Mister Monster's Workshop

Blog

  • Mummy fatigue

    Mummy fatigue

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

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

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

  • Fiddling with Underworld rules

    Fiddling with Underworld rules

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

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

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

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

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

    We’ll see how it goes.

  • Dark Heresy playtest

    Dark Heresy playtest

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Mummy downtime

    Mummy downtime

    Okay. Okay. I admit it. I have to change the downtime rules in my Mummy: the Resurrection port. I still think the idea behind them is sound – they’re mechanics for when the party settles in for a few days to learn new spells, do surveillance, work on projects, whatever.

    The problem is that the PbtA gameplay loop makes it very hard to create a natural time to take a few days off. PbtA encourages you to keep throwing stuff at the players, to prevent those endless, boring moments when the plot can’t progress because the players are failing to do X, Y or Z that would lead to the next setpiece. In PbtA, if the players just sit around doing nothing, then the GM springs a GM move on them that forces them to take some kind of action. That’s a good thing – in fact, it’s a great thing. But it does mean that the action never really comes to a natural halt. The players never want to stop for several days, because there’s always something they need to deal with today.

    Still, I think most of this can be solved by making downtime represent, say, half an hour instead of several days; not enough time for the shit to really hit the fan for lack of player attention. While I’m at it, I might as well make it so that rituals must be cast as downtime moves; that ties the two paces of the game into the magic system neatly. It does mean that mummies now heal downright scarily fast, but fine, fine – they can literally reconstitute themselves from a single speck of ash when resurrecting, it isn’t too far-fetched that they heal pretty fast the rest of the time too, just not to the point of wounds closing instantly the way they do for werewolves.

    It still bugs me, though. Shouldn’t there be some way to make characters take breaks, even in PbtA? Dungeon World has “making camp” rules, I’m not sure why that works – yes, it’s an inherent part of standard fantasy, but urban fantasy (especially the sort that involves caster types) surely has “time to run to the library and look stuff up!” as an equally natural ingredient. So why do players never want to do that?

    Oh well.

    I’ve also started sketching on a Pendragon port. Which is also going to have downtime moves, because that’s a big part of the game. If I can’t figure out a way to get the players to return to their manors for the winter there, it may just be hopeless… Anyway, my starting point is to use the thirteen Trait pairs – Energetic/Lazy, Valorous/Cowardly, Trusting/Suspicious, etc – as the basis for all moves, making what sort of person you are matter more than your training (which will be more or less the same for all characters, after all – they’re all knights!). I’ll get back to you with any developments.

  • Eldritch Skies… sort of

    Eldritch Skies… sort of

    I started sketching on a game in the vein of Eldritch Skies, the game of Lovecraftian horror minus the horror, and also minus all the Probluhmatick stuff… and unfortunately also minus all the dark poetry and evocative ideas, because no one seems to have pointed out to the writer that when you take out all the Probluhmatick stuff, it helps if you replace it with something instead of just slicing off huge chunks of the genre and then presenting the mutilating carcass as an improvement.

    All that said, the idea of Lovecraft without quite so much swooning and pearl-clutching and, yes, without quite so much hysterical xenophobia, isn’t without its appeal. I mean, let’s face it, sometimes the endless wailing about how horrible it is that this thing is mixing with that thing even though those things aren’t supposed to mix!!! gets a little tiresome even for a cosmic horror fan. So why not a game where you get to shoot Cthulhu with a raygun?

    Still, Eldritch Skies needs some serious massaging, not just in the rules but in the setting, before it can be a decent game, so I’m not looking to make a straight port of it so much as a reimagining. Hey, Cthulhu is public domain anyway, might as well.

    So what’s first?

    Well… first off, let’s involve the Dreamlands in a more serious way. In fact, let’s make them half the game, in the same way as the Umbra in Werewolf: the Apocalypse or the Underworld in Mummy: the Resurrection. Let’s make sure that there are always things going on both in the waking world and in the Dreamlands, and that they are frequently connected – that information about waking problems often needs to be found in the Dreamlands, and that disturbances in the Dreamlands are often caused by dysfunctions in the waking world. Whenever a character falls asleep, they go to the Dreamland; whenever a character wakes up, they return to the waking world.

    Speaking of which, let’s give each character 3 “strain boxes” that measures how close they are to freaking out. We’ll forego physical health entirely – that’s not normally what’s at stake in Lovecraft’s stories, and as for Eldritch Skies, the weapon of choice there are Yithian stunguns that knock people out non-lethally. Being physically hurt causes strain, but only because being physically hurt is upsetting; in the main, it’s your state of mind we keep track of. So, when you mark too much strain in the waking world, you pass out and end up in the Dreamlands, and when you mark too much strain in the Dreamlands, you wake up in a cold sweat. Also, whenever you wake or fall asleep for any reason, you clear all strain.

    To give “death” some teeth, though, let’s also give each character 10 “alienation boxes” that measure how close they are to losing themselves to the Mythos. Every time you wake or pass out as a result of strain, you mark alienation. When you mark too much alienation, you leave the game in some way decided by your playbook.

    Speaking of:

    THE AGENT
    High Practicality, low Imagination (worldly but dull)
    Someone must put a lid on the chaos, and it’s your bad luck that it had to be you. Empowered by the authorities and trained to withstand the sanity-shredding effects of the Mythos (for a while, at least), you’ve been sent out alongside the lunatics that the agency employs as troubleshooters in the hopes that you’ll keep them under some kind of control. To help you keep up with the inhuman abilities of your colleagues, you’ve also been outfitted with some gadgets that you’ve been assured are cutting-edge technology… but it’s odd how often their effects seem to mimic what the freaks get up to…

    When you exceed your alienation tract, you get forcibly retired by your superiors, possibly to a padded cell.

    THE DREAMER
    High Imagination, low Practicality (open-minded but distracted)
    On this pale, prosaic Earth, you are little enough – a poet, an dreamer, an impractical person in a practical world. But every night, you enter a truer reality, and there, you are little less than a god, wandering an endless land of wonders in search of ever-greater glories. It is with reluctance that you return each morning, but elder dreamers have warned you of the dangers of completely abandoning the flesh.

    When you exceed your alienation track, you overdose to enter the Dreamlands permanently.

    THE GHOUL
    High Rigor, low Intellect (fierce but simple-minded)
    You were placed in a cradle as a child, and grew up watching the world through cold scavenger eyes, not knowing until recently why you always felt different – why you felt called to claw and fight and steal. You know now that you are of an older and more virile breed than the lazy monkeys around you… and yet, some semblance of fondness for your adoptive world remains and makes you want to prove your worth to it.

    When you exceed your alienation track, you find your way to the deep tunnels and leave the sunlit world forever.

    THE HYBRID
    High Practicality, low Rigor (insidious but fragile)
    It was the will of Father Dagon that the briny blood of the ocean be mingled with the sweet one of the land. The experiment – or crusade – or migration – seemingly failed, but you remain, a scion of both worlds. The ocean whispers in your dreams, but you are not ready to go to it yet. Perhaps your presence here is still part of Father Dagon’s true plan to bind the oceans and continents together?

    When you exceed your alienation track, you throw yourself in the ocean in search of beckoning Y’ha-nthlei.

    THE PSYCHIC
    High Imagination, low Rigor (intuitive but erratic)
    For whatever reason, you were born different, with wild supernatural abilities that are only barely under your control. Some theorise that the appearance of people like you signify humanity’s gradual evolution into… something else. All you know is that the visions and headaches get a little easier to bear when you put your gifts to good use.

    When you exceed your alienation track, you transcend your body to become one of the daemon spirits beyond the veil of sleep.

    THE SORCERER
    High Intellect, low Imagination (educated but hidebound)
    The folly of ancient man was to misunderstand and misname his stranger arts as “magic.” The folly of modern man was to think that those arts were not real. You know better than both – you have studied the eldritch sciences, teased out the potent formulas and alchemies that were hidden among the superstition and the lies. You know that many who have walked your path came to a bad end, but they surely lacked your discipline and drive.

    When you exceed your alienation track, you perform an ill-advised ritual and trap yourself beyond time and space.

    And finally, the basic moves of the game:

    When you shape the dream, describe what should happen next and roll +Dream. 7-9, your embellishment comes true, but in a twisted or ironic way, causing as much trouble as it solves. 10+, you rewrite the reality of the Dreamworld exactly to your liking.
    Note: This move is only possible in the Dreamlands, for obvious reasons.

    When you make an intuitive leap, roll +Dream. 7-9, you get a hint as to what you should do next or what is really going on, but you get a fatalistic sense of impending doom; take -1 forward. 10+, you get a glimpse of the true state of the world without being disturbed by it… which should maybe worry you.

    When you perform an eldritch spell, roll +Intellect. 7-9, the spell succeeds, but it echoes within your soul and threatens the bounds of your sanity. Mark alienation. 10+, the spell succeeds, and you withstand its effects.
    Note: The Sorcerer can take advances that allows him to learn specific spells so well that casting them with a partial success only causes him to mark strain, not alienation.

    When you put the pieces together, roll +Intellect. 7-9, ask 1 question below. 10+, ask 1 question, and you may choose to ask 1 more in return for marking strain.

    • What have I read or studied that reminds me of this?
    • How do I make this stop?
    • Who is lying about something?
    • What should I avoid doing here at all cost?
    • What led up to this?

    When you get to where you’re going, roll +Practicality. 7-9, you make progress on your journey, but choose 1 complication below. 10+, the same, but you also run across an unexpected opportunity or resource along the way.

    • It takes a long time.
    • You wear yourself out; mark strain.
    • You attract unwelcome attention.
    • You have to pay a price, whether in goods or in blood.

    When you acquire what you need, roll +Practicality. 7-9, you find some goods, services or connections that are useful for your purposes, but you become entangled in a situation or have to pay a steep price. 10+, you got hold of what you needed easily, or recalled that you already had it with you.

    When you push for what you want, roll +Rigor. 7-9, choose 1 option below. 10+, choose 2 options.

    • You hurt someone worse than they hurt you.
    • You don’t mark strain.
    • You seize control of something.
    • You advance your tactical position.
    • You make a clean getaway.

    When you endure great hardship, roll +Rigor. 6-, mark strain. 7-9, you go on, but take -1 ongoing to this move until next time you wake up or fall asleep. 10+, you soldier on undeterred.

    That’s off to a good start, I think. Next up would be the special abilities and advances of the different playbook. We’ll see if I end up continuing.

  • The Bandage Brigade goes forth

    The Bandage Brigade goes forth

    In tonight’s game of Mummy: the Resurrection…

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

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

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

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

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

  • Dark Heresy headache

    Dark Heresy headache

    Every game I do a port of is, in some way, a pain in the ass. If they weren’t actively painful to play, I wouldn’t need to do a port of them. But man, Dark Heresy is a pain in the ass.

    I’m at something like my fourth attempt at it, and this time I think I might be on the right track, but only by throwing away most of my initial goals and trying to save what can be saved. See, the main reason why I make these ports is that game systems are too fiddly, too packed with rules and calculations. A system should be simple to use, without requiring constant flipping back and forth through a doorstopper of a rulebook. So for each of my previous DH attempts, I tried to streamline things down to something easily memorable.

    And they all fell flat, because that kind of thing is actively opposed to what Warhammer 40,000 is. W40K is all about the clutter, all about the detail added to detail, about the neurotic beancounting and rote memorisation of things that don’t, when it comes right down to it, really matter much. That’s what the setting is, a giant glorious mess of people fighting to the death over trivia. Simplify it too much, and you might as well be playing a different game.

    So I had to take a step back, and resign myself to actually make use of all the fiddly little rules, all the “take +1 to Crotcheting except on the second Monday after New Years” modifiers, but to try to somehow carve them into something that was modular enough that you could at least grasp the situation at hand. Shorten the combat rules to, at least, two pages instead of twenty, and make the talents more or less independent of each other rather so you could focus on the next thing you wanted to be able to do instead of obsess over your “build.”

    All of which amounts to the fact that my cleaner-and-simpler version is at 107 pages and counting. Though in fairness, a lot of it is repetition, since one way to make it unnecessary to flip back and forth through the book is to write out the full information everywhere you actually need it. But still, Emperor have mercy…

  • Welcome

    Welcome

    Well, hello there.

    This here is my blog, on which I talk about all the roleplaying games I write on. There are usually a fair number of those, because I absolutely do not have the powers of concentration to stick to a single project. I offer very little guarantees about what the post will be about on any given week; it’ll be whatever shiny thing caught my attention just then.

    Some of the games will be new rule sets for existing game settings, because I have strong feelings about what rule systems should look like and what they should be aimed to accomplish, and hardly anyone else seems to share those feelings. I’ll make those rules available to anyone who wants to have a look at them. Right now, my five projects are Mummy: the Resurrection, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Mage: the Ascension, Blue Rose and Dark Heresy, but doubtless I’ll start fiddling with others before long.

    There is also the ambition – but please don’t hold me to it – to work more on my own original games. The main ones I have cooking are Monstrous Mishaps, a comedic urban fantasy game running on a diceless system I am quite proud of; Heroes of the Ice Age, a low fantasy game set during a time of encroaching glaciers and hungry sabertoothed tigers; and Starlight Dreams (name subject to constant change), a game of divine power that might not be quite as absolute as you were given to believe. I have some plans to sell those once I get all my ducks in a row (but have you ever tried herding ducks? They’re freaking impossible to get in a row!), so hopefully there will eventually be some links to drivethroughrpg here.

    So there you have it. Mostly, this place is just an excuse to log whatever I’m fiddling with at the moment. If you find something to interest you here, though, nothing would please me more! See you around.