Torg readthrough: The Nile Empire

All right! In our readthrough of Torg, the roleplaying game of let’s-throw-everything-in-and-see-what-happens, we have started reading the original core rules, found out that we needed to read a novel trilogy to understand the original core rules, done that, gone back and finished reading the original core rules, and made an initial trip to the Living Land. Now we’re heading to everyone’s favourite cosm, the ridiculous pulp reality of the Nile Empire!

Though I would again like to point out that it would stand out more if Torg as a whole wasn’t already ridiculously pulpy. Look, it just bugs me, okay?! Anyway…

The Nile Empire has appeared over Egypt, natch, and is spreading in every direction. It’s a place of roughly 1930s technology mixed with isolated displays of ramshackle super-science, the subtle influence of brooding gods, ritualised magic, and an odd tendency for people to put on a mask and go jumping between rooftops at night. Its High Lord is Doctor Mobius, who is a sort of proto-supervillain out of schlocky 1930s pulp fiction; maniacally evil, larger than life, and always embarked in a new sinister scheme or a new fiendish invention.

Mobius comes from a cosm called Terra, which is identical to Earth except that everything is more cheesy and bombastic. He was the son of an ancient Pharao who tried to usurp his older brother and got killed, but the descendents of his followers recently resurrected him with a magic ritual and he set about mastering the sciences of the new era. He become a Recurring Villain (TM) for a number of the heroic “Mystery Men” of Terra, but then suddenly disappeared. He had found a Darkness Device called the Kefertiri Idol in the shape of an ancient Egyptian statuette of a crocodile-headed deity, and used it to disappear into the cosmverse, plundering worlds of their possibility energy. A number of Mystery Men have since gotten wind of this and have followed him to Core Earth on the principle of, “this time I will put an end to Doctor Mobius’ reign of evil! For justice, righteousness, and mom’s apple pie!”

There’s a list of Mobius’ long-term goals, none of which are very surprising – he wants to become all-powerful and live forever, basically, and he’s interested in any kind of technology or magic that promises to help with that. We also get his stats. For a world-conquering uber-villain they are relatively modest, though he does have a value of 37 in Weird Science, in a system where 15 is respectable, 20 is impressive, and 25 effectively superhuman. So basically, he can probably do just about anything you can imagine if he just gets the time to cobble some gadget together.

Relation to other High Lords is what you’d expect, he has a loose alliance with Baruk Kaah because he figures the lizard dude is too pathetic to be a threat, he is actively hostile to Jean Malraux because Jean Malraux a loser and everyone hates him, and he’s wary of the other three.

We get an outline of the Nile Empire’s government, including a bunch of NPCs. Basically, Mobius has a couple of ministers with specific areas of responsibility, and below those he has a mini-boss squad of ten “Overgovernors,” most of them are some kind of colourful criminal mastermind in his or her own right. Some of them are loyal, some of them are plotting against him, some are even starting to reconsider their evil ways. One that stands out is Wu Han, who’s a Fu Mancho expy who is a sinister Orieeeeeeeental who likes poison and traps and other things that no decent Englishman would ever stoop to, no sirree. I feel like that’s kind of stepping on the toes of Nippon Tech, since their whole deal is that they’re negative Asian stereotypes (admittedly Japanese rather than Chinese ones) so this is just another way that the Nile Empire just does what the setting as a whole is doing, only sligthly more flamboyantly. And yes, Wu Han has ninja minions, because of course he does.

Many of Mobius’ followers obey him out of religious devotion and because he’s promised to restore the glories of ancient Egypt (though he has no plans of actually doing that). It’s noted that he’s gotten a lot of converts on Core Earth by promising to restore Egypt’s fortunes there, and apparently that has gotten a ton of impressionable people on board. I don’t know enough about Egyptian culture to be sure here, but I don’t think that makes sense – the people who live in Egypt today aren’t even that closely related to the people who lived there in ancient times, ethnically or culturally, and certainly I have trouble seeing a devoutly Muslim country being excited about bringing back paganism. But, I guess we can chalk that up to it being a pulp reality where ridiculous schemes stand a genuine chance of working as long as that will make things more dramatic.

There is a rundown of Mobius’ army, which is your basic World War Two setup with tanks, propellor planes and infantry. The only thing I’ll note here is that tallying up the numbers listed, it seems that Mobius has about 70,000 men or so. This is in contrast to modern Egypt, who has an army of 300,000, while Israel – who is only one of the countries Mobius is fighting against – has twice that. Ah well, chalk it up to slapdash research in the pre-Internet era, though it does add to the difficulty of being overly worried about this guy actually conquering the world… Anyway, Mobius fights his war by dropping “reality bombs” over areas he wants to horn in on, which causes the axioms to switch over to Nile Empire ones for a brief time, during which he rolls in with his armies and trounce the defenders, whose 1990s-era weapons and vehicles are suddenly too advanced to function. Then he raises a ton monuments all over the place, some of which are actually stelae, thus adding the area to his realm.

There’s a long section about the major cities of the Empire and some specific and generic locations. Cairo has become a sort of anything-goes city ruled by gangsters and home to a thriving black market, since Mobius has decided that trying to control it is more effort than it’s worth. He instead rules from his palace in Thebes. There are a lot of descriptions of crusading journalists, hardboiled private detectives, weird pagan cults, mysterious curses, grubby-but-not-monstrous criminals like smugglers and spies, and pretty much anything you would expect in a period adventure story that wasn’t trying over-hard to be realistic. It does all paint a pretty vivid picture of what sort of adventures you could set up here.

Likewise, there is a section on the land outside the cities. There are scorching deserts with mysterious and possibly cursed oases, an island populated by amazon warriors (most of whom weren’t amazon warriors a few months ago, but who have embraced girl power by way of hitting things with a sword in a big way), secret laboratories where Mobius’ scientists work on new super-weapons, steaming jungles filled with tribes of noble savages and tribes of savage savages (because it’s the Nile Empire, so everyone is either a positive stereotype or a negative stereotype). There are underground gold mines where Mobius sends Israeli prisoners of war to work them to death and I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.

The state of the war! Mobius is basically in a slow stalemate on every front. He’s not advancing into Libya because Qaddafi has threatened to set off a nuclear bomb in the middle of country’s oil fields if he comes any closer, so for now Mobius is just extracting a regular tribute in crude oil and calling it a day. He’s not advancing into Israel, because the Israeli are fighting back like mad bastards – understandably, given that they’re being invaded by what seems like a bizarre mix between the Pharao of Exodus and an even-crazier versus of Adolf Hitler, which I’m sure is hitting every cultural trigger they’ve got. He’s not advancing into Ethiopia because the altitude is playing havoc with his military equipment, and he’s not advancing into Sudan because in Sudan a bunch of African countries have banded together with some Soviet support and are giving as good as they’re getting.

Actually, I’m honestly not sure why the Communists aren’t all over the Possibility Wars. The Americans have trouble enough on the home front, but the Russians actually beat back their invasion before it started, so why aren’t they running around bailing out smaller countries with troops and thus also putting them firmly under their thumb? “Never fear, proletarian brethren, Soviet Union will come to rescue! Unlike American imperialists pigdogs, who are too busy getting eaten by dinosaurs! Getting eaten by dinosaurs is ineeeeeevitable consequence of decadent capitalism!” I think there’s some mention in a later book that Nippon Tech is doing sneaky things behind the scenes to keep the Kremlin too tangled up and inefficient to launch any sort of coherent action, but it still seems a bit iffy.

Anyway, we move on to world rules. First are the axioms. Social and technological development are, again, at the level of the 1930s or, though women have full equality. The spiritual axiom is a lot more powerful than it is on Core Earth, and religious miracles (specifically tied to Egyptian paganism) are a fact of life. Magic is a little more modest and has to be mastered through rigid formulas – no flinging fireballs around all willy-nilly. There are two schools of magic, mathematics (which function by tying magical effects to the movement of the heavens) and engineering (which functions by tying magic to architectural or mechanical designs). Interestingly, that means that they’re basically “magic that’s half religion” and “magic that’s half science,” indicating that the lines in the Nile Empire are a little blurrier than elsewhere. Add that to the fact that “weird science” are effectively “technology that might as well be magic” and you have a pretty fun and flavourful mix.

In addition to the axioms, there are also World Laws that set the cosm apart. Firstly, the Law of Morality states that each person is either basically good or basically evil. You can go from one to the other by being corrupted or redeemed, but everyone falls into one category or the other at a given time. The definition of “good” here amounts to “unselfish” or “community-minded”; a good person thinks about others before themselves, a bad person thinks about themselves first and others never. Secondly, the Law of Drama commands the GM to keep adding complications and raising the stakes at every turn. Finally, the Law of Action gives heroes extra power; when spending a possibility for an additional roll on an action, a Storm Knight can spend a second possibility to make two addtional rolls and choose the better one to add to his total.

Pulp powers! They’re basically superpowers, but rather less comprehensive than your typical caped flying brick. You can take pulp powers for your character before the game starts, but each one you take has a possibility cost, and you’ll need to pay it out of your acquired possibilities after each adventure, and if you fail to pay up even once, you lose the power, permanently. Powers are things like flight, invisibility, force fields, the ability to grow or shrink, the ability to talk to animals, and similar handy but not godlike feats. You can also take power flaws, which are specific weaknesses (possibly but not necessarily connected to your pulp powers) that grants you possibilities whenever they come into play in a way that actually matters (exposing you to your weaknesses under controlled conditions doesn’t count, therefore – it has to be when it’s really inconvenient to you to take a beating from them), thus helping to pay that extra possibility tax on pulp powers.

How do you get pulp powers? Ehhhh, you were probably hit by lightning or something, don’t think too hard about it. Welcome to the Nile Empire.

Gizmos are the creations of weird science, which can coincidentally recreate the effects of pulp powers, though they can also just add some extra bonuses to perfectly ordinary skills and abilities. There is a long, complicated description of how you create gizmos, which include drawing up an actual blueprint with all sorts of interesting symbols representing the gizmo’s abilities, energy consumption, sturdiness, and all that sort of thing. Each thingamabob you add makes the gizmo harder to create, but you can offset that somewhat by adding special make-it-easier thingamabobs. And then, at the end of all that, you’re cheerfully informed that you’re of course not supposed to actually use these rules, they’d slow the game down way too much and the Nile Empire is all about the fast-past action, silly!

…

…

… Torg, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, I actually find it kind of endearing. These people sat down and created a mathematically precise, highly flavourful subsystem that no one was supposed to use, that was just there to give you an idea of how things would work mechanically if you were to resolve them mechanically. That’s some serious commitment to the game-as-simulation-engine ethos, you can’t deny that.

Magic! Nile Empire magic relies on astronomy, in particular on the position of the planets. To cast a spell, you need to figure out where some subset of the planets are, and if they’re in a particularly auspicious position, it makes your spell stronger. There is a helpful description of why the spell that raised Mobius from the dead had to wait until the planets were correctly aligned, and precisely what sort of bonus his cultists had on their casting. Like I said, commitment! Anyway, it all serves to give Nile Empire magic a slightly grittier, more ritualistic quality than the sort of spellchucking an Ayslish mage can pull off.

Mathematics (as in the magic school) can do some slightly Egyptian-themed things like command crocodiles, create an oasis in the desert, raise mummies and heal with rays of sunlight. Engineering has a few spells that lets you loft heavy blocks, find or dismantle traps, or find a path through a maze, but its main shtick is binding spells or pieces of technology to architectural designs. In effect, it lets you create the sort of underground maze full of still-miraculously-working-after-centuries traps that the Nile Empire is full of. Not sure if it’s something that a player character would have much use for, but it certainly fits into and justifies the setting.

Miracles make use of the same astrological requirements and enhancements as magic, so there’s another way that the two overlap in the Nile Empire. Egyptian priests can do things like lay down curses, spread plagues, blight or bless fields, bring fortune in war, and other high-level stuff. Again, more flavourful than actually useful for a player character – I think these are mostly meant to be used by Mobius’ minions, with the players focusing more on pulp powers (not that that’s too shabby).

The section of critters has a number of giant animals (apes, insects), as well as “walking gods” who guard pyramids and take the form of actual deities, but aren’t quite as all-powerful as all that. Gospogs are present as in all cosms, here they take the form of increasingly deformed and disturbing mummies in their later plantings. Also, there are Martians who look kind of like big spiders when they’re not masquerading as humans through their technology and are on some sort of mission from (Terra’s) Mars that no one is quite sure what it is.

The equipment section is mostly forgettable, but I want to note that includes rules for using a bull whip as a weapon, if you want to get your Indiana Jones on. And then, after a bunch of pre-generated characters from the Nile Empire, the book draws to a close.

I’ll admit that I can see the appeal of this one. It’s a weird kitchen-sink mess, but it’s also got an odd sort of specificity and flavour to it, a sense of how it’s all supposed to work. The weakest part of it all is really how little interest the writers seem to have had in the actual place of Egypt, its people and its culture – there are some hand-waves about how the pulp tropes are meant to have an “Arabic slant,” but they don’t seem to have really known themselves what that meant in practice. It feels more like ancient Egypt mushed up with 1930s America, without any attention paid to the (mostly Arabic, mostly Muslim) state of the modern (or for that matter 1930s) northern Africa. That’s something the Living Land (and as we’ll later see, Aysle) benefited from; the writers actually felt comfortable with the original state of the place they were transforming, and it made it all the more vivid how it had been forcibly changed.

But oh well. I understand that’s a common criticism of the game, and it doesn’t change the fact that the Nile Empire, too, seems like a fun place to adventure in.

Dragonbane readthrough: second edition core

The first edition of Dragonbane / Drakar & Demoner wasn’t particularly long-lived. Two years and two published adventures (and, admittedly, two issues of Sinkadus magazine to add some extra content) it was already time for the second edition. Let’s have a look.

That guy on the cover is Elric of Melniboné, by the way, taken from one of Michael Moorcock’s novels about him. It has nothing to do with him, his world, or the game of Stormbringer other than using similar rules, but I guess Äventyrsspel didn’t have a budget to commission its own covers at the time.

So, the rulebook starts with a choose-your-own-adventure section where you go investigate a haunted mine, fight a bear, and get in a scrap with a wizard and his goblin (?) minions. I still love these things, but I’ll note that here, the task resolution rules used for the choose-your-own-adventure are completely different from the ones in the actual game, which does seem like a flaw if this is meant to give you a sense for how the game runs… Oh well.

Character creation has changed a good bit since last time. There are still seven base stats that are rolled up with 3d6, but Skill has been renamed to Dexterity, Power is now Psychic Power, and Body has become Physique. There are now ten character classes instead of four: you can be play Merchant, Thief, Wizard, Warrior, Scholar, Hunter, Bandit, Pirate, Knight or Monk. There is also an entrance roll for all of them, so there isn’t a “default” option of being lawless if you fail to qualify for any of them. That seems a bit needlessly unhelpful. Though I’ll grant you, you still have Dexterity x 8% chance at making it as a thief, so unless you’re terribly clumsy you’ll usually have it to fall back on.

Anyway, each class gives you a spread of skills, and you choose three of them as your Expert skills and five as your Normal skills. Each skill is based on a stat, and your starting score is 50 + 2 x that stat for an Expert skill, or 20 + 2 x that stat for a Normal skill. Any skill you don’t choose either starts at 0% or at the related stat in percent. So you’ll be looking at something like three skills at 70%, five at 40%, and the rest at either 0% or 10%.

Which, I must admit, is a lot nicer and more streamlined than the fiddly-specific rules from first edition, while also giving you more of a chance to set up your character the way you want. You’re still going to get horribly killed by the kind of monstrosities the published adventures sends you up against, but at least you’ll be roughly competent.

Wizards have some additional rules. Spells are now divided into four levels, with the fourth level being completely forbidden for starting characters, and the other levels determining what your starting score is if you choose that spell as an Expert or Normal skill. You’ll end up with a score between about 60% and about 5%, with about 35-45% being the average. So if you start as a wizard, you start as a fairly sucky wizard, which is pretty much the same as in first edition. Oh, and magical healing is a fourth-level spell, so you’re not going to have a healer in your party. That’s going to increase the meat-grinderiness considerably.

Also, wizards no longer start with any fighting skills, at all, and they can’t carry metal or their magic doesn’t work. They’re amazingly squishy.

The skill list is basically the “effective” skill list from first edition, but here they’ve streamlined it. All the knowledge skills that scholars used to get are here, for instance. Since all the classes work the same now, scholars also no longer get a base chance in all the knowledge skills, so they now have a few rarely-relevant specialties and the rest of the time they are pristinely useless. Don’t play a scholar, kids.

Persuasion – you know, just talking people into things – has gone from being just 5 x Charisma in first edition to being a skill here. And to add insult to injury, it’s one you start at 0% in, so you don’t even get a base chance unless you’re trained… and no class has it on their list of selectable starting skills, except for wizard and there I think it was an oversight (wizards can choose to know any skill that isn’t a weapon skill, see). Did… did someone just completely abuse Persuasion during playtesting and convince the designers that it was grossly overpowered?

Improving in skills has gotten a lot tougher. See, you can’t just train in your off time, you also need experience. Which in this game means successfully using a skill in the course of play – never mind that you might just have a 5% chance at that, it’s still the only way to improve. An even getting experience doesn’t necessarily raise the skill, you still have to succeed at an improving roll at the end of the adventure. Not the game session, mind, but the adventure. So basically, if you didn’t pick the skill at chargen, you’re pretty much never getting good at it – you’d need to play for a thousand years for it to happen.

And that super-handy healing spell? Yep, can’t pick it at chargen. You need to learn it during play, starting at 5% (in first edition, you could learn new spells and they started at Intelligence x 3%). Which costs a ton of money to even get to that point. So yeah, the designers apparently felt that the game wasn’t deadly enough.

ETA: Here I must write a correction, since I spotted a line in the book I hadn’t noticed before. A wizard’s starting score in a new spell is his Psychic Power in percent, rounded to the nearest multiple of five. So realistically, once you get the 4000 silver coins together to learn the healing spell, you’ll likely start with it at 15%. Still pretty brutal, and far below the first edition’s relative generosity, but not quite as demoralising.

Combat is mostly unchanged. Weapons are no longer as breakable – depending on which of two optional systems you use, a weapon can break after taking a single extremely powerful hit, or it can break after taking a number of still pretty hefty hits. All weapons except quarterstaffs and longspears can potentially break a weapon. Impaling rules have disappeared.

Oh, and casting a spell now… seems to take two rounds? Like, this is something that after thirty years I am still trying to figure out, but that seems to be what it says – you cast the spell with one action, then you release it with your next action. So that’s nerfing wizards even harder. This was not the case in the first edition, as near as I could understand how it worked there, and in the fourth edition it seemed not to be the case in the core rules but then became the case in the advanced rules that came later… Yeah. If someone has a clue, let me know!

Magical items are much the same, they give you the ability to cast the spell that’s in them at 95%. Weapons and armour with permanent enhancements and potions that affect you with a spell of a certain strength when you drink it also exist. Demon weapons seem to have disappeared, though funnily enough they’ll be making their return in a late third edition adventure, aaaaages from now.

The bestiary has been extended, and like a bunch of other things different creatures have been put on a more similar level – no more giving elves a ton of spells just for existing! All the creatures from first edition make their return except for wolves – I think we can assume that they still exist and just didn’t make the cut, or maybe meek Swedish players didn’t feel like killing an endangered species. Trolls are among the ones that return, but have turned a lot dumber and are no longer noted as being great magicians – they’re now more lumbering Tolkienian brutes than the cunning folk from Swedish folklore. That feels like a shame.

Among the new arrivals we have… the ducks (“mallards” in the modern English translation). Who are ducks, like Donald. Yeah, one day I’m going to really do my research and figure out where this idea came from – I know it didn’t start here, they were imported from Rune Quest, but why they made sense there I have yet to discover. We also now have orcs and halflings, again bringing us closer to Tolkien, and a few other fantasy standards like unicorns, griffons, harpies and centaurs. Oh, and ghouls, for some reason. They’re called likätare (“corpse-eaters”), but whatever, they’re ghouls.

The sample adventure with this edition, Sarkath Hans Gravvalv (“The Tomb of Sarkath Han”) apparently has the distinction of being regarded as the worst adventure ever published for the game. I’m not entirely sure I understand why, though. It’s very basic, certainly – the players get sold a map to a tomb full of treasure, they cross some wilderness including a troll bridge that has gotten taken over by elves, and when they find the tomb it turns out that the trolls who used to run the bridge have come here to plunder it. The only really annoying part with it is that the players can pick up hirelings in town that are statted out in a way that’ll make them ridiculously more powerful than the players are likely to be. Oh, and one of them starts out with a staff that stores Power Points, which is something that doesn’t even exist in this edition, and back when it did exist in the first edition it was something that cost a ton of money and took a year for a player to create. Like, can we just play as these guys instead? They seem like they’re better suited to be the heroes! But other than that, it’s a fairly by-the-numbers mini-adventure.

Overall impression? I think this was a step in the right direction, and certainly less messy, though a few cool things were lost along the way. Fourth edition would eventually come along and change things beyond recognition, but funnily enough the current edition has in many ways returned to what the second edition set up. Having actually run this edition, I can also vouch for the fact that it plays pretty well. I house ruled those skill raises pretty thoroughly, though.

Comedy or tragedy: take your pick

The problem with most roleplaying games is that their premises collapse the moment the players fall on their asses.

Which, unless you really railroad them within an inch of their lives and fudge every dice roll, is going to happen. It’s just a fact of life. People mess up. Humiliating accidents happen. We all know that from our real, actual lives set in comfortable First World environments… and the sort of high-risk shenanigans we get up to in TTRPGs offer a lot more chances for things to go demoralisingly wrong.

The problem is, most TTRPGs try to emulate fiction, and in fiction people tend to succeed at anything that is broadly achievable. When they fail, it tends to be because it was hopeless right from the start. If the hero loses a fight, it’s because he’s not skilled enough and needs a training montage. Or his opponent was unkillable by mere steel, and he needs a special magic sword. Or some nefarious traitor slipped drugs into his breakfast stew. It’s never just because, well, he had an off day. He zigged when he should have zagged. He was a little too slow with that one parry. Hey, shit happens. You win some, you lose some. But not in fiction.

So what TTRPGs produce – partly since they have randomised elements like dice, but mostly because they have the ultimate randomised element of human beings making bad judgment calls and misreading situations because they haven’t read the script – is usually less like the sort of fiction they’re supposed to be based on, and more like a parody of the same. It’s Conan the Barbarian, except he falls on his face when trying to scale a wall. It’s Lord of the Rings, except the Fellowship wanders in circles for a week because they can’t figure out the map. It’s Robin Hood, but the Sheriff’s men spotted the ambush because someone burped at the wrong time.

And it gets worse the more high-powered and dignified the game is meant to be. There’s a reason why the origin of the hobby was a bunch of random schmoes skulking through a dungeon and trying to steal some gold without being eaten by a giant slime mold. When your first-level halfling thief trips and falls into a bottomless chasm, well, it’s about what you’d expect, isn’t it? But when a game is meant to be beautiful, evocative and heroic, the cracks start to show. When your immortal champion of light and justice trips and falls into a bottomless chasm, it’s really kind of wretched.

I think that if you want tonal consistency in your games, you really just have two options. Call them comedy and tragedy. The senseless setbacks will happen. You have either be prepared to laugh, or be prepared to cry.

I don’t mean, of course, that your only options are non-stop slapstick or wall-to-wall angst. You can run fun adventures or intricate intrigues or passionate drama or anything you want. What I mean is that the potential for comedy or tragedy (or both) have to be there right from the start. You need to set the game in the sort of universe where things can suddenly go wrong and where everyone knows that they can suddenly go wrong.

For a good example – and one of the few franchises that I think actually lends itself well to roleplaying – you can look at Star Wars. There you have epic conflicts and pulse-pounding action, to be sure. But it all takes place in a world where silly things happen, even to characters who are stalwart heroes or fiendish villains. Darth Vader goes to rout the forces of good through his terrifying presence and unmatched dogfighting skills… and gets sent spinning into space because some jerk managed to shoot him down from behind. Luke Skywalker has a vision of his friends being in danger, so he runs to the rescue… and completely blows it and ends up needing them to rescue him. It doesn’t mean that they’re not an inspiring hero and a terrifying villain, it just means that they’re both at the mercy of a bad die roll.

Among roleplaying games, the one that comes to mind for leaning into this is of course Paranoia, where things getting wildly out of control is meant to be part of the fun. It definitely embraces comedy. And in (ahem) my own labour of love, Monstrous Mishaps, I of course do the same thing. The more ridiculous and dignity-free a way the players find to succeed, the better it fits the game’s themes. Which is, I still think, an excellent way of doing it.

But I actually think that a better example for how you can open the door to randomness without going all out on it is the early Vampire: the Masquerade books I’ve been reading my way through.

And, look, I know what you’re thinking. VtM? The game that’s justifiably blamed for the entire “roleplaying is aaaaaaaaart, man!” vibe that dominated the nineties and encouraged GMs to force through their Incredibly Important Themes no matter how badly they had to mutilate the game to do it? The gold standard for pretentious, oppressive metaplot? And, well, yes, that’s fair. But I mean the very early days.

Because, you see, in those early days, the premise of the game was still that you were something that shouldn’t exist… but that you existed anyway. And that coloured everything. It took place in a world that had lost the plot, where there was no justice and no consistency, just cold facts of the environment. You were a vampire, but you weren’t a sleek, elegant movie vampire – you were just some person who had gotten stuck with the powers and limitations of a vampire and had to figure out what to do about it. You weren’t guaranteed success or failure, because if the universe had been in the habit of guaranteeing anything, it would have made sure you never existed in the first place.

You could see it in the NPCs, too. A lot of them were powerful, sure, but they were also usually not wholly successful – their backstories usually read like a laundry list of phyrric victories and disappointments, of half-measures and derailed plans. You could just hear the dice rattling in the background. The game clearly took place in a world that usually refused to serve up simple, satisfying plots, where pratfalls didn’t break the ambience but just gave you another thing to feel gloomy about. It embraced tragedy.

Needless to say, it didn’t last, but still… it makes reading those early books informative.

Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough: Ashes to Ashes

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…

Creating Marissa Mealey, the Moocher

We have at least arrived at the last pregenerated character to create for my Monstrous Mishaps quickstart. For those who haven’t been following along, our previous entries were:

For our big finish, we’re going to go traditional and create a Vampire – or a Moocher, as they are less politely known in Monster World. I figure we’ll make her an extremely lazy woman who uses her people skills to trick everyone else into doing stuff for her and prides herself on never having done an honest day’s work in her life. We’ll call her Marissa Mealey.

As a Moocher, Marissa needs to have an addiction to something – Vampires in Monstrous Mishaps don’t need to suck blood, but they do have to have a bad habit of some other kind to be angsty over. We’ll say that Marissa is addicted to expensive custom mattrasses, elaborate massages, acupuncture treatments, and anything else that can help the bad back she claims is keeping her from working.

Marissa obviously needs to be slick to be able to work scams and cons, so we’ll give her Basic (4) Mindgames and Schmoozing. She’s also nowhere to be found where work needs to be done, which includes being vigilant for signs that some is about to be handed out, so we’ll give her Limited (3) Hiding and Keenness. She’s not got much discipline, but she’s very stubborn about not needing to show any discipline, so she’s got Limited (2) Grit. Finally, her interest in traditional medicine for her back and her habit of selling fraudulent products of other sorts have given a smattering of occult knowledge, enough for Limited (2) Weirdness.

For some reason, I immediately imagine Marissa’s parents as taking her camping a lot as a kid, thus teaching her to properly hate everything that wasn’t comfortable and air-conditioned, so we’ll give her the Forced to Go Camping childhood for +1 to Camping. She was actually a convincing outsider in her teens (hey, she is a Vampire!) so she’s got the Freaky Kid adolesence for +1 to Weirdness. These days, she is a small-time confidence trickster by trade, making her a Criminal, so +1 to Hiding. She’s got another +1 to Camping and Schmoozing from her Breed (Vampires are seductive and quite good with “ze children of ze night”), so she ends up with Limited (3) Camping, Limited (2) Grit, Basic (4) Hiding, Limited (3) Keenness, Basic (4) Mindgames, Basic (5) Schmoozing, and Limited (3) Weirdness.

As far as Values go, Marissa doesn’t like to ruffle feathers – it’s too much of a bother! She also believes in everyone’s fundamentally equal worth, since that means less pressure to do stuff. Thus, she holds to Harmony and Egalitarianism.

For Monstrosity and Dooms, I think I’ll punch it up to the max and give Marissa Basic (5) Monstrosity right from the start. After all, her lack of ambition is unlikely to have granted her any material success, but she’s great at looking dark and mysterious and Vampire-like. I’ll sink the points into Basic (4) Siren’s Voice to make it easier for her to make herself seem trustworthy, and put the last point into Minimal (1) Varg’s Ferocity – maybe being good at imitating animal sounds will impress some people who’ll think she’s One With Nature or some such?

All told, here’s Marissa:

MARISSA MEALEY

Breed: Moocher

Childhood: Forced to Go Camping
Adolescence: Freaky Kid
Adulthood: Criminal

Values: Harmony, Egalitarianism

Primary Abilities: Minimal (1) Asskicking, Limited (3) Camping, Minimal (1) Dramatics, Minimal (1) Fitness, Limited (2) Grit, Basic (4) Hiding, Limited (3) Keenness, Basic (4) Mindgames, Minimal (1) Nerdery, Minimal (1) Paperpushing, Basic (5) Schmoozing, Limited (3) Weirdness

Derived Abilities: Basic (4) Bullshitting, Minimal (1) E-Skills, Limited (2) Hocuspocus, Limited (2) Intrusion, Minimal (1) Joyriding, Minimal (1) Lawyering, Limited (2) Quackery, Limited (2) Rumours, Limited (2) Trickery, Limited (3) Understanding, Minimal (1) Volume, Minimal (1) X-Tremeness

Special Abilities: Limited (3) Maze, Basic (5) Monstrosity, Basic (5) Pretension, Minimal (1) Respectability

Dooms: Basic (4) Siren’s Voice, Minimal (1) Varg’s Ferocity

Pools: HP 6, GP 7, SP 6, BP 1, FP 5

For her first Friend, we’ll pick the Stereotype, Problem and Discord at random – I think we’ve used pretty much every single one at this point anyway. We’ll go with Alpha, Occult Lightning Rod and High Maintenance, a combination that makes me think of some sort of pushy nightmare customer, a retail person’s bad day incarnate.

MARISSA’S FRIEND #1: THERESE TELLER

Therese is Marissa’s only repeat customer, a woman always in the market for some new dodgy food supplement or pyramid energy regimen. That makes her quite handy for Marissa, but the downside is that the reason why Therese is so anxious for anything to make her life better is that her life is preternaturally bad. A dark cloud of inexplicable misfortune always seems to be hovering over her head, cursing her with odd ailments and strange maladies. She’s happy to accept Marissa’s cures for them… but she’ll also come pounding on Marissa’s door whenever they invariably fail to work, forcing the Moocher to improvise madly to keep the money flowing.

Stereotype: Alpha
Problem: Occult Lightning Rod
Discord: High Maintenance

Values: Harmony

Primary Abilities: Limited (3) Asskicking, Limited (3) Camping, Limited (2) Dramatics, Limited (2) Fitness, Limited (2) Grit, Minimal (1) Hiding, Limited (3) Keenness, Limited (3) Mindgames, Minimal (1) Nerdery, Minimal (1) Paperpushing, Limited (3) Schmoozing, Limited (3) Weirdness

Derived Abilities: Limited (3) Bullshitting, Minimal (1) E-Skills, Limited (2) Hocuspocus, Minimal (1) Intrusion, Minimal (1) Joyriding, Minimal (1) Lawyering, Limited (2) Quackery, Limited (2) Rumours, Minimal (1) Trickery, Limited (3) Understanding, Limited (2) Volume, Limited (2) X-Tremeness

Special Abilities: Basic (5) Respectability

Pools: HP 7, GP 1, SP 3, BP 5

For the second Friend, we’ll pick Romantic, Paper Tiger, and You’re Not the Boss of Me. That gives us someone who’s hot-blooded and warm-hearted, but perhaps a bit soft-headed as well…

MARISSA’S FRIEND #2: PEPPER LOVEGOOD

Marissa’s long-time best friend Pepper is on a quest for true love, something that confuses Marissa, since love seems like the definition of doing a bunch of bothersome stuff for no particular reward. This cynical viewpoint has not been helped by her having had a front row seat to Pepper’s dismal taste in men, most of whom have indeed been ne’er-do-wells who have emptied her wallet, enlisted her in their projects, and cheated vigorously on her all the while. Getting Pepper to realise that her latest romance is just as unhealthy as the last tends to strain even Marissa’s skills at argumentation, however.

Stereotype: Romantic
Problem: Paper Tiger
Discord: You’re Not the Boss of Me

Values: Stoicism, Egalitarianism, Justice

Primary Abilities: Limited (2) Asskicking, Minimal (1) Camping, Basic (5) Dramatics, Limited (3) Fitness, Limited (3) Grit, Limited (2) Hiding, Minimal (1) Keenness, Limited (3) Mindgames, Minimal (1) Nerdery, Minimal (1) Paperpushing, Limited (3) Schmoozing, Minimal (1) Weirdness

Derived Abilities: Limited (3) Bullshitting, Limited (2) E-Skills, Limited (3) Hocuspocus, Minimal (1), Limited (2) Joyriding, Limited (3) Lawyering, Minimal (1) Quackery, Limited (2) Rumours, Limited (3) Trickery, Limited (2) Understanding, Basic (4) Volume, Limited (2) X-Tremeness

Special Abilities: Basic (5) Respectability

Pools: HP 7, GP 2, SP 4, BP 5

For Marissa’s Rival, let’s go with a Deadbeat (think a stoner-slacker Zombie) who resents Marissa for having it much easier than her. I figure that she’ll be hanging around and staring creepily at Marissa through windows like some kind of haunting ghost, all while looking to “steal her life” in some vaguely defined way. We’ll pick the Approach of Shadow, the Feud of Destined and the Redemption of Tragedy for her.

MARISSA’S RIVAL: SALLY SLOUCH

Sally grew up in miserable poverty and had to work very hard to get anywhere in life. This makes her intensely resentful of Marissa, who, while also miserably poor, seems to manage to avoid working at all. Having been told by a less-than-trustworthy fortuneteller that there will come a time when their fates can be exchanged, Sally is now plotting to bring the right occult conditions about so that she can become the slacker and Marissa the wage-slave… at least when she’s not too tired to plot.

Approach: Shadow
Feud: Destined
Redemption: Tragedy

Breed: Deadbeat

Values: Tradition, Utilitarianism

Primary Abilities: Limited (3) Asskicking, Minimal (1) Camping, Minimal (1) Dramatics, Limited (2) Fitness, Minimal (1) Grit, Basic (7) Hiding, Limited (3) Keenness, Minimal (1) Mindgames, Minimal (1) Nerdery, Minimal (1) Paperpushing, Minimal (1) Schmoozing, Basic (5) Weirdness

Derived Abilities: Minimal (1) Bullshitting, Minimal (1) E-Skills, Limited (3) Hocuspocus, Basic (4) Intrusion, Minimal (1) Joyriding, Minimal (1) Lawyering, Minimal (1) Quackery, Minimal (1) Rumours, Basic (4) Trickery, Limited (2) Understanding, Minimal (1) Volume, Limited (2) X-Tremeness

Special Abilities: Limited (3) Maze, Limited (3) Monstrosity, Limited (3) Pretension, Limited (3) Respectability

Dooms: Minimal (1) Ancient’s Wisdom, Minimal (1) Revenant’s Miasma, Minimal (1) Titan’s Prowess

Pools: HP 7, GP 1, SP 3, BP 3, FP 3

For Marissa’s Enemy, we’ll turn her stats inside-out as usual, and we end up with someone with decent Scores at Asskicking and Paperpushing, the two Legend Abilities for the Dweeb Legend. Dweebs, you see, are a kind of Slayers who like to think that they’re Paladins, so they punch you very hard in the face, but only when it’s legally justifiable. Well, a devoted crusader out to get a Vampire? That gives you a rather obvious idea, I should think.

MARISSA’S ENEMY: ABIGAIL VAN HECKNING

A petulant suburban brat of the first order, Abigail always longed for a life of adventure, Gothic romance, and having a proper excuse for hanging out in graveyards. As such, it’s perhaps no surprise that she was Called as a Slayer, and she has taken to it with gusto. She is determined to put an end to Marissa’s cursed unlife, but of course she has to figure out a way to do it that won’t get her into, you know, trouble of any kind – otherwise, her parents would ground her! Still, she’s confident that if she just hangs around and bugs Marissa enough, she’ll eventually end up in a situation where pounding an oak stake through someone’s heart will qualify as “reasonble self-defense.”

Legend: Dweeb

Values: Stoicism, Excellence

Primary Abilities: Minimal (1) Asskicking, Minimal (1) Camping, Basic (4) Dramatics, Limited (3) Fitness, Basic (4) Grit, Minimal (1) Hiding, Minimal (1) Keenness, Limited (2) Mindgames, Limited (3) Nerdery, Minimal (1) Paperpushing, Minimal (1) Schmoozing, Minimal (1) Weirdness

Derived Abilities: Minimal (1) Bullshitting, Limited (3) E-Skills, Limited (2) Hocuspocus, Limited (2) Intrusion, Limited (3) Joyriding, Limited (2) Lawyering, Limited (2) Quackery, Minimal (1) Rumours, Limited (2) Trickery, Minimal (1) Understanding, Limited (3) Volume, Limited (2) X-Tremeness

Special Abilities: Basic (4) Calling, Basic (6) Respectability

Pools: HP 7, GP 2, SP 4, BP 6

That’s it! We now have four full-feathered Monsters to send into the maws of adventure, along with supporting casts to anchor them into the setting. Now I just need to figure out some kind of scenario that could accomodate any particular subset of them. Stay tuned.

Paranoia readthrough: Gamemaster Screen Adventures

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.

Cyberpunk readthrough: Hardwired

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.

Torg readthrough: The Living Land

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.

Creating Bradley Bulle, the Loudmouth

Welcome back to my not-quite-weekly series of character creation in my lovingly hand-crafted game, Monstrous Mishaps. As those who hang around here know (there are some of you, right? I’m not talking exclusively to a bunch of net-thrawling bots?), MM is a parody urban fantasy game where the characters are supernatural creatures in human form… light on the “supernatural creature,” heavy on the “human form.” Upholding the dark splendour of Vampyredom when your powers of hypnotism amounts of having vaguely sincere eyes isn’t easy!

So far we have had a timid nerd of a Goblin, a happy-go-lucky occult investigator who’s actually a Dragon, a skeevy lawyer for a Demon, and a Giant with a need for speed. This week, the time has come to create a Loudmouth, which is to say, a human Harpy. Let’s make some noise.

Since I decided last time to not go for the obvious archetypes, I’ll forego making this dude a shock jockey vlogger or something. Instead, let’s make him a big, burly nurse. Hey, just because you have a foul mouth it doesn’t mean you can’t be nurturing, it just means that it’s always going to be tough love! We’ll call him Bradley Bulle.

As a health care professional, Brad will need a decent Quackery Score. Quackery is Derived from Camping and Nerdery, so let’s give him Basic (4) in both. Since I picture him as a big, looming guy, and of course he needs to be stubborn to deal with fussing patients, we’ll also give him Limited (3) Fitness and Limited (3) Grit. He’ll need to keep records, so we’ll let him have Limited (2) Paperpushing. Finally, we’ll give him Limited (2) Asskicking to better hold people down while they’re getting their shots.

I figure that Brad was interested in biology from an early age, so I’ll say he was a Bug Fancier as a child and an Eco Brat as a teenager. That gives him +1 each to Nerdery and Camping, for Basic (5) in both, so he’s got some actual professional competence – a rarity in the setting he lives in! As a nurse, I figure he’s effectively a Blue-Collar Schmoe, even if he’s an unusually well-educated one, so add 1 to his Fitness, leaving him at Basic (4). He gets +1 to Dramatics and +1 to Grit from being a Loudmouth, giving him Limited (2) in the one and Basic (4) in the other.

For Dooms, I’ll put a point in Siren’s Voice, just because I think it’s funny if Brad is such an imposing presence that he can get people’s attention by glaring at them from behind. He has to start with a point of Garuda’s Swiftness since that’s his Primary Doom as a Loudmouth, so he has Minimal (1) in both.

For Values, Brad is hard-working and stubborn, so he holds to Stoicism. I think he’s also very practical about morals, thinking that what matters is making things as good as possible for as many people as possible and never mind who has to get screwed over for it, so I’ll also give him Utilitarianism.

After calculating our Derived Abilities and Pools, we end up with this:

BRADLEY BULLE

Breed: Loudmouth


Childhood: Bug Fancier
Adolescence: Eco Brat
Adulthood: Blue-Collar Schmoe


Values: Stoicism, Utilitarianism


Primary Abilities: Limited (2) Asskicking, Basic (5) Camping, Limited (2) Dramatics, Basic (4) Fitness, Basic (4) Grit, Minimal (1) Hiding, Minimal (1) Keenness, Minimal (1) Mindgames, Basic (5) Nerdery, Limited (2) Paperpushing, Minimal (1) Schmoozing, Minimal (1) Weirdness


Derived Abilities: Minimal (1) Bullshitting, Basic (4) E-Skills, Minimal (1) Hocuspocus, Limited (3) Intrusion, Basic (4) Joyriding, Limited (2) Lawyering, Basic (5) Quackery, Minimal (1) Rumours, Minimal (1) Trickery, Minimal (1) Understanding, Limited (3) Volume, Limited (3) X-Tremeness


Special Abilities: Limited (3) Maze, Limited (2) Monstrosity, Limited (2) Pretension, Basic (4) Respectability


Dooms: Minimal (1) Garuda’s Swiftness, Minimal (1) Siren’s Voice


Pools: HP 8, GP 9, SP 9, BP 4, FP 2

Next up is Friends. I have no particular ideas, so I’ll just reach into the grab-bag of Stereotypes, Problems and Discords for some that I haven’t used yet. I arbitrarily pick Arteest, The Enemy of the Good, and Big Brother is Watching. Combined with Brad’s grumpy I-don’t-have-the-energy-for-this-crap-so-take-your-medicine attitude, that suggests someone with a… different take on medicine.

Brad’s Friend #1: Frieda Fairweather

Frida is a fellow nurse at the clinic where Brad works, and she’s equally devoted to her job – in fact, she’s a tremendous perfectionist. Her idea of what is perfect, however, run very contrary to Brad’s and tend towards smiles being the best medicine and everyone’s personal lives needing to be micromanaged to ensure “inner health.” This would work out better if she actually had the people skills to be a functional soul-healer, but Brad had to admit (just not to her face) that she sometimes has a point.

Stereotype: Arteest
Problem: The Enemy of The Good
Discord: Big Brother is Watching

Values: Excellence

Primary Abilities: Limited (3) Asskicking, Limited (3) Camping, Limited (3) Dramatics, Minimal (1) Fitness, Minimal (1) Grit, Minimal (1) Hiding, Basic (4) Keenness, Minimal (1) Mindgames, Limited (3) Nerdery, Basic (4) Paperpushing, Minimal (1) Schmoozing, Limited (2) Weirdness

Derived Abilities: Minimal (1) Bullshitting, Limited (2) E-Skills, Limited (2) Hocuspocus, Limited (2) Intrusion, Limited (2) Joyriding, Limited (3) Lawyering, Limited (3) Quackery, Limited (2) Rumours, Limited (2) Trickery, Limited (2) Understanding, Limited (2) Volume, Limited (2) X-Tremeness

Special Abilities: Basic (4) Respectability

Pools: HP 7, GP 1, SP 2, BP 4

Using the same method for the second Friend, I find myself with Careerist, Paper Tiger, and Smug Straight Edge. Hmm. Perhaps we have room for an edgy Internet personality after all?

Brad’s Friend #2: Sebastian Sajber

Sebastian and Brad attend the same gym and have bonded over their shared uncompromising stance on life. Sebastian has a modest side hustle having exaggerated opinions on lifestyle and politics online, and frequently uses local characters as inspiration for his rants, which has resulted in him having to meet Brad in a more professional capacity as well…


Stereotype: Careerist
Problem: Paper Tiger
Discord: Smug Straight Edge

Values: Stoicism

Primary Abilities: Limited (2) Asskicking, Limited (3) Camping, Limited (3) Dramatics, Limited (2) Fitness, Basic (7) Grit, Minimal (1) Hiding, Minimal (1) Keenness, Limited (2) Mindgames, Minimal (1) Nerdery, Limited (3) Paperpushing, Minimal (1) Schmoozing, Minimal (1) Weirdness

Derived Abilities: Minimal (1) Bullshitting, Basic (4) E-Skills, Limited (2) Hocuspocus, Minimal (1) Intrusion, Minimal (1) Joyriding, Limited (3) Lawyering, Limited (2) Quackery, Limited (2) Rumours, Limited (2) Trickery, Minimal (1) Understanding, Limited (2) Volume, Limited (2) X-Tremeness

Special Abilities: Basic (6) Respectability

Pools: HP 7, GP 3, SP 3, BP 6

Moving on to the Rival, I scrape the barrel a little and find myself with Freak, Attention and Faith. That makes me picture some sort of wild-bearded street prophet yelling at people to repent. Let’s make him a fellow Loudmouth – Monsters of the same Breed butt heads more often than not (especially since having that be canon justifies player groups having diverse characters!).

Brad’s Rival: Nutty Elmir

Nutty Elmir is a local character who is a devoted member of the little-known Latter-Day Church of the Holy Hollering. In accordance with this holy creed, he spends his day walking around town with a sign, yelling verses from the Hollering Bible at people. Brad has gotten on his bad side due to their common ground – Brad just happens to be the town’s only other member of the Latter-Day Church of the Holy Hollering, and he’s taken to shouting back at Elmir and correcting his errors. Everyone else mostly just wishes they’d both be quiet, but they are, after all, on a mission from God.


Approach: Freak
Feud: Attention
Redemption: Faith


Breed: Loudmouth


Values: Individualism, Tradition


Primary Abilities: Limited (3) Asskicking, Basic (4) Camping, Basic (7) Dramatics, Limited (3) Fitness, Limited (2) Grit, Minimal (1) Hiding, Minimal (1) Keenness, Minimal (1) Mindgames, Minimal (1) Nerdery, Minimal (1) Paperpushing, Minimal (1) Schmoozing, Basic (4) Weirdness


Derived Abilities: Minimal (1) Bullshitting, Minimal (1) E-Skills, Basic (5) Hocuspocus, Minimal (1) Intrusion, Limited (2) Joyriding, Basic (4) Lawyering, Limited (2) Quackery, Minimal (1) Rumours, Basic (4) Trickery, Minimal (1) Understanding, Basic (5) Volume, Limited (3) X-Tremeness


Special Abilities: Limited (3) Maze, Limited (3) Monstrosity, Limited (3) Pretension, Limited (3) Respectability


Dooms: Minimal (1) Garuda’s Swiftness, Minimal (1) Revenant’s Miasma, Minimal (1) Siren’s Voice


Pools: HP 8, GP 1, SP 4, BP 3, FP 3

Finally, the Enemy… which, for some variety, I’ll not make a Slayer but another Monster. A Monster Enemy is likely to be what is called an Abomination, which effectively means, “a Monster who is way way way the hell too into being a Monster, I mean, honestly!” We haven’t seen any Wussbags here until now, and they’re one of my favourite Breeds – they are effectively Lovecraftian entities that have a Lovecraftian neurotic fear and lothing of everything that’s the least bit upsetting – so let’s have one of those.

Brad’s Enemy: X-94-Zeta

X-94-Zeta, as she calls herself, is supposedly a scout for a proud and ancient Alien empire, sent to evaluate Earth for membership in the Galactic Federation. The Galactic Federation is all about peace and harmony and being nice to people, but it’s also got oddly rigid rules about honourable retribution against anyone who fails to be peaceful, harmonic, and nice to people. It only took X-94-Zeta five minutes in Brad’s company to decide that he needed to suffer in the name of cosmic justice.


Breed: Wussbag


Values: Harmony, Justice


Primary Abilities: Minimal (1) Asskicking, Limited (2) Camping, Minimal (1) Dramatics, Minimal (1) Fitness, Minimal (1) Grit, Minimal (1) Hiding, Basic (4) Keenness, Limited (3) Mindgames, Limited (2) Nerdery, Basic (5) Paperpushing, Limited (2) Schmoozing, Basic (6) Weirdness


Derived Abilities: Limited (2) Bullshitting, Minimal (1) E-Skills, Limited (3) Hocuspocus, Minimal (1) Intrusion, Minimal (1) Joyriding, Limited (3) Lawyering, Limited (2) Quackery, Basic (4) Rumours, Minimal (1) Trickery, Limited (3) Understanding, Minimal (1) Volume, Minimal (1) X-Tremeness


Special Abilities: Limited (3) Maze, Limited (3) Monstrosity, Limited (3) Pretension, Limited (3) Respectability
Dooms: Minimal (1) Ancient’s Wisdom, Minimal (1) Kraken’s Malleability, Minimal (1) Revenant’s Miasma


Pools: HP 6, GP 1, SP 2, BP 3, FP 3

There we go! One more nitwit, with a supporting cast, added to the pile. Next time will be the last character, who will be a smooth-talking Moocher. I’ll just have to think of something suitably ridiculous for her to have a dark, forbidden thirst for…

Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough: Blood Nativity and Alien Hunger

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.