit harder if you’re me and you’ve read maybe one or two William Gibson books and watched Johnny Mnemonic and that’s about it.
Then, of course, there’s the main event: cybernetics! You’ve got a bunch of gear you can bolt onto your feeble human form. Cybernetic eyes for seeing into the infrafred spectrum, reflexes boosters that pump up your all-important REF stat, chipware that lets you gain the basics of a skill you don’t naturally have, interface plugs that lets you become one with your gun or your car… You’re limited partly by your starting funds (which you can double by selling your soul to a crime syndicate, corporation, or the army!), partly by the fact that each piece of cyberware adds to a tally that permanently reduces your EMP stat, with EMP 0 resulting in “cyberpsychosis” and needing to make a new character. Which does, funnily enough, make EMP something you need lots of if you want to play a stone-cold cyborg – not because you’ll be using it, but because the amount of cyberware you can handle is capped by how high it started out.
I do feel a little like cyberware is underpowered, both compared to how powerful it tends to be in fiction, and how much the game is meant to center on it. Is it really worth crippling your stats for a +2 to some very specific rolls? But then, I guess I’m probably just not being cyberpunk enough. Form over function, attitude is everything, live on the edge – you’re supposed to rip out parts of your living brain just so that you can take phone calls in your head, because that’s how you show that you’re a complete badass who don’t give a shit, man!
Next up are rules for running around the Net. You basically have a program that interprets the stuff you run into when hacking a database or whatever, so that you see it as a fantasy dungeon, a Noir city, or a glowy Tron-style virtual universe. You go in carrying a selection of programs that you can throw out like spells to do things like smash through a door or defeat defensive software. You’re limited to five programs, but you can cheat by loading a bunch of them into a “demon” which counts as a single program but gradually deteriorates every time you use it. Pretty cool and flavourful, though I don’t know if it’d work well as a mini-game – a lot of the rules feel like you just roll repeatedly to pass an obstacle until you succeed. But I guess you could probably spice it up with enemy netrunners and the likes.
Also, the text notes breathlessly that a haul from a netrunning operation might consist of… an entire Megabyte of data!!!! Which, considering that my folder of roleplaying PDFs has reached 85 Gigabytes from my obsessive hoarding is… a little bit funny, I feel.
Last part of the rules are about medicine. Most notably, a sensible professional will sign up for a Trauma Team subscription! That means that whenever you flatline, a flying ambulance shows up and scoops you up to try to revive you, if necessary gunning down whomever caused you to flatline in the first place. That’s… kind of awesome. There are also some notes on street drugs, but it’s kind of anemic given how much drug use is part of the genre – I think they were worried about moral guardians if they seemed to promote it.
SETTING: WELCOME TO NIGHT CITY
The world book, Welcome to Night City, starts out with a timeline, which is… honestly so forgettable that I have trouble even grasping enough of it to describe here. But basically, there have been a couple of South American wars with cybernetically enhanced super-soldiers, Europe is back on top of the world and America is in the crapper (mua ha! Mua ha! I smirk over my over-priced cappuccino!), the Middle East is a radioactive wasteland and most cars run on alcoholic fuels created from genetically engineered super-crops, there are lunar colonies and space stations, and corporations have their own militaries who sometimes go to war against each other.
Funnily enough, every part of the world that isn’t the US seems to be doing pretty well – as near as I can tell, the writers felt like it made the future more depressing if all us other riffraff were thriving while the Land of the Free collapsed… The Soviet Union has made a comeback, Europe is going strong, Africa and South America are getting their act together, Japan and China are coming into their own. Of course, those places are presumably also run by ruthless megacorporations, so it ain’t that rosy, but still.
In America, though, cities are divided into the corporate-controlled business areas and suburbs, which have a private police force and things are relatively quiet, and the Combat Zones, where poor people live, violent crime is omnipresent, and everything is generally kind of crap. Outside the cities are mostly a lot of ghost towns and corporate-run farmland, and nomadic caravans are traveling around trying to scratch out a living by means fair and foul.
Laws have gotten a lot more rough-and-tumble. The cops can and will gun you down. On the other hand, you can gun down anyone who tries to mess with you. Lots of gunning down going on. Old-fashioned drugs are illegal, but genetically engineered crop failures have mostly destroyed the production of them anyway, and the sort of designer drugs that corporations sell are, conveniently, not considered “drugs” drugs and therefore legal. Prisons are overcrowded and prisoners are mostly crammed into cryo-tanks for the duration of their sentence, meaning that they spend all that time semi-conscious and having nightmares. Okay, that’s genuinely sort of horrifying.
Vehicles are stil mostly regular cars, but short-distance flying cars exist, mostly as emergency vehicles. Trains run on “maglev” tracks, hovering on a cushion of magnetic force to remove friction.
Communications is where the game shows its age. The fax machine is still state of the art, and people read newspapers by having the pages they are interested in faxed to their home or to a public outlet (futuristic!). Cell phones exist but are of course giant bricks with antennas at the end.
Game Master advice! Cyberpunk is meant to have a ton of grim ambience, so make sure that it features a lot of garbage-strew back streets, bodies in the gutter, deranged down-and-outs, and brutal firefights. Also, it’s always raining. Always. Or at the bare minimum, it should look like it’s about to.
Of course, the rich don’t live like that – they dwell in disgusting opulence, with armed guards standing ready to throw out anyone who they don’t want to look at anymore. Play up the contrast.
Furthermore, morality should be shady. Sworn enemies might get thrown together. Getting anywhere requires cutting some corners and compromising your values. This is the part that I think could have used a little more squaring with the assumption in the rules book that players will be heroic crusaders against the evil corporate tyrants, but okay, I think I get it. There are bad guys, but in order to have a chance to get at them, you’re going to have to give up a lot of that moral high ground. Everyone gets a little muddy just from wading through the muck.
The book acknowledges the problem with the classes, which is that they don’t really fit naturally together – a cop on the edge, a nomadic biker, a corporate sell-out and a rebellious rock star aren’t just going to naturally form an adventuring party. It suggests a few combinations that might work, but basically, you need to center the team on one kind of scene, then play fast-and-loose with the classes that don’t really fit into it so they do. E.g., if the team is a police squad, then the “fixer” might be the shadier sort of cop who’s in bed with half the criminals he’s supposed to be stopping. Since your class doesn’t actually influence which skills you can take (all it really gets you is one particular special skill), that works out fairly well.
There’s a map of Night City, which is the default setting for the game. A lot of landmarks are written out, but the only ones who get any sort of description are the seedy bars. That possibly tells you something about where the focus of the game is meant to be…
There is a short story to demonstrate the setting, called Never Fade Away, which concerns a Rocker (Johnny Silverhand, who is effectively the face of the franchise) whose Netrunner girlfriend gets kidnapped by a corporation so she can build a brain-frying Net program for them. So he recruits a crusading Media, his Solo ex-girlfriend and her Nomad partner to launch a rescue, but in the end all they manage to accomplish is sabotage the Netrunner’s own plan to free herself so that she ends up with her brain uploaded in the Net and no way to return to her body. It offers some helpful stats for the various characters, with the implication that you can run this as a sample adventure. I guess it’s flavourful enough. Oh, and they apparently really liked the picture of a cyborg girl in lingerie, because they reused the same one to mark the start of the next chapter.
There’s a chapter on how corporations work, most of which is pretty unexciting stuff about corporate structure and what the different positions mean. That’s… probably something you need to know if you’re running a game in a world where corporate executes are effectively royalty, yes, but it’s not really sexy. Anyway, the corporations can do pretty much whatever they want now, the governments have given up on controlling them. Also, they have private armies, and ninjas. Because it’s 1988, and conventional wisdom is that Everything Needs More Ninjas.
There’s a looooong list of major corporations and their exact military assets. Again, good to know, definitely would be using this as setting detail, but none of it really stands out.
The book closes with a random sprinkling of flavour – information on a couple of different bands (all of which are POLITICAL!!!, because again, it’s 1988 and being angry about stuff is considered edgy and rebellious. As opposed to today, when it’s just considered mandatory… Sigh. I make myself sad), a couple of different nomad caravans (the Crazy Quilts are disgruntled combat vets, who came back from the wars to find nothing waiting for them; the Huskers are farmers who have been driven off their land by corporations), a couple of different street gangs (the Blood Razors are mad, bad and crazy and big on cybernetic claws; the Iron Sights are patsies for the Arasaka Corporation). There is also a deranged cult who go around killing cyborgs. Finally, there are some kind of funny reports from a Trauma Team operative, which includes things like resuscitating a client, charging him for it, have him violently object to the price tag, needing to take him down in self-defense, resuscitating him from said take-down, and adding the extra cost to his bill. Heh!
COMBAT: FRIDAY NIGHT FIREFIGHT
The combat book is called Friday Night Firefight. The rules are apparently modified from a game called Mekton which seems to be about giant robots punching each other. Sounds kind of cool, but I hadn’t heard of it before – I guess it didn’t stand the test of time as well.
It starts out with telling us that this system is super-gritty and deadly! Try to be a hero, and you’ll get stuck with a Trauma Team bill. I feel like there is a bit of tension between a high-lethality system and the expected playstyle of never playing it safe because that’s not the cyberpunk way… I mean, I get that what they mean is that you should take insane risks even though you might die, because you’re a complete badass who don’t give a shit, man, but I think players would probably get less committed to that ethos after losing a character or three.
Anyway, combat is played in rounds, every round has four phases, and you get to act in between one or four of them depending on how high your REF is (four actions require you to have near-maximum REF and also to have a cybernetic reflex booster). When you shoot at someone, you roll REF+weapon skill and the target rolls REF+Athletics, and if you roll higher you hit and roll damage. The shooter gets a bonus for the accuracy of the gun and for spending extra actions aiming, the target gets a bonus for range (which ranges are relevant depends on the gun as well), and for things like being in cover or in motion. Hit and you roll damage depending on the range and caliber of bullets, adding the amount by which you exceeded the defender’s roll. From that, you subtract armour, and then you compare what’s left to a table that depends on your Body Type, and it determines whether you scored a Flesh Wound (which effectively does nothing), a Serious Wound (which might cramp your style), a Critical Wound (which is going to hurt), a Mortal Wound (puts you down and you’re dying) or an Instantly Mortal Wound (puts you down and you’re dead, dead, dead). Each type worse than Flesh Wound gradually worsens to the next level if left unattended for a certain amount of time, so you’ll want to get some first aid. Also, if you take a wound worse than a Flesh Wound when you already have a wound worse than a Flesh Wound, the wounds add up to one that’s worse than both.
Okay, that’s… going to take a lot of flipping back and forth. Also, is this actually as lethal as all that? I feel like if you’re wearing body armour, you’re going to be wading through handgun fire without a care in the world and it’ll take a high-caliber rifle to put you down. Not sure if that is realistic or not, but it does mean that in certain situations the system becomes irrelevant – it will just consistently spit out the same result. Also, certain characters are going to be impossible to hit for certain other characters, even at point blank range, since the sum of your dodge bonus can easily rise so high that a poor marksman can’t hit even with the best possible result.
Automatic weapons have their own rules variation, and they are terrifying. Like, hefty penalty to dodge, one hit per point that the attack roll exceeds the dodge roll terrifying. Once those come into play, things have indeed taken a turn for the gory… though again, a high-level Solo can probably dance right through a machine gun burst from a raw recruit.
Healing, finally, takes time. The advanced medical technology of the futuristic year of 2013, which has fancy tricks like cloned transplant organs and spray-on skin, does speed things up a little, though you’re still looking at weeks of convalescence.
SO, WHAT DO I THINK?
Well… I must admit myself a bit charmed. It’s all very rough, very much a game in the early tradition of “scribble down our personal notes all willy-nilly, then package it as a game.” But it’s got a raw appeal to it, precisely because it feels like something that’s meant to work rather than look pretty (even if I suspect that there are some things that don’t work especially well). As near as I can tell from my admittedly shallow knowledge of cyberpunk, it does present the genre fairly effectively, with its ever-shaky balance between raging against the machine and wanting to join with it, between wanting to be superhuman and fearing to become inhuman.
I don’t know. I do plan to keep reading, though. I’ve just had to take a break before the first published supplement, because it was a conversion to Walter Jon Williams’ Hardwired setting. So now I have to read that 520-page novel so I can properly understand that 98-page roleplaying supplement. Yes, sometimes I do think I’m a bit weird.
Having recently embarked on a quest to read every single book for every single tabletop roleplaying game that has ever interested me even one little bit, it was of course inevitable that Vampire: the Masquerade would be one of the first ones. It’s the first and most defining World of Darkness game, and I’m of course a huge World of Darkness nerd. I mean, not to blow your mind, or anything, but I am.
Thing is, though, that Vampire was always the one WoD game I could never work up any enthusiasm for. I used to hate Werewolf: the Apocalypse with a fiery burning passion, but it at least made me feel something (and I ultimately made my peace with it – look, you can work around the stupid parts and focus on the nice, wholesome ripping-mutants-to-shreds action!). Vampire just felt like a waste of space. I read a few books, if only to mine for antagonist ideas for the other games I ran, but I never took to it.
Now, having read the very first few books of the very first edition, I have to say… okay! I finally see what all the fuss was about!
For those who don’t know (and one of my friends recently told me that her DM was unaware that there were other roleplaying games than D&D until she informed him otherwise, so I guess some people actually don’t know), Vampire: the Masquerade is a game first published in the 90s where you play… well… a vampire. Who has to hide his true vampiric nature from the world. Like in a masquerade. Again, not to blow your mind or anything.
Anyway, it was huge. Like, it was so huge that for a time, it didn’t just compete with D&D, it was bigger than D&D – a feat that no other roleplaying game has even come close to rivalling before or since. It has been mimicked and analysed and argued over with a meticulous zeal that only artsy nerds can equal. There was a well-regarded video game. There was an ill-regarded TV show. Even today, it’s not quite dead, just sort of… in torpor. Much of modern game design can trace a descent to Vampire, if only by being created by people who were so annoyed by Vampire‘s many flaws that they resolved to create something better.
Vampires, in this game, are humans who have had their blood drained by another vampire and fed some of it back, causing them to rise from the grave. The first vampire was supposedly the Biblical Caine, though he’s not around anymore so no one is exactly sure. Each generation of vampires (with Caine being the single member of the first generation, and most vampires created in the modern night being somewhere between the eighth and the thirteenth) are a little weaker than the one before, with the only way to increase your effective generation to kill by feeding another vampire with lower generation than you. They lack most traditional weaknesses, except for sunlight, which does indeed cause them to spontaneously combust.
There are thirteen clans, each with its own set of special vampire powers (called Disciplines), and each being a sort of cross between a type of movie vampire and a type of high school Goth. The Brujah are rebellious bikers with strong political opinions, the Ventrue are snooty aristocrats who aren’t very good at moving with the times, the Toreador (yes, really – did I mention that a lot of things about this game are goofy as hell, despite taking themselves 110% seriously?) are pretentious arteests, the Nosferatu are creepy deformed monsters who lurk in the sewers, the Gangrel are feral shapeshifters who lurk in the woods… Everyone has their own shtick and look down their noses on everyone else.
Drinking a vampire’s blood on three separate nights, even if you’re a vampire yourself, makes you “blood bound” – effectively, you fall head over heels in love and will do anything for them. Humans who drink vampire blood without first being drained of their own become “ghouls,” which means they stop aging and get some minor Disciplines for as long as they still have vampire blood in their system. Needless to say, vampires tend to keep blood bound ghouls as servants and bodyguards.
The vampires of a city are usually ruled over by a vampire called a “Prince,” along with a bunch of elder vampires called “the Primogen.” The Prince and the Primogen enforce, first and foremost, three rules: a vampire may not kill another vampire except by the Prince’s permission, a vampire may not create another vampire except by the Prince’s permission, and a vampire may not reveal the existence of vampires to the humans under any circumstances whatsoever.
That’s about the basics, that have stayed more or less constant throughout all the editions of the game (we are up to the fifth, with the first three being during the WoD’s prime in the 90s and early 00s and the last two being a latter-day nostalgic revival). So what’s different here that made me change my opinion on the whole game?
Well… for a start, it’s pretty.
That’s really a huge thing. What put me off Vampire for the longest time was how drearily, unrelentingly ugly it was. In all the books I read, vampires were portrayed as, effectively, icky walking corpses who went around doing crappy things while serving no purpose. Every line in every book was filled with a sort of snide, smirking disgust. Everything was crap, especially you, and shame on you if you tried to make anything at all enjoyable. My constant reaction was, “… why would I want to play this thing that is intend on making me feel bad?”
First edition, though? First edition is different. Not in any one particular detail, mind. Vampires are still skeevy and self-indulgent. They still leave corpses behind. They still lie and cheat and fight vicious feuds for exceedingly petty reasons. They do all those things.
But damn, they look awesome doing them!
It’s all in the presentation. Third edition and onwards all seemed to hate their subject matter. First edition clearly loves it. The betrayals, the obsessions, the degeneracy, the hatred and the pride, the failures and the humiliations… all are described in glowing, operating terms. This is a game of beautiful damnation, of reveling in your romantic guilt. Blood isn’t just some sordid crack metaphor, it’s every forbidden pleasure, every carnal desire made red and glistening and deliciously lurid. You shouldn’t have it, you’re bad for wanting it… but it would taste sooooo goooooood!
I guess part of the reason why Vampire always rubbed me the wrong way was that it remained the only game about playing amoral characters in a set of games that, as time went on and the gleeful grimdark of the 90s shifted closer and closer to the sanctimonious outrage of the aughts, became more and more about moralising. It’s weird, given that Vampire always remained the flagship game, but it was kind of left behind in terms of tone. Every other game gave you a cause to fight for, bad guys who you should feel great about gunning down because they were bad. Vampire only made sense as part of a setting where no one was innocent and the closest thing to “goodness” was accepting your dark side enough to keep it in check. When the vampires explicitly existed in a world that ran on objective and tangible Good and Evil, they no longer looked like dashing Byronic antiheroes straddling the divide between sublime virtue and sordid vice. They just looked like lackluster posers, too dull and emotionally stunted to bother choosing a side.
I think, on the whole, that the exact incurious self-righteousness that I complained about at length in my Aberrant readthrough (not a World of Darkness product, but made by the same people) was, as it were, the stake through Vampire‘s heart. No one actually wanted to keep making the sort of “I’m a bad, bad man, I hate myself, I should be dead, and ohhhhh! – isn’t that just so romantic?!” game that it was originally (and explicitly; another thing to love about this version is, it actually states what it’s trying to convey instead of having “hidden themes” that you’re supposed to unravel on your own) designed to be, but it was still the most popular one. So they kept shoveling out books for it, and filling them all with finger-wagging about how we should in no way sympathise with the vampires because they were bad, unlike werewolves/mages/hunters/demons (yes, even the freaking demons from hell were holier than thou at that point!) who were good and fighting for a righteous cause just like you should be doing, why are you not out there saving the whales?!
Yeah… let’s just say I liked how they started out a lot better than how they ended up. Not to lie, here: back in the late 90s, I was absolutely one of the people who were sick of grimdark and clamouring for morally uplifting messages. It’s just that having since learned the fruits of self-righteous people running rampant, I have gotten nostalgic for some honest amorality.
But, let’s try to back up a bit and give you something resembling an actual readthrough rather than my fanboy gushing and ranting…
THE ACTUAL READTHROUGH
The book starts out with a letter from a vampire to a human he had previously victimised, in which he claims to try to make up for his actions by revealing the truth about vampires, their nature and their society. Also, the vampire is not-so-subtly implied to be the actual Count Dracula and the human Mina Harker. Which is, er… a choice.
But, aside from the blatant use of public domain characters that don’t really fit very well with the game, I actually love the opening. It sets the tone, presenting the narrator as someone who is monstrous enough to have done terrible things but still human enough to want to somehow make up for them… and it also has a disturbing undertone to it that lends it some extra delicacy. After all, the good count has clearly been watching Mina from afar, brooding on his sins and wallowing in guilt, and having the passionate regard of a self-confessed monster who is prone to unplanned crimes of passion is… perhaps not entirely comfortable.
That’s very much the game, the way it started out – the romance, the tragedy, and the subtle (subtle, please note!) post-modern deconstruction of them both. In contrast, the introduction to the third edition was narrated by what I can only describe as a smirking douchebag actively trying to be a shit to the woman he was talking to. It… made for a less compelling argument for continuing to read.
After that, we get a brief description of vampires (from a more clinical, out-of-character perceptive) and of the fairly straightforward rules. In brief, you roll a pool of between 1 and 10 d10s and each die that equals or exceeds a difficulty between 2 and 10 is a success. Each 1 you roll cancels out a success. If you roll more 1s than successes, you botch and something bad happens. For a simple action, you just roll, and if you get 1 success you muddle through but more successes might give you some kind of perks or bennies. For an extended action, you need a particular number of successes, but you can keep rolling until you’ve acquired them, at the cost of spending more time and risking a botch. For a contested action, you and another character both roll, and whomever gets more successes win. Not an amazing system, some improvements do suggest themselves, but simple and solid enough. Stay tuned to hear how they proceeded to mess it up (yes, sadly that happens already later in this same book!).
We also get the first few of a series of… well, call them old-fashioned cartoons, I guess, that runs through the book, each one consisting of a picture along with a few lines of narration. Put together, they tell the story of a vampire named Shelzza who lived in some ancient (Sumerian?) city and formed a mutual blood bond with the vampire who ruled it, allowing them to be in something resembling “love” to each other. To summarise, he was killed by a peasant uprising, she slept through the ages and woke up in modern times where she got it into her head that a random dude was her king reborn. She stalked him and turned him into a vampire, which he was horrified by, and he eventually killed her and thus became human again.
That’s a thing in this edition, by the way. It’s called Rebirth, and it can be achieved in a couple of different (and all rather unreliable) ways. Killing your sire soon after your own embrace is indeed one of them. Add it to the list of things I’m sorry they dropped in later editions; for one thing, if vampirism was actually theoretically curable (albeit not with any certainty, and never without considerable difficulty), it’d give Hunters of the Redeemer Creed something to actually do. Oh well.
Anyway, I really love that story and how it sets the tone. Shelzza is a monster, and not entirely sane – the story makes both things very clear. But you still get to see it from her perspective, and you feel sorry for her when she dies. Likewise, her relationship to her king is explicitly artificial and a bit disturbing, but that doesn’t make it inherently worthless. Vampires live outside of nature, they get nothing without breaking some kind of rule, without brute-force something that should be organic. But they can still value the things they have and cry out in anguish when they lose them, and that gives them agency and dramatic weight.
The book continues with character creation, which is about what I’m used to – you have nine basic Attributes, a bunch more Abilities, and you assign dots to them so that you have between 0 and 5 in each one. To that, you can add Backgrounds, which are a sort of catch-all for traits that are more conditions you live under than inherent aptitudes – for instance, Resources determine how wealthy you are, and Generation determines, well, what generation you are.
Clans and Disciplines are about what I’ve already briefly covered, except that here, there is some blessed simplicity – only seven clans are detailed, and only ten Disciplines. I love that, most of the extra Disciplines that got added over time were crap anyway. Also, Thaumaturgy (blood magic, basically) looks actually useful instead of being the boring point-sink that it’s been in every later edition I’ve seen.
Also, the clans are more comfortably stereotypical, without the later editions’ frantic insistances that “vampire are all, like, individuals, man!” Case in point, Nosferatu don’t all have unique deformities, they’re all pale and bald with pointy ears and fangs, deal with it. I mean, okay, I get why they drifted away from that over time, it probably would get a bit samey eventually, but… it’s a lot easier to just come up with a character in a hurry when you have solid archetypes to draw on.
Also, with vampires not being inherently worthless and subhuman, some of the clans work a lot better. Like, the Brujah being idealistic crusaders never made any sense in light of later editions’ presentation of vampires as completely and inherently selfish and despicable. Here, because the explicit premise is that everyone is culpable and that that doesn’t completely invalidate their virtues, the Brujah don’t look like hypocrites for claiming to want a better political system. Sure, they’re probably a bit self-serving about it, but everyone is a bit self-serving about everything, and to some extent they really do want justice and equality and all that good stuff, just as long as they get to snack on people a little on the side. Hey, it’s better than someone who doesn’t want justice and equality and still wants to snack on people, you know?
Special vampire rules! Vampires can keep a certain amount of magical mojo in their bodies at the time, called Blood Points, which are replenished by drinking blood, natch. Blood Points can be used to speed-heal injuries, though it’s still a little too slow for you to use it in a fight – it’s more something you use to restore yourself to full health after the fight has ended. Also, you can give yourself bonuses to physical actions for the duration of a scene (about 20 minutes) by spending Blood Points. Notably, it does not seem like you have to stop and concentrate to do that – you can only spend 1 Blood Point per turn, but it seems like you can do it and perform an action too. Which means that if a vampire starts with a full belly, he’ll get progressively more dangerous the longer a fight goes on. That’s kind of cool, and different from how I remember it working in later editions (where you basically had to know a fight was coming so you could hulk out in advance). Also, you have to spend a Blood Point to wake up every night, so the clock is always ticking – faster if you do a lot of crazy action stunts, slower if you restrict yourself to mere human ability, but it never stops, ever.
Vampires are subject to frenzies, where they go nuts in one way or another. When they feed while very hungry (that is, while having very few Blood Points currently in their system), they have to roll to avoid a Madness Frenzy where they basically try to guzzle every last drop of blood they can get to (which is not good news for whomever they were already feeding on). When they’re in some way bullied or humiliated, or a companion is threatened, they have to roll to avoid a Rage Frenzy, where they try to kill everything in sight. When exposed to fire or sunlight, or otherwise in severe danger, they have to roll to avoid a Terror Frenzy, where they can just run and hide until it wears off. Either way, the GM takes control of the character for the duration.
In lieu of rolling to avoid the frenzy, a vampire can decide to “ride the wave.” If she does, then she does go into a frenzy but she retains some control – she can spend Willpower points (which is the other kind of personal currency characters in this game have) to ignore the frenzy for one turn per point. Which isn’t much, but at least you can avoid doing something completely unforgivable. However, you still have to roleplay the frenzy, and if the GM thinks you’re not doing so, he’ll just dock you Willpower points for them. If you run out of Willpower points, he takes over your characters as in a regular frenzy.
If you try to resist a frenzy and botch the roll, you gain a Derangement which is sort of like a mental illness except usually based on a pop-culture-based misapprehension of how that particular illness actually works. That’s a bit of a problem in other games, where the same Derangements are used to reflect actual mental illnesses… but here, I feel like it’s a lot more okay, since hey, they’re not regular mental illnesses, they’re ways that the vampire mind breaks down under stress, and who’s to say how vampire minds work? Anyway, Derangements work under the same principle as riding the wave – you have to roleplay them, and every time the GM thinks you’re failing to do so, you lose a Willpower point, and once you have no more Willpower points the GM takes over your character.
This… is actually pretty good. This looks actually playable, in ways that the version in third or fourth edition never really did (fifth edition has a brand new one that I think is a lot better, but I think I prefer this one even over that one). It really brings forth the themes of the game more elegantly – you need to decide how much compromise to make with your feral impulses, because they are always stronger than you and if you try to complete repress them you’ll lose and they’ll run wild. It all does rely on there being a workable Willpower economy, with well-defined ways of regaining Willpower, which I think is not really the case in this or any other edition, so that’s a shame. Still, it seems like a wonderfully solid system.
Humanity is another special vampire stat, which measures how much morality you’ve managed to hold on to. If you do something like kill or steal, you have to roll to feel bad. No, really, that sounds like the kind of joke you’d make about this game, but it’s literally a thing. If you fail the roll, then you feel great about your hideous crime. And that’s a problem, because it means that another little piece of your conscience has died, and thus your Humanity goes down. Humanity function as a cap for some of your rolls, like empathy-based ones and any that you make during daylight hours, so the lower your Humanity, the more you become a heartless monster who is effectively a lifeless corpse when the sun is in the sky. Avoiding that is effectively the goal of the game.
Golconda is a sort of vampire nirvana that can be reached at the end of a long and complicated road. It isn’t the same as Rebirth (though they may be related, with them being the two alternate outcomes of a similar process), you remain a vampire who need to drink blood to survive, but you start requiring a lot fewer Blood Points to keep yourself going, meaning that you have a lot more ability to hold out for ethical feeding opportunities. You also don’t frenzy, ever. It basically means that you have made peace with your inner darkness, and in doing so, learned to control it. Which is probably why Golconda is rarely mentioned at all in later editions, which as mentioned got a lot more absolutist in their morality. Sigh.
After that, we get more general rules, and this is where the system starts showing signs of becoming the miserable mess that is the Storyteller System as we know it. See, the system as given back in the earlier chapter was fine, more or less what you needed for a game that’s more about ambience and feel than about rigid physics simulations. But the problem is… the White Wolf writers got enthusiastic.
That’s the best way I can put it, honestly. There is a section that gushes about how much fun they think it is to turn every situation into a unique minigame with its own distinct rules. And the thought never seems to have occurred to them that if you do that, then you end up with a gazillion unique minigames that are going to have to be balanced against each other and which, having been used once, are going to have to be memorised so that things work the same way next time. No, they just threw themselves into it with merry abandon, and we have the next several hundred books full of bad mechanics to show for it. At the end of this road, folks, lies Exalted and entire shelf meters of broken Charms, because White Wolf could not and by God would not accept that anything those uncool math geeks could do, they couldn’t do better.
Oh well.
Having all that said, though, I’ll come out and say that I actually think the combat rules are better in this edition than in any that followed, precisely because they were kept relatively simple. If two people fight in melee, that’s a contested roll, and whichever wins deals damage to the other. If someone shoots at something, that’s a simple roll, and one success is enough to hit and deal damage. Cover provides a hefty difficulty bump to shooting, so when bullets start flying you want to throw yourself behind something. And when someone gets hit, that may just be the end of the fight right there, because injury is very punishing in Storyteller. Which works to the game’s advantage here, where it’s pretty clear that combat is supposed to be rare and risky and with stakes, but not so well in… well, any game from Werewolf onward, where Fighting The Bad Guys is expected to be a pretty constant occurrence.
Also, there is no bashing damage here, only aggravating (from fire, sunlight, vampire fangs, and other extra-nasty sources) and normal (from everything else). Vampires can “soak” normal damage, which means that they roll Stamina against a difficulty derived from the damage source and each success cancels out a success on the damage roll. Humans can’t soak at all, and vampires can’t soak aggravating, but damage is rolled against a difficulty derived from the target’s Stamina, so a super-tough character is still going to be able to power through a wound better than a sickly one. That’s a little more complicated than what they replaced it with, but I think I like it better.
There is a helpful example of play where a prose narrative is side by side with a description of the mechanics being used to determine outcomes. That’s kind of cool. The story is about some Anarchs attending a rabble-rousing meeting, but a guy named Sheriff who works for the Prince comes to break it up and everyone ends up fleeing from a building on fire. To clarify, he’s not “the sheriff,” as per later editions – he’s just this one guy who’s called Sheriff, because he struts around talking with a Southern drawl and claiming to be the law. Heh. I guess he got retconned into being an entire institution later…
Next up is the settings chapter, where we get more detail on vampire society… which is rather less cluttered than it will be in later editions. For one thing, there isn’t a gazillion different court positions that will outnumber the total number of vampires in most cities – there’s just the Prince, who rules with the help of whatever cronies he’s got handy. The Primogen are a thing, but they aren’t a fixed council consisting of the top vampire of each clan in the city here, they’re just the most powerful elders, the people the Prince need the support of to rule effectively. It feels a lot more organic and natural.
The main conflict is between the elders on one hand and the Anarchs on the other – the latter being, effectively, young vampires (or neonates) who don’t like the elders. The book is a little vague on whether all neonates are per definition Anarchs – I don’t think they are, I’m pretty sure that there is meant to be such a thing as neonates who are bootlicking sycophants for the elders, but the book doesn’t quite say.
The Camarilla is the overarching vampire organisation that… doesn’t do terribly much except sit there and be stuffy and entrenched. There is a competing organisation called the Sabbat, but it’s this vague thing that’s out there somewhere and most of what you hear about it is probably lies. Still, it’s supposed to be the opposite of the Camarilla, all hellfire and reveling in being monsters. I guess the Anarchs are meant to be the happy medium between the two, which players are meant to sympathise with? Also, there’s the Inconnu, who seek Golconda, but we don’t find out much more about than than that.
Elders are usually a couple of centuries old, and are the movers and shakers in the vampire world. Vampires who are a thousand years or more are called Methuselah and tend to disappear from vampire society, partly out of paranoia and partly because a lot of them can’t digest human blood anymore and need to feed off other vampires. Which is kind of cool. While you’re on the hunt, something else might be hunting you.
The Jyhad is… a little better explained than I’ve seen it elsewhere, but still not great. In some places, it’s said to just be the natural animosity between vampires of different ages – neonates know they can only be as powerful as the elders by killing and eating them, Methusaleh can can only survive by killing and eating other vampires, and the elders are trying to maintain their power and long-term survival in the face of the other two. So basically, everyone is scared of either starving or ending up on the dinner table, and scheming wildly to try to avoid either fate. Other times, there are vague hints that the Jyhad is something deeper that’s really a proxy war between a bunch of of ancient, third-generation uber-vampires (the Antediluvians) who are in hiding somewhere, but precisely how they supposedly control everything without ever being noticed isn’t exactly clear.
Speaking of generations, the first (Caine) through third (Antediluvians) are largely mythical. The fourth and fifth generation are mostly Methuselah and stalking the night for succulent vampire blood. The sixth and seventh tend to be the elders and are the ones whose wrath the players will need to avoid. The eighth through thirteenth are on roughly the level of players and are peers who they might get into scraps with without it being immediately suicidal.
Also, I have to laugh with great sadness at the mention that the ancient, terrifying Methuselah might have as much as… fifteen dots of Disciplines! Ahhhhh, more innocent days, before the power creep set in. I’m sorry to report that it didn’t last long, by the time of Chicago By Night the unbeatable godmode NPCs were already a thing.
Other antagonists include ghosts, lupines and magi, later to be known as wraiths, werewolves and mages. “Lupines,” notably, are just as OP as they will be later, but only at night – in the daytime, they’re effectively human. Not that that’s a tremendous comfort to vampires, admittedly. Among human menaces are the Inquisition, the regular cops, and the Arcanum, which is this nebbish bunch of scholars who research the occult. Yeah, I’ve never quite understood what the Arcanum was meant to be used for, though I guess they are a little more of a problem in a game where you can get killed for letting anyone discover that you’re a vampire…
GM advice! There’s a lot of it, and much of it is… er… kind of pretentious and overblown, to be honest. Look, I think I might once have met a roleplaying group whose campaign had a “theme,” but they were weirdly super-into it even by my standards, and that’s saying some… Still, there are some useful stuff here, like suggestions for how to stage a campaign since it’s hard to make a standard “adventuring party” out of vampires. Having them run a street gang together, be exiles from another city, or be the Prince’s team of troubleshooters are all suggestions offered.
Also, I alluded to this before, but… the book actually tells you what things are meant to represent, which I feel is uncommonly helpful of it. Like, a vampire’s eternal life (which in practice is just life-until-something-kills-you) is meant to represent our instinctive clinging to a survival that is ultimately impossible. The vampire’s need for blood represents the fact that we, as living beings, must consume other life to sustain ourselves – and how, just like how a vampire can live off of rats and freely donated blood, we can theoretically choose to minimise our impact on the environment, but that doing so is so thankless and inconvenient that most of us don’t bother (just to be clear, I am very much one of the people who don’t bother! I’m just saying, the metaphor is sound). And so on.
The book wraps up with a starting setting of sorts, in the form of the city of Gary, Indiana. It’s described as being, essentially, a dismal place of rusting, abandoned factories, crippling poverty and a rapidly fleeing populace, ruled over by a Prince (Modius) whose chance for the big times was lost decades ago and is now just going through the motions. It’s all got a nice Life is Strange vibe to it, of shaking your head at the hopelessness but also secretly relishing the romantic squalor. There are a bunch of other NPCs statted up, including some allies and rivals for Modius, a couple of vampire hunters (regular no-powered ones, since Hunter: the Reckoning is still a decade away!), and some sundry hangers-on. There’s also a short scenario where the players attend a party in Modius’ decaying mansion and get sent as his envoys to the rival Prince of Chicago. To be continued in Ashes to Ashes.
All in all? I kind of love it. Oh, there are some dumb stuff, and some things that could have been better explained, and certainly the book could have been a lot better organised, but the vibe, man. The vibe. This is everything I loved about the WoD, only distilled and without years upon years of the writers getting too big for their britches.
So okay, fine. I’m jumping on the bandwagon, some thirty-five years after it left the station and probably twenty or so since everyone else got off of it. I admit it. Vampires are cool, too.
Mister Monster's Workshop 