Mister Monster's Workshop

Tag: mummy

  • First free download is up!

    First free download is up!

    This week, I can report a milestone in this site’s existence: I have put my first PDF up for download. It’s my Powered by the Apocalypse port of Mummy: the Resurrection. I added the fourth level of every Hekau and wrote up some obambo wraiths, so now I’m declaring it to be finished. I might add more later – there are always the need for more NPCs, and there are of course fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth levels of Hekau that I haven’t converted – but for now, anyone who wants it can go over to the download page (link to the upper right) and help themselves.

    I’m quite proud of this port, since Mummy is a game that always needed a lot more love than it got. I didn’t just need to create a bunch of rule systems, I needed to come up with an intended playstyle and setting from the rather anemic hints that exist in the official books. In the end, I tried to make it a game about sinister plots foiled and strongholds of evil infiltrated, since that seemed to be what the spells and rituals in the source material encouraged: the impression I get was of mummies as a sort of secret agents, James Bond with mystical amulets and alchemical potions instead of high-tech gadgets. And I spent a lot of time researching Cairo, Egypt, and Islam, not to get the details right (because let’s face it, I probably got most of them wrong) but to get some sort of feel for it all, some idea of how the Middle Eastern parts of the World of Darkness look and sound like.

    It’s not perfect, of course. Like I’ve talked about before, there were areas where I just had to give up, where the problems I saw with the game were inherent in the setting and I couldn’t fix them without rewriting the whole thing from scratch. For one thing, if I created my own game inspired by Mummy – and I might some day – I would dial down the way that things in the Shadowlands are impossible to manipulate because they are reflections of material things, and instead make it more like a zombie apocalypse setting or a survival horror game: everything is broken down and unhelpful, but most of it can be salvaged, repurposed or repaired, if you just work long and hard enough at it. “Maybe, if you’re persistent and lucky” is a lot more interesting to tell the players than, “no, that’s impossible.”

    Still, it’s the first officially finished project of the game-design kick I’ve been on for the last couple of years. Hopefully there’ll be many more to come.

  • 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.

  • 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.