Having suffered through the dullness of The Player’s Guide, this time we’re going to look at a shorter but considerably more colourful supplements: Awakening: Diablerie Mexico. Like Milwaukee by Night (which we’ll get to soon!) it’s considered to be kinda-sorta part of “the Chicago chronicle” despite neither of them actually focusing on the Windy City – they both just sort of hang nervously in its orbit, making brief little forays into the big, wild world outside, bless them. Let’s see we can bring back from there.
Awakening: Diablerie Mexico starts out by delving into the subject of, well, diablerie, the act of one vampire feeding on another and a major no-no in Kindred circles. High-generation vampires do it to low-generation ones because it lets them decrease their own generation and thus raise their power cap, and ancient vampires do it to younger ones because they can no longer survive off of mortal blood but only vampire blood will do. Also, some vampires do it because they’re just sick bastards – when it comes to vampires, I think we’ve learned by now that “because he’s a sick bastard” is a perfectly plausible reason why one does something…
There’s a mention of the theory that the Kindred as a species exist solely because the Antediluvians know that when they’ll wake up at the end of their current torpor, they’ll wake up thirsty, and only the blood of thousands upon thousands of lesser vampires will be able to sate them. Gehenna will thus be an orgy of diablerie, as all of Kindred kind is extinguished – presumably except for a few Fourth Generation vampires who can replenish their numbers for the next time the Antediluvians need to feed. That’s kind of creepy-awesome.
We also get a number of ways that you can be found out to have committed diablerie, one of which is having an Auspex-trained vampire check your aura. I don’t really like this at all, because that’s entirely too easy and ruins the paranoia of wondering whether some other vampire might be going off and doing the unspeakable on the sly. I mean, aura reading isn’t even that hard, it’s the second-dot Auspex power. Every other Toreador, Malkavian and Tremere can do it. That means that diabolists simply can’t be part of vampire society, or someone will find them out. Okay, the aura taint does fade after half a year or so, but still, that’s a lot of time to be off the radar.
Also, we’re introduced to the Ritual of the Bitter Rose, which is something the Tremere cooked up that allows more than one vampire to take part in diablerising the same victim and all get a generation bump. It’s almost useless, though, because if you use it on any vampire above the Third Generation it only works if the vampire is really tremendously old or powerful, and even then it has to be at least Fourth or Fifth Generation. Okay, this adventure is about happening to discover both the Ritual and the location of an ancient Fourth Generation vampire at the same time, but I don’t like how neurotic White Wolf is already getting about putting up guard rails and making sure that nothing can be used without their expressed blessing.
I mean, I can only assume that at this point they had gotten a bunch of playtest results and were panicking over the fact that a lot of players (being players) had gotten the idea in their heads that you “won the game” by working your way up the generations and finally diablerising Caine himself, so this was them putting in multiple stop gaps. But honestly now… the thing that should stop players from going crazy with diablerie is that really old vampires can defend themselves, and even if you somehow take them down they’ll have childer and Blood Bonded servants and allies who will all raise a fuss. It shouldn’t be a problem.
Also, one thing that the book doesn’t even bother to discuss is that it’s kind of useless for some 13th-generation schmoe to diablerise a really old vampire, since you only gain one generation at the time anyway. He’d need to work his way down the list, starting with vampires as young and dumb as himself, and only hitting a major wall and having to quest around for sleeping ancients once he got to the Eighth Generation or so. Before that, you don’t even need the Ritual of the Bitter Rose to show that sharing is caring, you just need to take turns hunting down the most recently embraced childer of some Seventh Generation Elder; there is no real lack of those. Hell, just go to a Sabbat city and dig up a few graves, they’re not going to miss one of their “failed shovelheads”…
Oh well. We also get some alternative uses for Elder blood, like how it can be used to heal aggravated damage. Nothing about it giving you temporary Discipline dots, like Menele’s blood did in Ashes to Ashes, because the rules are getting more boring already. Shame.
Then we get the life story of Mictlantecuhtli, who’s an ancient Gangrel embraced by a mysterious stranger that might have been the Gangrel Antediluvian. He wandered America in the years long before Columbus, eventually finding his way down to the Mayas and setting himself up as a god of a city called Tzental. After a few centuries of ruling supreme and snacking on his childer, he started feeling sleepy, though, so he had himself intombed beneath a pyramid along with a whole bunch of magical traps. He also had a bunch of his childer join him, after raising their generation to the 13th with magic (supposedly so they’d have an easier time waking up if the tomb was invaded, but actually so that the players won’t have a whole slew of Fifth Generation vampires to diablerise in the bargain!).
So Mictlantecuhtli snoozed, and Tzental was eventually abandoned, fell into ruin and was forgotten. Meanwhile, some of the research notes he’d made in his self-studies of blood magic got stolen and eventually found their way to the Tremere, who used it to create the Ritual of the Bitter Rose. I don’t know, I guess it’s meant to be ironic or something?
Anyway, to start the adventure the GM is to have the players (who are assumed to already be diablerie-enthusiasts) first hear the legend of Mictlantecuhtli and suggestions that he might have been a vampire, then find that the mortal scholar they tried to contact about it suddenly got killed (offed by another vampire who was keeping tabs on him to keep him from telling the wrong people about this very thing), then get contacted by the world’s geekiest Malkavian, a guy named Shaeffer who suffers from the single-minded compulsion to keep adding to his stores of esoteric knowledge. He’s been researching Mictlantecuhtli too, and he wants to compare notes.
This is all assumed to take place in Chicago, by the way, with some of the minor NPCs from there mentioned as bit players. That’s what I meant about it being still kinda-sorta connected to the default setting – it can be started from anywhere, but we still have this assumption of Chicago as being where vampire PCs hang out.
Anyway, before they can meet, Shaeffer gets killed by another vampire named Pietr, who is a stereotypical cackling villain whose internal monologue (as seen in an introductionary fiction piece) has a lot of gloating about how stone-cold baaaaaad he is. He’s actually already found Tzental, but he got sent packing by the tomb’s guardians with a set of gnarly scars all across his face to show for it, and he thinks he can learn the Ritual of the Bitter Rose from Shaeffer’s research and use it to gain enough power to go back. This is noted by the text itself to not make much sense – the Ritual is mostly just useful for groups of Kindred wanting to share a kill – but it’s shrugged off with Pietr just being that nuts.
A few days later, the players get a package containing Shaeffer’s research, which he mailed to them for safekeeping before being offed. It contains both the Ritual of the Bitter Rose and his best guess for Mectlantecuhtli’s resting place in Mexico. Time for a messed-up cannibalistic road trip! Yay?
Getting to Tzental is of course an endevour in its own right, and the players have to grapple with both regular wilderness-traveling logistics and the unique challenges posed by vampiredom – for one thing, it’s noted that Kindred can’t regulate their body heat, so they’re actually more sensitive to extreme heat than puny humans are (albeit less in danger of actually dying from it… unless they pass out under the open sky with no one to pull them into cover before dawn, of course).
The area around Tzental is also guarded by a “mated pair” of elderly werewolves (this being before that whole Garou Shall Not Mate With Garou thing was canon, I guess) whose ancestors swore eternal oaths of friendship with Mectlantecuhtli and who now stubbornly keep watch even though they’re all that’s left of the tribe. Also, they might be faithful to the memory of one particular Kindred, but they still really freaking hate every other filthy vampire in the world, so that’s bound to be interesting.
Then they get into the tomb, and… well, it’s a dungeon, is what it is. Vampire: the Masquerade officially has dungeons. The hobby keeps trying to escape them, but it can’t seem to stay away from them – the whole thing just grew up around them and now you’d have to redesign it practically from the ground up to keep dungeons from being the perfect fit for the play experience. Of course, the “monsters” are a little more gothic than your regular kobolds and gelatinous cubes, being things like the mad ghosts of sacrificed priests, an insane ghoul (one of Pietr’s, abandoned and trapped inside when his master fled) and of course the childer of Mectlantecuhtli, who wake up as soon as the tomb is breached and start preparing to defend it. Likewise, while there are some “normal” traps like spike pits and pressure plates, there are also more psychological ones like waking dreams where you need to display Conscience, Courage or Self-Control to pass and a mirror that forces you see your Beast instead of your reflection. And of course, instead of healing potions, there are magically preserved pools of blood and free-roaming rats.
In the end, the players can find Mectlantecuhtli, but of course by then one of his childer is in the process of feeding him blood to make him awake up, and there’s a nice big boss fight. Not sure that this is quite the system I’d choose for having nice big boss fights since the game usually tries to focus on things other than direct combat, but, well, it’s a dungeon, it needs to have a boss at the end. If they bring him down, they can use the Ritual of the Bitter Rose to share the level-up three ways. Then, when they head back out, Pietr turns up and ambushes them for their kill-stealing ways, just as an extra nasty surprise.
All in all, this is a pretty entertaining adventure, and it’s certainly lush with flavour and backstory. It’s only really possible to run for a group of players who are willing to be monstrous even by the exceedingly low standards of vampires, and as I said, I have certain doubts about how well the format even works for this game and this system. But it’s certainly fun to see a very traditional adventure structure decked out in Vampire‘s aesthetics.
Next up we’re continuing to stay close to Chicago – in particular, we’re going to neighbouring Milwaukee for our second city book, Milwaukee by Night. Stay tuned.
Yesterday’s WoW: the RPG session got cancelled due to Adult Responsibilities (don’t you just hate those?), so no further reports on the kobold-infested mine for now. Instead, I thought I’d write up a very brief summary of the main rules that tend to come up in battles. Because let’s face it, I could use the summary myself, and it might be handy to have something to refer my players to, this being a lot crunchier than we’re used to.
So, to make a very short story of a long and convoluted system, here’s your options when fighting for the glory of the good ol’ Alliance:
ACTIONS
On your turn, you may take either:
One full-round action.
One standard action and one move action.
Two move actions.
Examples of full-round actions are:
Run (move 4x your Speed).
Charge (move between 2 and 2x your Speed squares, then make an attack with +2 to the roll; take -2 to AC until your next turn).
Withdraw from melee combat (move your Speed squares away from a threatened square without triggering an attack of opportunity)
Prepare an action to be taken if some condition applies before your next turn.
Examples of standard actions are:
Make a melee or ranged attack with a weapon you have readied.
Cast a spell.
Make an Aid Another action (make an attack roll or skill check against DC 10; if successful, give an ally +2 to a relevant roll or check on their next turn).
Use a scroll or drink a potion that you have readied.
Declare full defense (+4 to AC until your next turn).
Examples of move actions are:
Move your Speed (6 squares for Medium creatures, 4 squares for Small creatures).
Ready a weapon, scroll, potion, or other item.
Sheathe or otherwise put away a weapon or other item (just dropping it on the ground does not require an action).
Rise from prone.
Pick up something from the ground.
Load a crossbow.
In addition to your regular actions, you may also take a 5-foot step on your turn, moving 1 square in any direction. This does not trigger attacks of opportunity, even if you move out of a threatened square. You may only take a 5-foot step if you have not otherwise moved from the spot this turn.
ATTACKS AND DAMAGE
An attack roll is 1d20+attack bonus vs AC. If you succeed, you roll damage per the weapon you’re wielding. Rolling high enough (usually a natural 20, but sometimes lower numbers can count) causes a threat. If you roll a threat, roll again, and if the second roll is also a success, the result is a crit; roll damage twice and apply the sum. If the second roll fails, the attack merely succeeds as normal. A natural 20 on an attack roll is always a hit, and a roll of 1 is always a miss. This only applies to attack rolls!
Making a ranged attack against an enemy who is adjacent to a friendly character inflicts a -4 penalty from needing to make sure you don’t hit your friend. In addition, making a ranged attack through squares that has other characters in it gives the target a +4 cover bonus to AC.
When making a melee attack, you may declare that you fight defensively; this gives you a -4 to the attack roll, but a +2 dodge bonus to AC until your next turn.
A weapon must be readied before it can be used to attack. You can only have one weapon readied at the time. Note that you can ready a weapon before combat has started as long as that makes sense with the situation (“I draw my sword and slowly advance towards the cavern entrance”). It takes a move action to ready a weapon.
A crossbow must be loaded before it can be used to attack with. If you are carrying a crossbow, we will assume that you keep it loaded, so you don’t have to load it before firing it the first time in a fight. You have to load it before each subsequent shot, though. It takes a move action to load a crossbow.
Making an attack usually takes a standard action.
BLEEDING
When your HP is reduced to a negative number, you are unconscious and bleeding out. Every round on your turn, roll 1d100. If you roll higher than your Stamina, you lose 1 additional HP and must repeat the process on your next turn. If you roll equal to or lower than your Stamina, you stabilise and don’t need to roll again unless you take more damage. If you regain at least 1 HP from magical healing, you also stabilise, and also if someone performs first aid on you and succeeds on a Heal or Spirit check with a DC of 10+the number of HP you’re below 0.
If your negative HP ever equals your Stamina, you die.
THREATENED SQUARES AND ATTACKS OF OPPORTUNITY
You threaten a square if you are able to make an armed melee attack against it. If one of your allies is threatening the square that an enemy is standing on, and you can draw a straight line between yourself and the ally that crosses any part of the enemy, you get a +2 flanking bonus to melee attack rolls against the enemy.
Performing certain actions in a square threatened by an enemy triggers an attack of opportunity from that enemy. Common actions that trigger an attack of opportunity are:
Moving out of the threatened square in any way other than with a 5-foot step or a withdraw action.
Sheathing a weapon (but not readying one).
Picking up something from the ground.
Making an unarmed melee attack.
Making a ranged attack.
Casting a spell without casting defensively.
Rising from prone.
An attack of opportunity is resolved in all ways as a regular melee attack, and subject to all the same modifiers. You can not choose to fight defensively with it, however. If you fought defensively on your last turn, any attack of opportunity you make also has the -4 penalty.
A character must have a melee weapon readied to perform an attack of opportunity.
A character can normally only perform one attack of opportunity per round.
Note that reach weapons threaten squares 2 squares away from the wielder, but do not threaten the squares immediately around him.
CASTING SPELLS
Casting most spells require the use of one free hand; you can’t cast most spells with a weapon in one hand and a shield or torch in the other without first dropping or sheathing one of them. When casting a spell would trigger an attack of opportunity, you may choose to cast defensively.
When casting defensively, make a Concentration or Stamina check against DC 15+spell level. If you succeed, the spell takes effect normally and does not trigger an attack of opportunity. If the check fails, the spell slot is exhausted to no effect. The Combat Casting Feat provides a +4 bonus to the Concentration or Stamina check for casting defensively.
When hit with an attack of opportunity brought on by casting a spell and taking damage, make a Concentration or Stamina check against DC 10+damage taken+spell level; if you succeed, the spell goes off normally, and if it fails, the spell slot is exhausted to no effect.
Casting a spell usually takes a standard action.
MOVING
Once again, your options for moving are:
Spend a move action to move your Speed in squares. If you choose to take two move actions in a turn, you may use both to move, thus moving 2 x your Speed in squares.
Spend a full-round action to run 4 x your Speed in squares.
Charge as a full-round action to move between 2 and 2x your Speed squares and make an attack at the end of it (you can’t charge without having anything to attack).
Withdraw as a full-round action to move your Speed in squares without triggering attacks of opportunity.
Take a 5-foot step to move 1 square without triggering attacks of opportunity. This is a free action, but you may only do this if you have not moved in any other way during the turn.
As part of your movement in a turn, you may move through squares occupied by friendly units, but not through squares occupied by enemies; nor may you end your turn in a square occupied by another unit unless one or the other of you is Fine or smaller.
Your Speed is 6 if you’re a Medium character, or 4 if you’re a Small character. Wearing armour or carrying a heavy burden can reduce your Speed.
Remember that moving through threatened squares trigger attacks of opportunity unless movement is a 5-foot step or a full-round withdraw action.
PREPARED ACTIONS
As a full-round action, you can define a standard action or move action that you will take if some condition occurs before your next turn. You may choose any condition you like, but the GM is the one who decides whether it has in fact occurred or not. If the condition occurs, you take your action (you may not choose to abort it) and it is resolved normally. If the condition does not occur before your next turn, nothing happens.
Examples of prepared actions are:
“If an enemy within my range becomes unengaged in melee, I will fire my crossbow at it.”
“If there are no friendly characters in the line of fire, I will cast Burning Hands at the nearest group of enemies, trying to catch as many of them as possible.”
“If a friendly character within my reach takes more than 5 points of damage, I will cast Cure Light Wounds on them, casting defensively.”
“If an enemy begins to move towards me, I will move away from them in the straightest line possible.”
The initiative count on which the prepared action triggered becomes your new initiative. Thus, after a prepared action riggers, you have to wait a full round before taking a new turn.
You can only perform one prepared action in a round; further triggers of the condition have no effect.
You may include a 5-foot step in a prepared action as long as you don’t otherwise use it to move from the spot.
We’ve reached the end of the first publishing year of Torg, as well as the end of the first published campaign, The Relics of Power. The first installment was great, the second one a little shakier. Let’s see how it wraps up.
One thing I could have mentioned earlier but didn’t for the sake of simplicity is that the Destiny Map doesn’t just lead to the resting place of the Possibility Chalice. It in fact points out two sites, one where the Chalice is, and another one (the titular Forever City, natch) where you’re supposed to take the Chalice once you have it to receive some vaguely defined goodies. So in the finale, the players set out for that one.
We first get a fiction piece telling us what the various baddies are doing. The Cyberpapal Inquistion is interrogating an upload of DeVris (remember him from the first part?) and berating him for not getting the Destiny Map and thus putting the Cyberpapacy out of the running. DeVris points out that he isn’t high-level enough to solo an entire party of players, which is a valid point that makes you wonder why Malraux sent him out on his own, then. I can only assume it’s because Malraux is a loser and everything he does has to be half-assed. Anyway, the Inquisition scoffs at DeVris and downloads his software into cyber-hell. Meanwhile, a vampyre named Victor Manwaring (remember that weird rat who spied on the players last time? Yeah, that was Manwaring) gets ordered to tag along with the players and steal whatever they are looking for, and Doctor Mobius has done something scientific so now he can send a pair of Walking Gods – who are creatures who look like ancient Egyptian deities but who are nearly mindless and usually just manifest inside pyramids to guard them – out into the world to do his bidding.
Also, we get a scene with Katrina Tovarish and Nicolai Ondarev, who are a Soviet psychic and her handler. They originally appeared in the novels, where they stopped the Tharkoldu invasion of Russia with frankly embarrassing ease. Katrina has had a vision again and is insisting they need to go off somewhere.
The adventure starts with the players rowing Amethyst’s Viking longship into London’s port and being met by Tolwyn. Before they can talk very much, they get attacked by cybernetic warrior monks. There’s a nice touch where one of the monks uses an extremely British-working-class girl (that is to say, she’s pretty, chipper, not overly burdened with morals, and smells faintly of fish) as a human shield at one point and the players have to rescue her, which does add some colour to an otherwise samey fight scene. Anyway, the players fend them off and take a prisoner, who they bring to Scotland Yard, which gets a lot of lavish description despite just being a backdrop for an interrogation. The captive claims that they were supposed to steal the Possibility Chalice and then deliver it to their contact on the Orient Express, to be combined with something called “the signal fire” that was mentioned on the Destiny Map.
However, that’s a fib, based solely on the fact that DeVris managed to send Malraux a picture of the incomplete Destiny Map while waiting for the players in that old Indian temple back in part one. Malraux can’t find anything without the five tiles that the players were bringing, but he could read the inscription, which mentions “lighting the signal fire to call our distant saviours,” so he’s arranged a trap. The captive knows this, but he’ll both use a miracle to make himself impossible to disbelieve (which is a bit iffy, I feel, since telling a player that they must believe an NPC is the same as telling them that they shouldn’t believe him, and that’s a frustrating combination to have to roleplay), and if they still press the issue a sleeper agent at Scotland Yard sprouts cybernetic weapons and try to kill him. If the players can save him, he will admit that he actually doesn’t know if the signal fire is real, but he does know that he was meant to deliver it to one Cardinal Rouchefoucald, and what the introduction phrase to him is.
Rouchefoucald is the head of the Cyberpope’s intelligence and sabotage operation in England and has all but paralysed the British government recently (which I guess might be why it’s been so oddly passive?). Tolwyn will think that the Orient Express is almost certainly a trap, but that it’d be super-helpful of the players to go there and bump off Rouchefoucald for her, because if there is one thing the Cyberpapacy needs it’s to become even less threatening. The players can refuse if they want, though, and move on with the adventure. If the monk didn’t spill the real truth, of course, then the whole “signal fire” thing will look like a mandatory plot hook and they’ll pretty much definitely go.
The players set out for Europe by boat, only to get attacked by an evil ice dragon halfway across the English Channel. They then get sucked into the GodNet. No, not the Cyberpapacy realm, the GodNet – they are physically transported into Evil Catholic Cyberspace for no apparent reason. See, this looks very much to me like the writers were just desperate to cram this thing in somewhere, because they’d made a big deal about it but were realising that it had very little actual relevance outside of one particular geographical area that, in turn, had very little actual relevance to the rest of the world (because it’s run by Malraux, and Malraux is a loser). So… they still end up having to fight a dragon, only now the dragon is pixelated, which is… kind of different, I guess? Also, some cybernetic Uvwe might show up to help them. Ooookay. Then they randomly get out of the GodNet and can move on with their lives.
In Europe, they board the Orient Express, which the game admits is not the original Orient Express since that one would have departed from Paris and Paris is in a bit of a state right now. Rather, it’s a revamped line that goes between Brussels and Venice. Either way, as you might guess the game absolutely seizes the opportunity to create a genteel mystery where the players rub shoulders with a ton of colourful passengers, most of whom are hiding something.
There’s a supposed Aylish merchant named Horace Blessed who is actually a Core Earth con artist who’s gotten strong-armed into serving as a stalking horse for the Cyberpapacy, directing people to the supposed “signal fire” so they’ll walk into a trap. There is Katrina and Nicolai, posing as a nun and priest (I did say that I’d like to see some more of the cast of the novels, I guess…). There is Manwaring, out to give the players some discreet nudges in the right direction. There is a bunch of Japanese tourists, one of whom is inevitably a Kanawa spy. There’s a pair of obnoxious American tourists who are actually cyberpapists in disguise. And of course, there is Rouchefoucald, waiting for some suckers to walk into a series of traps that he’s set up with a shiny jewel posing as the “signal fire” as bait; one of them injects the would-be thief with Jaz and then uses it as a connection to download his soul into the Hell region of the GodNet. And that’s just the first one in a series. Eeep.
Anyway, in whatever fashion, the players are going to get into a fight with Rouchefoucald and his cybernetic minions, with a lot of shooting and crashing through windows and running around atop the train and other fun stuff. Hopefully they will ultimately kill or capture him, and discover that the “signal fire” doesn’t actually exist. After that, it’s off to Tibet, where the Forever City is meant to be located.
I suppose that given my constant griping about how Malraux is a lame villain, I should be grateful that the early parts of this adventure, at least, shows him off a little and gives you a sense of how he operates. Which is to say, with a combination of underhanded deception, Gothic-Catholic fanaticism, and cyberpunk techno-horror. And… fine, I guess, but I still think that the Cyberpapacy is poorly designed and handled, and I’ll probably go over that more when I get to its own book.
So, to Tibet it is, and the players have to spend some time searching the area from the air to find something that looks like a mysterious hidden city. They might also get attacked by a Nile Empire dirigible if they try to get too ambitious. Once they’ve found the spot, they have to make the trek on foot (obviously there aren’t any convenient landing pads in the ruined ancient city; a chopper would probably work, but getting hold of one in a hurry would be tricky), running into some yetis along the way because why not (as I may have mentioned, Core Earth isn’t quite our own world, it just looks like it on the surface), and also having to race Manwaring, who’s now also gotten the scent of the Forever City and is making his way to it at the head of a bunch of gospog.
After a lot of environmental challenges, the players manage to climb all the way to the City. If they dragged their feet, Manwaring is already here and they get ambushed by him and his gospog. If they made good time, they spot him arriving after them, and can arrange their own ambush. Either way, though, he escapes once the fight start going against him.
The Forever City is a weird mashup of architecture from a ton of different cultures, including some oddly modern-looking ones and some that doesn’t even seem human. Buildings have recognisable (but no longer functioning) indoor plumbing and central heating. The players end up having to fight a pair of Doctor Mobius’ long-range Walking Gods, who parachuted in here once they found the city. They’re not terribly tough, though, for all their buildup. Manwaring is watching them the whole time, though the method by which he avoids the sun feels oddly inadequate to me – he conjures magical darkness around himself, but from the description it seems that that only slows down the rate that he takes damage in the daylight, and even then he has to cast the spell again every time he wants to move to a new position. Feels like he should wear himself out pretty soon, is what I’m saying. Why exactly did Thratchen send a damn vampire on a mission that would likely include a lot of moving around in daylight, anyway?
The players eventually find a strange pyramid where they have to solve a riddle to figure out that they need to use the Possibility Chalice to send a message into the cosmverse. At that point Manwaring attacks them for a final boss fight, and after beating him they get a flashy cutscene where a beam of light shoots off into the sky and have a trippy vision where a Ravagon encourages a kid to torture a captive Storm Knight. The players can send the kid a telepathic message to Resist Peer Pressure, leading to him running from the Ravagon instead. And… that’s the end.
So I know what you’re thinking – what the hell was all this about?! Who built the Forever City? Who are the “distant saviours” that this was supposed to summon? Sorry, you’re going to have to wait another ten books to find that out. Welcome to the 90s, the decade of metaplot madness. Okay, the book does mention that the whole thing causes more Storm Knights to manifest across the world, so that’s something, I guess. Still…
Oh, and along the way, the adventure also mentions two bits of political worldbuilding: Ayslish who fight Uthorion are granted honourary British citizenship, but the rest of Europe is decidedly suspicious about people from other cosms, especially if they aren’t human in the strictest sense of the world. Fair enough, though I feel like the game’s interest in the realistic sociological consequences of cosmic incursions has decreased significantly since The Living Land got so excited about them… Also, China’s reaction to the Possibility Wars has been, basically, to sit behind its borders and sulk even harder than usual. Maybe that was the country’s image in 1990, I don’t know? These days, the idea that the Chinese wouldn’t absolutely jump on a chance to set themselves up as Earth’s primary defenders while America was otherwise occupied… well, it just feels bizarre.
So, my various gripes aside, this was pretty cool. Fighting Catholic cyborgs on the Orient Express, awesome; weird ancient city that offer tantalising hints about how human history might not be quite what everything thinks, cool; vampires and giant god-monsters and dog fights over the Himalayas, I love it. The series as a whole does showcase the game pretty well – it could be more balanced, but at least every faction got some kind of chance to shine.
Next up we’re getting a bunch of short-short adventures after this long-long adventure, in The Cassandra Files.
I’ve said a lot about early Dragonbanehere, but I’ve also been reading some of the very first installments of the game’s younger, less popular sister. It was first published in 1984 under the title of Mutant, and was essentially second-edition Dragonbane sort of half-heartedly reskinned to a post-apocalyptic setting in the vein of Gamma World. Then in ’89, it got almost completely rewritten into a cyberpunk game, still under the title of Mutant. And then, in ’92, it got another overhaul and turned into am ersatz Warhammer 40,000 called Mutant Chronicles, even though mutants were not even really a thing in the space-marine future the game now took place in (admittedly, there are also very few warhammers in Warhammer 40,000). So… it’s not really a game that ever felt particularly sure of itself, let’s just say.
Still, at the time, it was the Swedish sci-fi game, just like Dragonbane was the Swedish fantasy game, so it got played. And it’s actually managed to survive to the modern day – its current form is called Mutant: Year Zero and, from what I can tell, it has mostly returned to the mutated-animals-wandering-a-postapocalyptic-Sweden form of its earliest installment. There was even a pretty good video game based on it some ten years back, called Mutant: Road to Eden; I have fond memories of positioning a mutated duck to snipe robots with a crossbow. And some of the horrific monstrosities from Mutant Chronicles eventually got imported to Kult.
Now, this isn’t going to be a full readthrough, at least probably not – I have too much on my plate already. But I do kind of want to read it alongside Dragonbane, especially since a lot of early material for both first appeared in Sinkadus magazine. And I can’t seem to remember anything I read, anymore, without making notes about it, so I might type up one of these posts from time to time.
All that said, let’s dive in.
We start out getting an account of the future history of the game, most of which won’t actually matter because no one still alive in the setting can even remember any of it. Some parts that will kinda-sorta matter is the invention of robots and artificial intelligence, and that society got increasingly totalitarian and people ended up needing keycards that determined their level of access to even supposedly public areas. It all ended when a horrific plague forced everyone to evacuate into bunkers underground while the surface ended up losing almost all life. To re-terraform the surface, the bunker-dwellers genetically engineered a bunch of fast-evolving species and sent them up there. It worked, but the new species also mutated wildly and assumed a ton of bizarre forms that will justify just about any weird critter you care to send at the players.
The world now exists in a primitive state, with reproducible technology at the level of steam engines and muskets. Certain “forbidden zones” still have caches of cooler stuff for anyone who dares to plunder them, but they are often guarded by robots or deranged cultists who worship the computers that continue to run them. Aside from regular humans, there are also weird mutants of various sorts, some of them appearing human but having psychic powers, and a wide variety of sentient, bipedal animals who have randomly appeared from the aforementioned technobabble. Countries are fairly small, and have a variety of systems of rule, with some being democracies, other feudal monarchies or military dictatorships.
The rule system is fairly similar to early Dragonbane too. You have seven stats, Strength, Intelligence, Personality, Dexterity, Size, Physique and Mental Strength, which you’ll notice is the Dragonbane ones except that Charisma has become Personality and Psyche has become Mental Strength – not sure why either of those were necessary, but that’s what they went with. You roll a 3d6 to determine your score in each of them, though certain classes and mutations will require you to reroll some of them. Size+Physique is your Hit Points, 5 times your Dexterity is your Dexterity Roll that you use for dodging and suchlike, and Physique+Dexterity is your movement in meters per round.
Strength, Intelligence and Personality gives you bonuses or penalties to certain particular subsystem rolls if your score is higher than 15 or lower than 6 – which is to say, it’s not going to be common. For Strength, it’s melee damage. For Personality, it’s reaction rolls, for which there is a table right here – you roll 1d6 to determine whether someone you meet is friendly or unfriendly. For Intelligence, it’s the Find Field, which is a complicated thing that we’ll need to get into later.
Like I mentioned, the available classes (they’re called “classes” even though they’re more properly “races,” and what’s usually called “classes” is called “professions”… yeah, I don’t know) are Non-Mutated Human (NMH), Mutated Human (MH), Psi-Mutant, Robot, or Mutated Animal. NMHs get a bunch of bonuses to their stats. Robots get to reroll their Strength with 2d6+6 and their Physique with 1d6+12, and they have 4 points of natural armour and 20% in a special skill for repairing inanimate objects (such as themselves). On the flipside, whenever a NMH gives them an order, they have to roll to see if they feel compelled to carry it out, and they may never knowingly injure a NMH – those pesky Laws of Robotics, I guess.
MHs have 1d4 physical or mental mutations (the player decides which one), and if they roll a 3 they also have 1 physical or mental defect, dependently. If they roll a 4 they have 1d2 defects instead. Mutated Animals are the same, and you’re also instructed to pick your species of animal as something that makes sense given the stats you rolled – I guess that’s why you choose race after rolling, it’s so they wouldn’t have to come up with stat modifiers for a zillion different animal species. Psi-Mutants have to reroll their Strength and Physique with 1d6+3 and 1d6+6, respectively, so they’ll be wimpy, but they’ve got 1d4+2 randomly determined mental mutations. If they got 3 mutations they have 1 mental defect, if they have more mutations they have 1d2 mental defects.
Which mutations and defects you have is randomly selected. Physical mutations run the gamut from the semi-reasonable, like claws that do 1d4 damage or gills and flippers, to the goofy superpowers, like invisibility or the ability to pull metal objects towards you by generating a magnetic pulse. Mutations that aren’t permanently active can be triggered a fixed number of times per day, and you have to roll against an unforgiving percentage for it (usually 40%) or so – apparently, mutant supremacy is still some ways away in the world of Mutant. Physical defects are things like taking more damage, being hyper-sensitive to radiation, being morbidly obese, or having clumsy hands with trouble gripping.
Mental mutations are your basic psionic nonsense, like reading minds, seeing the future, levitating, and creating force fields. There is one vaguely disturbing one called Death Snap that lets you reduce a character to 1 HP if you overcome his Mental Strength with your own, albeit at the cost of quickly passing out afterward. Still, if your buddies are fighting an especially nasty mutated abomination, that could be a game-changer. Mental defects are various forms of insanity and psychological breakdowns; a lot of them have a chance to be triggered whenever you fail your roll to use a mental mutation. Which, again, is likely to happen a lot. I’m more and more thinking that the NMHs with their flat stat bonuses may have a point about them being superior to all the mutated freaks, at least from a pure utility perspective…
Characters are assumed to be professional adventurers, but they need to roll to find out what their previous occupation was. Depending on that occupation, they get a bonus to two different weapon skills (which must be primitive weapons, like swords and bows) and a shield, as well as a score in one or a couple of skills that’s a multiple of a relevant stat. Your starting competence is, thus, really on the modest side, but to be fair, there aren’t that many skills in the game – being good at even one of them gives you a pretty big chunk of the total knowledge of Man.
The occupations are Thief, Explorer, Forester, Soldier, Labourer, Scientist, Officer, Administrator, Physician and Aristocrat (assumed to be of the impoverished kind; there’s just not enough wealth left in the setting to live like a gentleman!).
Skill are, again, rather few in number. There are a handful you get a base chance in (Listen is 2 x Intelligence %, for instance), and a slightly larger handful that you can’t use without training. There are some interesting choices – Hunting & Tracking is a single skill, for instance, but Find Edible Plants is a separate one – but it’s mostly what you’d expect from a fantasy RPG. Each weapon is its own skill, and they all have a fixed (non-stat-based) starting success chance, which can be modified by your occupation. Notably, there are no skills for understanding or manipulating technology. You’re going to be a primitive screwhead for life! Though I guess Robots do get that repair skill… Anyway, as you might guess, the system is 1d100 roll-under.
You can improve a skill by 5% by studying under a teacher (who must have the skill at 90%), or by 1d6% by succeeding at using a skill in play, then rolling over it after the adventure is over. You can only improve a skill by studying one step at the time, then you can’t study it anymore until you’ve increased it by experience at least once.
The combat rules are pretty simple and more or less the same as in Dragonbane 2E. You roll to attack, if you hit you roll damage, and damage reduced by armour is subtracted from HP. If you hit HP 0 you’re unconscious and bleeding out, once you hit -5 HP you’re dead. Initiative is just a d6 rolled for the heroes and the villains, highest one goes first as a group. It is possible to parry melee attacks with melee weapons or shields, though it’s not entirely clear from the rules whether parrying with a weapon means you can’t attack with that weapon in the same round – I assume that is the case, but that’s because it’s so in Dragonbane. If you parry with a shield, it provides extra armour for the attack, while if you parry with a weapon, it saves you from taking damage at all but the attacking weapon rolls damage and if it’s higher than the weapon’s Breaking Value, that Breaking Value is reduced by 2, and once it reaches 0 the weapon, well, breaks.
Regular weapons are your fantasy basics, plus flintlocks, which take 3 rounds to load between shots, won’t work in damp weather, and explodes doing a ton of damage if you roll 96-00 on your attack roll. Irregular weapons include modern rifles and machine guns, as well as laser (red beam), maser (white beam), infra (invisible beam), gyro jet (fires a miniature rocket that explodes on impact), gauss, ultrasound, stun, gas and needle guns. Some of these weapons can fire more than one shot per round, but we don’t get told if there’s any penalty for multiple shots – if not, that’s kind of OP, frankly.
Regular armour just comes in three kinds: leather, boiled leather, and “mixed,” which here means that you’ve basically strapped a ton of different crap to your body for protection, so you look a lot like a walking junkyard. Okay, I love that. Shields also include trashcan lids and road signs, for some more of that post-apocalyptic silliness. Power armour is the lost-technology variant, and several kinds of it comes with built-in flight capability, but they require energy cells.
Segueing over to the technology chapter, energy cells are the standardised fuel of the now-lost high-tech society. They come in four sizes, from battery-sized ones that power small guns to massive one intended to be installed in vehicle engines. Some vehicles have hydrogen-oxygen turbines instead, meaning that you fuel them with regular water, and others are regular gas-guzzlers. Hovercraft and flying cars also existed and may be found here and there.
Computers also came in four sizes, from “programmable calculators” (heeeey, I actually had one of those in school in the late nineties! It was super-cool at the time, let me tell you), to “mini-computers” which are essentially laptops, to “mainframes” that can run entire high-tech basis, to the somewhat squicky “cybers” that have a living organic brain encased in them somewhere.
Sentient robots are a thing, with the Robots that players can have as characters being implied to be the most innocent sort, the “safety robots” that are fussy caretakers who try to ensure that nearby humans play nice and don’t get themselves hurt by going anywhere they’re not supposed to be. Security robots are bigger, meaner, and willing to use lethal force if necessary, and battle robots are biggest and meanest and have lethal force as their first, last and only method.
Force fields are a thing, but the ancients also used cruder obstacles like electrified fences and automated gun turrets. Traps and cameras may also be encountered when sneaking through a forbidden zone. Goodies may be stuck in stasis fields, ensuring that they’re ripe for the looting. Access to areas in old installations can be gained through having a key card of a high enough security clearance. I’m not sure if they are meant to be universal or if a particular key card only works in the forbidden zone it comes from? The latter seems more reasonable, but I don’t think it’s spelled out anywhere.
Drugs that near-instantly heal injuries exist (cough healing potions cough), and the most advanced sorts can even regrow lost limbs. There are also drugs for compelling obedience or forcing honesty, and ones that makes you immune to gas (the kinds that comes in trap, not the kind that might lead to embarrassing faux pas! Though that would be handy too, come to think of it…). There is also such a thing as “memory cubes” that contain the encoded memories of people in the past, for some enigmatic flashbacks.
There’s a random table to determine what a strange relic of the mythical past is, which can be something useful but can also be something like a stuffed bird’s head or the Dragonbane roleplaying game. Heh. When trying to figure it out, you use the Find Field. Told you we’d be getting to that. It looks like this:
See, you start at the field marked START and then you roll a a number of d4s in order to see which direction you head in next. If you reach the centre (MÅL), you’ve worked out how to use the relic, and if it’s a weapon you can now fire it at its base success chance. If you step out from the Field, you can’t figure the relic out and you can’t try again; someone has to show you how it works or you’ll never know. If you roll all the d4s allotted to you (you get more for a simpler relic, less for a more complicated one) and you’ve neither reached the centre or left the Field, you can’t figure it out right now but you can try again later. Having a high Intelligence means that you can ignore the first few 4s you roll, and a low Intelligence means that you have to ignore the first few 1s.
The section on “plants and animals” grudgingly admits that these critters may sometimes be referred to as “monsters,” almost like this is reskin of a fantasy game or something… Anyway, they weren’t kidding about the plants part, plants in the world of Mutant are not to be trifled with. The first one mentioned is the slayer tree, which has tentacles instead of branches and drops seeds call “Lil” that appear as regular humans in every way except for bleeding green and having no emotional range. Lil are driven to seek out nourishment for the slayer tree. More about these guys in a bit. Other ferocious plants include bushes that spurt sleep gas when touched and then latch on with its roots and suck your blood if you pass out, and lianas that drop down from trees and try to strangle you.
Giant spiders, wasps and stag beatles exist, and so do giant amoebas. Land sharks are sharks that swim through the ground and burst out of it to eat you. Sand biters look like weasels but can turn the ground into what’s effectively quicksand. Okay, I have a natural aversion to walking on ground that isn’t nice and paved, and this is not doing anything to offset it. Air morays live in the trees and glide through the branches, and tree leeches just drop down on you and latch on. Urk. Centipede snakes are like long lizards with tons of legs and the psychic ability to create illusions, though in diversion from the general nightmare fuel, they’re actually sentient and friendly. Also there is something called a blood eagle, which is just kind a really big eagle that eats people.
There’s a GM section that’s boring like GM sections invariably are – my eyes always kind of glaze over GM advice. Which may be a learned defense mechanism from reading, and trying to implement, the absolutely terrible GM advice that a lot of these 90s games were full of. There is a play example wherein Jerry the psychic ferret-mutant tries to sneak into a forbidden zone, running afoul of guard robots, killer plants, and bird-mutants. It sets the tone but is nothing special.
Finally, there is a sample adventure called Mission in Mos Mosel. It also doubles as a default setting, since it introduces the Pyri Community, the country in the south of modern Sweden where most of the game will take place. The Pyri Community is ruled by Emperor Thorulf the Executioner (described as “harsh but fair” in spite of the name) from the capital of Hindenburg. There is a hereditary nobility who appoint the governing council along with the richer merchants and the Emperor himself. Punishment for law-breaking is strict, which the Community credits with its low crime rates, though they probably have more to do with officials being willing to take a bribe to not press charges. The population consists of mostly NMHs and MHs, though there might also be some Psi-Mutants around – they tend to hide their nature since they are prone to getting lynched if it’s discovered. The level of technology is relatively high, with steamboats, flintlock rifles, and heliographs (long-range communication through light bursts – think of the Clacks in Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal). Rails for steam trains is something that’s being experimented with, and some neighbourhoods in the capital have gas lights.
The players get hired by merchant Nicholas fon Rijn. His agent in the town of Mos Mosel, a guy named Wolf, hasn’t been reporting back, so he sent a dude named Jerry Gaxy to check on him. Now Jerry Gaxy is also not reporting back, so Nicholas is sending the players to check on him. Because some people say that the definition of madness is doing the same thing while expecting different results, but those people are quitters!
In fairness, Nicky does rather generously outfit the players with armour and high-tech firearms so they’ll have a better chance of not getting ganked by whatever ganked the last two guys. So off they go, either by steamboat (for a fee) or on foot (in which case they get to roll for random encounters and might meet some of the items from the “plants and animals” chapter. And yes, a land shark is a possibility).
The deal with Mos Mosel is that a slayer tree (told you those would come up again) has gotten ambitious and decided to – TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!! MUAHAHAHA, RUSTLE, RUSTLE! It’s planning to start with Mos Mosel, so to that end it’s been quietly killing people and replacing them with Lil. The GM is instructed to make it reeeeeaaaaally obvious when an NPC is a Lil by having them speak in vague, inflectionless voices while staring blankly ahead like zombies. Probably wise, to be honest – if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a GM it’s that a lot of things seem really obvious when you know them, but a lot mor enigmatic when you’re trying to puzzle them out from the outside.
Wolf was killed by the Lil, who have among others replaced the mayor and the local police department, after finding out too much about their plans. Before expiring, he handed over his special safe-cracking gizmo to a local fishmonger with instructions to give it to “whomever comes to continue my work.” The safe-cracker can in turn be used to open the safe in the mayor’s house where he keeps a list of people replaced by Lil and directions to where the slayer tree is growing, along with a can of plant fertiliser. Heh. Jerry Gaxy also fell afoul of the Lil, and they’ve stuck him in jail (and will deny to anyone who asks that he’s there). There are also a few red herrings, like a pair of feuding families and a band of chipmonk-mutants living in tunnels beneath the cemetery.
The slayer tree is actually a bio-weapon designed in a place called Bio-Bunker VII, now a forbidden zone. So it’s dungeon-crawling time! And it’s actually a pretty good introductionary dungeon. It contains a little of everything mentioned in the rules – radiation, gas traps, high-tech weapons and healing drugs, automated gun turrets and disease-spreading corpses, a mainframe that isn’t happy with the presence of the slayer tree and might be persuaded to help, memory cubes that can fill in some of the Bio-Bunker’s backstory, and so on. In the end, the players are expected to face the tree and its remaining Lil in battle and go full lumberjack on its ass. Nicholas fon Rijn will be happy with them and offer to employ them as in-house troubleshooters. Hurray!
So what’s my overall impression? Eh. I’m not too impressed. The game isn’t entirely without its charm, and it’s got some of that mix of good-natured Swedish dorkiness and gleeful Swedish edgelording that I recognise from Dragonbane. But it all feels a little haphazard, a little too much like “let’s take this thing we already have and use it for something completely different.” In some parts it seems to be trying to improve on the Dragonbane rules – in particular, the way that HP is double what you get there seems like a recognition of how overly lethal second-edition Dragonbane is – but again, it doesn’t really commit to it, and most things are not just copied over by copied over rather lazily, with a lot of details being left out.
Oh well. The next adventure is called In the Claws of the Reptile Men, but I make no promises as to when I might get around to it. It’ll be whenever I feel lazy and like I want to procrastinate my actual readthroughs, I expect.
I would say that this is where it got silly, but it’s Paranoia, so it was already pretty silly. I will say that this one feels a little like someone just threw their hands up and decided to give zero craps, which is maybe not entirely a good thing – yes, a certain meh-just-go-with-it spirit is explicitly part of the game, but maybe giving just one or two craps might help? Anyway, let’s get into it and we’ll see what we can make of it.
So, the backstory for this adventure is that a doohickey called the Transdimensional Collapsatron was discovered as part of a long-dead High Programmer’s possessions and accidentally activated, and it transported three wizards from Dimension X to Alpha Complex. Yes, wizards. You know, guys in robes and pointy hats who can make stuff happen by chanting and waving their hands. They’re part of this sci-fi comedy game now. See what I mean about this being maybe a step too far in the sure-throw-it-in way of thinking?
But okay. Wizard magic (“Shaping the Force,” in their own nomenclature) works on the same rules as mutations, though wizards are actually good at it, and know some entirely new spells/mutations like throwing fireballs, spreading magical darkness, and communicating across language barriers. The GM is cautioned to make it clear to the players that the wizards, while certainly an intimidating outside-context problem, aren’t all-powerful – they act stressed when they have to fast-cast something, their magical force fields shrink a little every time they deflect damage, sometimes their spells just plain go wrong and cause a big mess that they clearly didn’t intend, and so on. Don’t get the players so demoralised that they won’t even have a go at them, basically. You can’t have their efforts go badly and hilariously wrong if they won’t make them in the first place!
Like most adventures so far, this one comes with half a dozen pregen characters, though here they are a bit more flavourful than usual since they are not-too-subtly also meant to fit fantasy stereotypes – we have a grumpy short guy who likes messing around with tech, a gung-ho Femme Fatale member with lots of combat training, a happy-go-lucky runt with sticky fingers and a mutation that makes him super-persuasive, a big dumb meatbag who’s immune to psychic influence… All good stuff, and like I said, a little more interesting than the usual selection of samey, one-dimensional little backstabbing nitwits. Like I keep saying, the game designers chose an incredibly narrow premise, and while that’s great for making the game distinct, it also makes it very challenging to come up with material for it after a certain point. The way these supplements keep dragging in more and more things that don’t strictly belong in a “classic Paranoia adventure” (though keep in mind that things stayed purely “classic” for maybe two or three books before the drift started; by Vapors Don’t Shoot Back, the players were already boarding a pirate ship) is a pretty direct result of that, I’d say.
The adventure starts with the wizards, their moronic lizardman flunky Randy in tow, appearing at a vehicle repair facility (they interrogated some clones demanding to be given “transportation home” and this is the confused directions they got). The players get sent in after them, get saddled with a bunch of shell-shocked civilians who glom onto them and keep getting in the way, and get some sense of what the wizards are capable of. They also follow them into the facility where they have to deal with malfunctioning and psychotic bots. The wizards ultimately teleport away.
The second altercation with the wizards happen at a power station, where the wizards managed to plug in the Transdimensional Collapsatron but couldn’t get it to work properly, resulting in some other fantasy thing being transported in. A few suggestions are given, from a bunch of hungry hobbits to a fire-breathing dragon. The players will have another inclusive altercation with the wizards, though this time they might also be able to communicate a bit with them – the wizards are beginning to despair of getting home under their own power and so are thus more receptive to anyone who might even conceivably be willing and able to help. Either way, they eventually disappear again.
Through it all, the Computer is being unhelpful as usual, but it’s also being rather less… Computer-y. What I mean is, it keeps being sarcastic and abusive in its pronouncements rather than doing its usual dissonant-serenity, “you are mistaken, citizen. No one is screaming. The Computer is your friend” thing. That’s another thing that makes this adventure feel like it was just cobbled together by someone who just didn’t feel inspired at all by the setting as it as.
The third time the wizards show up, it’s at a travel information office (they wanted information on how to travel back home, but… well, that was a bit of a non-starter). There, they’ve managed to capture a powerful psychic mutant who they feel is a little closer to their own kind, so when they flee this time, they’ll leave Randy behind to take her with them instead. Randy can tell the players approximately what is going on, though of course he’ll do it in the slimiest way possible so that they doubt every word. Also, as an additional complication, a bunch of sleeper agents from a rival Alpha Complex also try to capture the wizards and the players end up having to fight them for the privilege of losing them all over again.
Finally, the players corner the wizards in an R&D facility just as they’ve managed to get the Transdimensional Collapsatron to work, and they all get sent back to Dimension X. It’s your basic fantasy setting, in spite of the pulp-sci-fi name, though befitting Paranoia it’s got a black comedy slant to it, with everything run by comically-sociopathic wizards who treat their human “herds” with the same care and compassion that the Computer treats its cloned citizens. There is also Randy’s species, who are the wizards’ evil soldiers and enforcers.
Once back home, the wizards are once more on certain footing, but they’ve exhausted themselves and aren’t up for dealing with the players right now, so they yell for some lizardmen minions to come help them, and strike a quick retreat into their dark evil dungeon (because of course they have a dark evil dungeon) along with the Transdimensional Collapsatron, leaving the players to deal with the mooks and get their bearings. Once they have figured out where they are (Randy is still with them and can advise), they don’t have much choice but to embark on a dungeon crawl to secure their way back home. Fortunately, a bunch of R&D clones and a bot got accidentally brought along, so there’ll be both someone capable of rigging up the TC and a power source to connect it to… assuming the players can keep them from being killed or destroyed, of course.
So it’s a dungeon crawl, and in most respect a fairly linear and basic one – the players pass through one chamber after another, blunder into traps (theoretically they can avoid them, but that’s unlikely to happen, so the best they can hope for is surviving them), fight monsters, and maybe find some loot along the way. There is magical healing items sprinkled throughout, to make up for the fact that there’s not going to be any instant clone replacements. Some of the more memorable encounters are a gelatin cube (not a gelatinous cube, gelatin. Raspberry-flavoured, in fact), a succubus (lucky that Alpha Complex clones get stuffed full of hormone suppressants that render them immune to such temptations), an over-friendly and near-invincible dog whose drool causes all metal objects to rust into uselessness, and two tribes of talking penguins who try to get the players to side with them. One room has a mixed bag of monsters sitting around waiting for it to be time to walk off on their patrols – they’re the wandering monsters of this dungeon, see? Oh, and at one point, there’s an orc, to justify the title, but he’s actually the dungeon chef and can’t put up any kind of fight.
In the end, the wizards turn out to have vacated the premises when the players got too close to their sanctum, having left the Transdimensional Collapsatron and a note telling the players to just take it and bugger off home. So presumably they do. The epilogue suggests that the Computer then sends them off on new and deadlier adventures in other dimensions, teasing a supplement called Vulture Warriors from Dimension X. I’m pretty sure that’s a joke, but there is in fact a second-edition supplement with that name…
Anyway, this was fun and all, but… yeah. It felt a bit too gimicky, despite my stated position that the best adventures so far have been the one who have been slightly gimicky. I guess the part that’s missing for me is the thin line of logic tying the obvious inspiration to the realities of Alpha Complex? Like, in all the other adventures, when something wildly out of genre turned up, there was always some sort of fig-leaf explanation for why it totally made sense, honest, and that just made it funnier. Here, wizards aren’t, e.g., powerful mutants who just happen to wear robes and carry staffs for spurious reasons. They really are wizards. Nor are they exaggerated, parodied or otherwise ridiculous like the aliens in Clones in Space were. There’s no joke there, is what I guess I’m saying, beyond them simply being in the game in the first place – which is strange and disjointed, but not really funny, per se.
Oh well. Next up is the final book published for the first edition, HIL Sector Blues. We’ll see if that’s a return to form.
When we last left our heroes, they had fought a bunch of kobolds in a tin mine and witnessed the appearance of what seemed like a ghost. This time, they set about exploring the rest of the mine with admirably methodical zeal. It’s just a shame that the dice were once again not on their side.
It started out okay. I had puzzled over what to have them discover on the kobolds that would keep their GP-to-XP ratio within recommended levels, and I’d decided on a miner’s helmet with a glowing yellow crystal in it that also protected the wearer from fear effects – a sort of exaggeration of the way that Warcraft kobolds feel braver as long as the candles in their helmets are burning. The Tinker put it to good use, being the only one with a kobold-sized head to wear it on. He’s a bit worried that it’s cursed, though, so maybe I should make some ominous references to how it feels like it’s dampening his emotions or something, hee hee hee…
Anyway, after that they ran into a trap baited with some fairly crappy treasure. And to their credit, they actually looked it over carefully and noticed that it was a trap. But then the Tinker tried to dismantle it and rolled another one of those really inconvenient failures, so parts of the ceiling fell on them. The Mage’s rat familiar needed urgent healing to avoid expiring.
After some inventory management to find room on the steampunk autodrudge for the treasure, they pressed on, only to be ambushed by a grenade-flinging goblin. The Mage’s rat familiar needed urgent healing to avoid expiring again. That’s the third time this campaign. That rat is just plain death-prone. Mind you, the fact that I keep throwing in area-of-effect attacks probably has something to do with it – no one is going to bother to specifically attack a rat, but whenever the Mage is in a blast radius, the rat is in the blast radius with her.
The goblin made a run for it while the Druid was frantically applying some magical CPR (the rat wasn’t the only one who was in bad shape), but her wolf companion chased him down and killed him. He was just a level 1 Rogue, which makes the fact that he almost knocked out the whole party kind of funny – again we see that technology is a great equaliser! Not to mention playing merry havoc with Challenge Ratings.
Somewhat annoyingly, I had to backtrack a little since I realised I’d forgotten that the Mage had Mana Shield up, so she should have gotten the chance to burn spell slots to mitigate the damage. That meant that she was up and awake when the goblin made a dash for it, but she declared that she was just going to let him go rather than get stuck in a fight, so it didn’t change the outcome. There’s a lot of different bits and pieces to keep track of in this system, especially with two casters in the party.
So that was that, mostly. The players poked around a little more and recalled that Njall Bashboulder, the owner of the mine, had mentioned that the only other tin mine in the hills was owned by the Venture Company, so finding a goblin with expensive high-tech weapons sneaking around in there was suspicious. Still, the mystery with the ghost remains unsolved, so the players are going to have to go back in next time, after spending the night resting and refreshing their spell slots.
This of course means that I’m duty-bound to come up with ways that the denizens of the mine are preparing for the players’ return. Only I should probably try to avoid having them lay any more area-of-effect damage traps… I’m starting to feel sorry for that damn rat…
The campaign Ärans Väg (“The Path of Glory”) that started out in the previous installment here continues with Maktens Portar (“The Gates of Power”). Last time, my complaint was that the open-ended nature of the adventure, while nice in itself, didn’t make it a particularly good fit for the first part in a series. Let’s see how it goes on.
The adventure starts out by giving a bit more backstory for the setting, which states that the elder races – elves, dwarves, halflings and giants – used to rule the land, but fled with the coming of humanity. Some of the dwarves hid their kingdom behind a pair of magical gates, the Gates of Power, which were locked with three keys. Alas, the keys were lost, and the dwarves ultimately felt that they weren’t safe anymore and had to flee towards some unknown fate, leaving behind a great many treasures in their abandoned mountain halls.
Flash forward about 700 years, and there’s a war going on in the lands to the east. The warring parties are the necromancer Dakoth, the noble servants of the god Eledain, and the sinister-but-not-actually-the-problem-this-time minions of the god Sathmog. All three are scrambling for troops and equipment. Mogdath, a “death wight” in the service of Dakoth, discovered the Gates of Power. The treasures inside interested Dakoth, and so did the still-viable mines and foundries of the dwarves, so he sent Mogdath and a bunch of orcs, ogres and skeletons into the dwarven city through a magical portal. The orcs immediately managed to trigger some traps, so large parts of the city collapsed on top of them. Mogdath is now running a mining and weapon-forging operation with what manpower he has left while waiting for reinforcements through the portal.
Meanwhile, the players are assumed to have gotten hold of the keys and used them to open the Gates (it’s suggested that Doriath recruits them for an expedition through the Gates if they haven’t played the previous adventure). Things are about to get frantic.
Before the players get any further, though, a major NPC pops out of the bushes. His name is Tefalas and he’s a monk in the service of Eledain who’s been sent to killinate Mogdath. He’s been given a magic dagger who’ll suck Mogdath’s spirit into itself if he’s stabbed with it (which will be relatively easy with prudent use, since it’s got a single-shot spell on it that gives a +50% modifier and +10 damage to the first blow you strike with it, and he only has to take 1 hit point of damage to get dagger-sucked). Since he’s kind of crap with daggers, he’s happy to lend the thing to any player character who feels called upon, though.
After that, the major enemy NPCs get introduced. Mogdath is, again, a “death wight,” which is an evil ghost that’s so powerful that taken physical form. This is actually a hindrance in some ways, because it means it’s vulnerable to regular damage, but it does mean you can lift and carry things, which Mogdath makes use of by having magical weapons and armour. Mogdath also has two “dark wights” with him, who are a sort of in-between points between barrow wights and death wights – they are semi-solid, so they can kind of pick things up but it’s difficult, and they’re immune to any damage but fire and magic. They’re called “Daz” and “Gozer,” because this game doesn’t take itself terribly seriously. Anyway, his last lieutenant is a grouchy “night worg” named Sharch who’s an evil soul bound into the reanimated body of a two-headed wolf whose howling paralyses people.
There isn’t really a plot here; rather, the entire adventure is a big dungeon. We get told where all the NPCs are at the start, and also that Mogdath will get informed almost immediately after the Gates are opened. The GM is instructed to decide how he reacts to that news, with a few suggestions – he might investigate on his own, send Daz or Gozer to spy on the players, gather his troops to hunt them down, or just wait and see if they will oblige him by stepping on a trap. It’s noted that he will try to protect the orcs and ogres, since they double as his work crew – again, he’s less interested in the remaining treasure than he is in using the city as a mine and forge.
Some treasure is certainly to be had, though it’s inconvenient to get to – half of it is in the throne room where Mogdath is sitting, and half is still trapped and under guard to keep the orcs from trying to grab it and bringing down even more of the ceiling. Still, if the players can get to some of it, the sort of items they can wield are game-changers – there is an amulet that heals 3d6 hit points, without the need for a roll or the expenditure of Power Points, for instance, and that right there will turn the game a whole lot less gritty in a hurry. Of course, it’s noted that if Doriath is along, she’ll totally call dibs on everything magical.
The idea is for the players to fumble their way through the mountain, constantly attacked out of the darkness by terrifying creatures, and hopefully at some point be able to dagger-suck Mogdath. Though the GM is also mischievously informed that Tefalas doesn’t know what Mogdath actually looks like beyond “a wight,” so the players might end up catching Daz or Gozer instead, and after that the dagger is useless. Oh dear.
They are then supposed to get to the eastern land. They can technically do that by trapping a wight in the dagger and then tapping on the magic portal with it, which will cause Dakoth to think that a wight wants to get through and activate the portal… but not only do they have no real way of knowing that, but it’ll put them smack into Dakoth’s stronghold, so it’s probably not a great idea. What they are meant to do is break open the floor under the lavatories and follow the underground river beneath it out. I… am honestly unsure how they are even going to know that they need to do that, instead of just retreating out through the Gates like sensible people, much less how you can expect them to think of that particular, highly specific solution. Yes, Tefalas might tell them that the dagger needs to get to the east quite quickly so that it can be ritually destroyed, but come on, surely he had some plans for doing that himself that didn’t include underground rivers?
So the same problem that applies to the last adventure applies even harder to this one. But, other than that, it’s actually not bad, and the darkness and terror makes a nice contrast to the pastoral whimsy in the last one. Having actually run it, I can also vouch for it going pretty well, though I admit that I can’t actually remember how the players found their way out. Probably I railroaded them shamelessly. Oh well.
The trilogy will be concluded in The Heart of Darkness! Before then, though, we’re going to get our first look at the game’s main setting Ereb Altor in Kandra.
Howdy, parrrrrdner! We’re heading back on the trail, and this time we’re going to be riding all over, because this time we’re covering the overall setting book for Deadlands, none-too-informatively titled The Quick & the Dead. It’s honestly all but required reading, because the core book was rather sparse with its setting info – in most books the introduction gives you a teaser of what the setting is like and then it gets filled in later in the book, but in the Deadlands core the teaser was all the description we ever got about the complex alternate history setting of the game. Mostly what we learned was that the Civil War is still ongoing, there’s a major gold rush in California after half of it fell into the sea, and magic and weird science are both running rampant and are powered by evil manitou. Let’s see if we can get a little more meat on our bones this time.
I am pleased to report that unlike last time, the cover art doesn’t lie to us – there really is an instance in the book of giant sand worms chasing steam cars across mountains shaped like tormented sinners. About time I got my money’s worth!
We start out with a bunch of rule tweaks and new Edges and Hindrances, presumably on the principle that they need to go somewhere. They’re okay, nothing much to talk about. I do note that there is a Hindrance called Ferner that makes you not fit in with the local culture, and there’s an Edge called Kemosabe that makes you fit in with the local culture, and I’d kind of like to know what happens if you take neither of them. Like, what’s the baseline of fitting in, here? Oh well.
There’s also an Edge called Veteran of the Weird West that gives you a bunch of extra points at the cost of a randomised effect which can be a punishing Hindrance or something even worse. So it’s basically drawing a Joker when assigning Traits, only by choice. I guess I can see how it might be used if you want to be a jaded old-timer rather than a greenhorn.
There are specific rules for revolver duels. I dunno, I thought the basic system already covered it pretty well, but okay.
We get a bunch of new premade characters, which is always nice. These seem to be a little more down to earth than the one in the core – like, you get a snake-oil salesman instead of a mad scientist, a card sharp instead of a huckster, that kind of thing. So I guess the idea is that they led with their more colourful options, and now they’re fleshing it out with some more general ones. That’s cool. I do note that while these characters are all ones that would fit into a Wild West story, they do not necessarily fit well into a group of wandering adventurers – a sheriff would be bound to a particular town, a spy would be getting specific missions, etc. Ah well. I guess you can always use the given stats and claim that they represent the job you just quit.
Now for the meat that comes with the spaghetti! The player-available section is meant to be a gazetteer written by Lacy O’Malley, last mentioned briefly in the core as one of the few men to have survived an encounter with a Hanging Judge. He writes for the Tombstone Epitath, which is a sort of tabloid that no one really believes in but are actually right about most of the crazy things going on in the Weird West. The paper’s motto is “Believe It or Else!” Heh. Anyway, every section that the players get to read has a reference to a later section that the players don’t get to read, and I’ll cover them together to make it less confusing. Here goes.
Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy launched a big offensive towards Washington in ’71, making heavy use of mad science gizmos developed in a base in Roswell, New Mexico. It had a lot of early success, but the Confederacy pushed too hard, resulting in a lot of mad scientists going crazy or deserting and the campaign petering out. The Union also raided Roswell, stealing a lot of cool crap, so Davis arranged to have the surface of Roswell wiped out by a massive explosion and the area around it covered in ever-burning ghost rock, claiming that it was an accident. The base is still active underground and the site for a lot of Confederate R&D, but now no one knows it’s there and aren’t particularly keen to go exploring through the burning inferno around it.
Following all that, both sides realised that the Civil War would be won or lost on mad science and access to ghost rock, so they started racing to establish train connections to the Great Maze in California. They have both promised huge bennies to whichever rail company can get there first, so of course a whole bunch of them are sabotaging each other like crazy, blowing up each other’s rails, robbing each other’s trains, shooting each other’s workers, and whatever other underhanded methods they can think of. A lot of trains are now sporting heavy armour and cannons as a result, for some bizarre visuals.
There are six railroads who have a realistic chance of winning. Bayou Vermillion is run by a New Orleans voodoo king named Simone LaCroix. He has zombies laying rail for him, and anyone who attacks him is likely to be added to them. Black River is run by a ruthless girlboss named Mina Devlin who has an all-female bands of gunslingers called the Wichita Witches who aim for the groin. She also practices black magic on the side. Iron Dragon belongs to a Chinese warlord named Kang. He has the distinction of having made a deal with the Sioux for passage through their territory, something he got by dealing with some kind of monsters at a place called Devil’s Tower. Slightly more about that later.
Wasatch is owned by Darius Hellstromme, the Weird West’s premier mad scientist, based out of Salt Lake City. He’s less interested in winning than in getting a chance to field test some of his more sinister creations. Dixie Rails and Union Blue is the Confederate and Union company, respectively, with the former owned by former General Robert E Lee and the latter by Joshua Chamberlain. Dixie Rails does well when Lee has time to manage it himself, but he keeps having to delegate it to his idiot nephew, at which point it lags behind. Union Blue is doing worst overall, because Chamberlain is trying to be honourable and upright about the race for the west, and that’s never going to work.
Union President Ulysses Grant and Confederate President Jefferson Davis are both up for re-election. Davis is planning a major offensive to get an excuse to declare martial law and hang on to power a bit longer. Except he’s not actually Davis anymore – he’s been replaced by an evil doppelganger who just wants to cause as much death and destruction as possible. Lee is suspicious of him and is tempted to launch his own run for President, but of course if he does that Dixie Rails is definitely going to crash and burn.
There is some helpful advice about travel. Stage coaches are faster and more comfortable than riding, and taking the train is best of all where there’s a line. Just keep in mind all that stuff we just talked about where the rail companies are in a state of war, so that option might get eventful too. Paper money is iffy since no one is sure which side will win the Civil War and render the legal tender of the other worthless, so gold and silver coins are best. Telegraphs offer quick communication, but don’t trust them too much, since the Reckoning they’ve got gremlins in them that mess with the messages.
The Pinkerton Detective Agency has been tasked by the Union to investigate weird stuff and hush it up (Lacy O’Malley is understandably not happy about it). They are especially interested in Harrowed, and have a special facility in Denver where they can semi-reliably bring the human in a Harrowed to the fore and offer to recruit them. If they aren’t interested, or the attempt fails, it’s kill-it-with-fire time, of course. The Pinkertons are led by Harrowed Abraham Lincoln (yes, really), who has special, hand-picked agents called Spooks who stride around in black dusters and scowl grimly at people.
The Texas Rangers are similar to the Pinkertons, except for operating in the South instead of the North, and lacking the aforementioned special assets and colourful leadership. They still try to recruit Harrowed when they can, though.
In the Great North-West (Washington, Idaho and Oregon) you get Sasquatches, Wendigos and Wolflings. Sasquatches and Wolflings are non-supernatural abhuman races, looking like great big apes and great big humanoid wolves, respectively. Sasquatches really hate Wendigos and the two fight a bitter war in the wilderness every winter, with the Wendigos prass-ganging Wolflings as cannon fodder. You become a Wendigo by eating human flesh – a white Wendigo if the flesh belonged to your kin, a black Wendigo if it belonged to someone else. If you instead withhold food from someone who is starving, you might become a winged Wendigo. Since Sasquatches are against more Wendigos being created, if they spot someone moving through their lands looking hungry, they’ll try to sneak them some food without being seen – though if they catch someone attempting cannibalism, they’ll forego all subtlety and just kill them.
The High Plains (Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska and Dakota) contain the Badlands, where you get giant bats swooping down and snatching you up. Worse than that is Worm Canyon, where there’s a cult of black magicians who worship the giant worms that live there. They have to sacrifice one victim to the worms every month, or the worms take one of their own number instead, so the cult has spread the rumour that there’s gold in the canyon. When someone gets sacrificed to the worms, one of the hills assume his tortured likeness within a few hours. See the cover picture, it’s awesome.
The High Plains are also the site of Devil’s Tower, and the Black Hills where people dig for ghost rock. Devil’s Tower, if you recall, was the place where Kang went and did something cool so that the Sioux would give him leave to lay his railroad through their lands (to carry the ghost rock from the Black Hills, natch). The book is being annoyingly coy about just what’s going on here – “tee hee, you’ll have to keep your players away from here for a little longer,” nyyyyyeeeehhhh bite me – but apparently it has something to do with mad science and giant scaly bears with machinery on their backs that controls them. Yeah, I don’t know.
Yellowstone, also on the High Plains, has a portal to the Hunting Grounds in it. Manitou and nature spirit sometimes wander out, making things around there very strange. It appears not to be the same portal that Raven used to enter the Hunting Grounds to slay the Old Ones and cause the Reckoning, so I guess there’s more than one.
The Disputed Lands (Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Utah) are the borderlands between the North and the South and thus the site of much bitter fighting – not just between the regular armies, but between outlaws and militias who claim to stand with one side or the other. Famous outlaw Bill Quantrill (never heard of him, but I guess he’s famous?) has come back as a Harrowed with the ability to summon a band of spectral warriors. When his human side takes over, he flees from them and tries to find his old pal Jesse James, who he hopes can help him. When the manitou takes over, he rejoins them and they go on a rampage again. There is also a mysterious gunslinger called the Revenant who rides into town and calls out the foremost lawman there, shoots him, and leaves. The Revenant is actually a sort of embodiment of lawlessness and crime, can only be killed by being shot in the heart by a lawman, and has stats up through the stratosphere.
Salt Lake City has become “the City of Gloom” from all the pollution caused by factories built by the mad scientists who congregate there. The foremost one is, again, Darius Hellstromme, who has figured out that the Weird West runs on fear and is doing horrific experiments with it. In one notable instance, he elminated a monster infestation of a town, and then created a new one to replace it, to see what would happen with the fear level if the source of it get exchanged. He’s got labs all along the rails of his company, Wasatch, and scary things occasionally escape from them. A bunch of Mormons have figured out that he’s a jerk, but since he’s considered the city’s great benefactor – he invented the steam wagons that lets people outrun the sand worms in the desert when entering and leaving the city – they have to keep it quiet for now. They have formed an organisation called the Danites to work against Hellstromme in secret. Also, some people are hunting those sand worms by dropping dynamite on them from flying contraptions, which I felt deserved to be mentioned.
California is even more disputed than those other states – both the Union and the Confederacy claim it, especially since the Great Maze by the coast has a ton of gold, silver and ghost rock in it. Both of them have armies in the area and fleets in the sea outside, and in addition to that, there are Chinese warlords (like the aforementioned Kang) and a Mexican armada raiding back and forth. General Santa Anna has also come up from Mexico at the head of an army, most of which consists of zombies run by an immortal Aztec wizards he’s somehow befriended.
Perched just off the Great Maze is the City of Lost Angels, ruled by a mad preacher named Ezekiah Grimme. He’s actually an abomination in human form who uses black magic to cause a famine throughout the region and then has his goons snatch up people no one will miss (and in the middle of a gold rush with plenty of transients and down-and-outs, there are always plenty of those) and cook them into a feast after his weekly sermons, making sure that all the serving people in the area remain pathetically grateful to him. Urk. His inner circle have the power to throw specially consecrated bones on the ground and have them transform into half-skeletal slaves called Bloody Ones. Even more urk. Also, Grimme’s magic prevents people who attend his feasts from becoming Wendigos, since otherwise it’d get a little obvious.
The Great Basin consists of southern California and Nevada. It holds Death Valley, which is haunted by a band of specters consisting of skulls with glowing eyes clad in black cloaks. A prospector named Pogo Joe had his entire team wiped out by them, but he managed to bounce away from them on his titular mad science contraption. There is also the Devil’s Postpiles, where people you bury have an enhanced chance of coming back as Harrowed, but they always come back with the manitou in full control. Also, all the people who were buried there but didn’t become Harrowed rise temporarily along with a new Harrowed and join it in slaughtering whomever buried it.
Fort 51 is where the Union’s colourful 10th Cavalry Regiment, “the Flying Buffalos.” They use mad science rocket packs in battle, and weird lights seen above Fort 51 at night is supposedly them training. In actuality, Fort 51 is the Union’s equivalent of Roswell, where they develop all their craziest crap. The Flying Buffalos really are stationed there as security, though.
The Mojave Desert! It has sand worms (“Mojave Rattlers” – they don’t rattle, but anyone who sees them soon start quivering) in it. That’s about it. I feel like those critters are more interestingly used in the last two places we saw them…
The Grand Canyon is haunted by the Crushed Man, who’s the ghost of a white man who ran off with an Indian girl but got captured and thrown off a cliff by the warrior she was promised to. Now he roams around, grabs hold of travelers and jumps off a cliff with them in his arms. The only way to kill him is with an arrow made from the bones of his murderer, feathered by a scrap of the dress of his beloved. Oh, and there’s also a gang of outlaws called the Laughing Men, but they kind of pale in comparison, I feel.
The dead of a small Texan town recently rose from the dead and staged a localised zombie apocalypse. It was actually due to a Bayou Vermillion train crashing and spilling its cargo of zombie juice. This is bound to happen again sooner or later.
Remember those prairie ticks from the core? To those you can add the Texas Tummy Twisters, which are a parasite infection that you get from drinking tainted water. They grow in your stomach and then hijack your spinal cord, making you stagger around as a puppet and trying to infect other people. They can kinda-sorta see through your eyes, but they prefer opening a discreet hole in your belly and peeking out through it. I think I am permanently traumatised by the whole idea and I love it.
The Sioux Nation, covering parts of the High Plains, is ruled by the four wicasas, representing the four prominent tribes of the Nation. Three of them want peace with the white man and a return to “the Old Ways” of pleasing the nature spirits and using absolutely no technology. The fourth is Sitting Bull, who is spoiling for a fight and very willing to use the white man’s weapons against him. He was the one who made the deal with Kang to allow him to lay rail through the Sioux Nation, with the secret agreement that Kang would also covertly deliver weapons to Bull. Bull’s followers call themselves the Order of the Raven, which is a not-particularly-subtle hint that Raven is around, whispering in Bull’s ear. Bull is waiting for the presence of the Deadwood mining camp and the mining in the Black Hills to result in an inevitable diplomatic incident between white men and Indians, and then he’ll use that to start his war.
The Sioux don’t let any white men roam around freely – they can only come and go by the Iron Dragon railroad, and they can only mine in parts of the hills they’ve been approved for. Anyone caught trespassing gets nailed to a spear along the road to Deadwood. Also, on rainy nights the corpses get down from their spears and go hunting for more white men to add to their number, which is a nice touch.
The Coyote Confederation in Oklahoma is the southern equivalent of the Sioux Nation. It’s ruled by a mysterious shaman known as Coyote, advised by tribal chieftains Quanah Parker and Satanta. Coyote and Satanta follow the Old Ways, while Parker has taken to guns in a big way. The Confederation is chummy with the Confederacy and keeps raiding Union sympathisers in the Disputed Lands.
Coyote (or Isatai, as his mother called him) hides his face inside a red hood and his name behind the Coyote title, because he had a vision from the mythical trickster Coyote saying that he’d lead the people to greatness by doing so. The vision was actually from Raven, and the mystery act is to make it easier for Raven to assassinate Isatai and take his place as Coyote if he started getting difficult. Man. Raven is kind of an asshole.
The Apaches under Geronimo are harassing Confederate ghost rock shipments in Arizona. They are assisted by the fact that the previous war leader, Conchise, has mentally entered the Hunting Grounds and bound a powerful nature spirit to his service, granting the Apache preternatural stealth skills for as long as his physical body remains alive, after which he’ll serve the spirit for eternity. That’s kind of poignant.
Deadwood, Tombstone and Dodge City get special writeups – not because they are the most significant of places, the book admits, but because they’re the Wild-Westiest. Deadwood, in Dakota, is in the middle of the Sioux Nation but connected to the outside by the Iron Dragon railroad and exists to service miners digging for ghost rock in the Black Hills. A big ghost rock vein to the south was accidentally ignited at some point, and it’s still burning – the smoke is ever-present, and on days when the wind is in the right direction, you can hear the wail of burning ghost rock. Oooh, creepy. Just generally, everyone in town is in a state of nervous frenzy from knowing that the Sioux could decide to wipe it off the map at any time.
Frontier legend Wild Bill Hickok was recently bushwacked by a no-good skunk, and has risen as a Harrowed (seriously, do any famous people just die in this game?!) and is looking to reclaim his six-shooters with the help of his old friend Calamity Jane. Kang is smuggling opium into Deadwood on his railroad. A bunch of ne’er-do-wells loyal to General Custer are sneaking around the woods killing Sioux.
Having seen all three seasons of HBO’s Deadwood, I’ll admit that I’m somewhat amused at the idea of having Al Svearingen turn up and rant about how much he hates these rotting Harrowed COCKSUCKERS!!!!
Dodge City in Kansas is composed of equal parts North and South loyalists, all there to get rich by hunting buffalo, and is about as terminally exciting a place as you might imagine from that (running joke: why is the town called “Dodge”? Because if you want to survive there, better get used to doing it!). Also, the Union Blue and Black River railroads have both reached Dodge and is working to proceed west from it while fighting each other relentlessly, the Union and the Confederacy both have a ton of spies here scheming against each other, and the Coyote Confederation is right next door and strongly disapprove of white men over-hunting buffalo. There’s a lot of ways to get killed here, is what I’m saying. On the bright side, Wyatt Earp and his giant moustache is working as a deputy and determined to Clean Up Dodge.
It’s kind of light on supernatural menaces, though – the only thing mentioned is that there are ghouls living in caves who come out at night to eat corpses. They’re too chicken to be dangerous to the living, unless you try to follow them home.
Tombstone in Arizona is connected to the Bayou Vermillion railroad and is the eastern endpoint for the “Ghost Trail” to the Great Maze. It’s hassled by the Apache and the French Foreign Legion (working out of Mexico) alike, and the closest thing to a law in town comes from a gang called the Cowboys. They’re opposed by Doc Holliday, who freaks them out because he’s dying anyway so he doesn’t give a shit, and also if they shot him his mate Wyatt Earp would hear about it and might be mad enough to get over there and raise a fuss.
Tombstone also houses the home office of the Tombstone Epitath, covering such weird occurrences as a group of undead conquistadores who keep trying to rob travelers of their “stolen silver” around town. The reason being that they were cursed by an Indian shaman whose people they’d enslaved to mine silver for them, and now they can’t rest until they’ve replaced as much silver as they extorted from the Indians. They can’t actually attack anyone who doesn’t carry silver, so that’s a plus.
The in-character section ends with a mention that America isn’t the only place where everything has gone wonky – all other parts of the world are seeing monsters and magic arise too.
After that, we get the “No Man’s Land” of semi-secrets. First off is Knacks, which you can take like Edges at character creation, but never after that since they represent some occult circumstance at your birth or early childhood (like being born with a caul across your face). They all give you some reasonably nifty ability that you can activate by spending a chip, with varying effects depending on the colour chip you spend (like ignoring some amount of fall damage for a white chip, seeing in the dark for a red chip, and negating all damage taken from an attack for a blue chip).
After that we get relics, which are supernatural items that seem to have been charged with some kind of strange energy from their legendary history. They are generally weapons for good rather than being secretly powered by the Reckoners like most other magic, though some can be decidedly creepy – for instance, the Sword of Cortez does a ton of damage, but the more you use it, the more your right arm starts oozing blood until you’re dripping it everywhere you go. Mmm, cool, I guess, but I am not much for extra-special magic items – it’s so hard to figure out how often, and in what way, you should give the players a chance to get hold of them.
The final chapter in the super-secret part of the book (remember, we went through most of it at the same time as the player-facing ones!) concerns black magic, which is special powers that only baddies can have. What, the magic that players can get wasn’t skeevy enough?! Anyway, it’s super-easy to use because the Reckoners want it to work, and also it’s a cheaty NPC thing so of course it’s going to be better than anything the players get. The kind of powers it provides are fairly standard magic stuff, like dealing damage or making you invisible. Somewhat interestingly, the powers are described purely mechanically and the GM is instructed to supply “trappings” that explain just what form it takes for a particular villain (e.g., whether a damage-dealing spell creates a blast of black lightning or causes the target’s internal blood vessels to burst). So this is the origin of that idea for Savage Worlds, I guess.
So that’s it. Okay, pretty decent stuff. Not very easy to get an overview of, though – even with me mushing the IC and OOC information together, you probably noticed that I had to go back over past information a lot. For example, I had to explain Kang once as relating to the railroads, once as relating to the Great Maze, once as relating to Dakota in general and then again as relating to Deadwood in particular. Now, double that for the IC-OOC split, and you can see that you have to skip back and forth like crazy to get some sort of overview on Mr. Kang.
But, that aside, I feel like we have a better idea of the setting now. Next time we’ll delve into Book o’ the Dead, which detail the Harrowed.
This week, our trio of intrepid adventurers sat down with Njall Bashboulder, the dwarven owner of the Bashboulder Mine, to discuss his labour problems. He explained that the mine seemed to be haunted, and that his employees were most cravenly letting a little thing like horrific spectres from beyond the veil of Death stand between them and his profit margin. The players managed to notice that he was being a bit shifty about it… and then completely ignored it in favour of negotiating a share in the mine’s profits, in perpetuity, in return for busting the ghost.
The last part was the players’ own idea, but it actually suits me just fine. For one thing, getting a regular income means that they’ll have some incentive to actually settle in and have some downtime, which I have been trying to figure out how to encourage. And secondly, now every time something goes wrong with that mine, they’ll have to run over and deal with it to protect their investment. Which means that while they might have ignored the deeper currents of the situation this time… well, let’s just say that I’m going to get some use out of that entire plotline, if not right now then further down the road! Mua haha!
Anyway, they were excited to do their very first dungeon crawl in however many years (I am not prone to serving them up; for one thing, I’m all about the True Roleplaying, yo, and for another, I can’t be arsed to draw all those maps! But as you may have noticed from what I’ve been talking about here recently, I’m trying to dip my toe in it a little at the moment). They immediately set out, flickering lamps in hand, and ran straight into a quintette of kobolds who attacked them with cries of “YOU NO TAKE CANDLE!”
Those kobolds were actually an experiment for me. In theory, five kobolds are more than three third-level adventurers are supposed to handle, but I was betting that I knew better, especially since the players have a decent amount of area-of-effect attacks and kobolds have very few HP. Well, it turned out that I was right, though I probably should have considered that kobolds also have very high AC, so there was a lot of swinging and missing before they finally resorted to Burning Hands. Still, that took almost the whole gang down, and of course it helped that the tunnel was too narrow for all five to get at the players at once. Again I note that encounter balance in this system is extremely circumstantial and dependent on a lot of things that it’s hard to come up with hard and fast rules to estimate. Still, it looks like I’m getting a better feel for it.
With only one kobold left standing, I unveiled a ghostly apparition of a tragically beautiful woman moaning and wailing up near the ceiling. The kobold screamed in terror and fled. I had actually been keeping the “ghost” in store for if the battle went too heavily against the players, to have an excuse for the kobolds running away. As it was, it served as a nice way of hinting that the kobolds, while trespassers in the mine, weren’t actually the source of the haunting – wouldn’t want the players to decide that they’d fixed the problem and head back out prematurely, after all.
All in all, a pretty decent session. The system is really nice when you have the right prep for it, and of course it’s always rewarding when the players take initiatives and integrate themselves in the setting. Who knows, this campaign might be the story of how they became the unrivaled business tycoons of Duskwood… For next time, I need to flesh out some of the other locations and encounter I have sketched out for the mine, and decide what sort of loot four kobolds might be carrying – the players might have a steady income now, but they’re still going to need a little extra to pay for all those modification to the steampunk auto-porter that the Tinker is planning on making…
So, we have now outlined the first act of our Monstrous Mishaps Story. Our heroes have, hopefully, a more or less seaworthy raft to enter into the race, and our two main antagonist groups have been introduced. Now we need to take a step back and set up some pieces for the race itself.
Firstly, the judges. There’ll be three of them, starting with Mrs. Frederica von Fjomp of the Committee for Maintaining Pleasantness in Gooberville. She’s a prim and proper middle-aged woman who likes everything to be neat, clean and official. She’ll take a liking to the lawyers, who are equally bland and boring, especially that nice Mr. Harris who never contradicts her (mostly because he is often unable to speak due to his Mister Cellophone Outsider Bane, but never mind). To make Frederica an especially tough sell, we’ll make her the target of Joachim’s Hell’s Fury Jerkass Bane. We can say she cut in line at the supermarket last week, and this is of course unforgivable! He needs to punish her somehow or he’ll be docked GP at the end of the Story; at the very least, he should try to push her in the water or something.
The second judge is Mannfred Mope, the Town Elder. Mannfred is really just in his fifties, but everyone swears he seems older – in fact, sometimes when you glance at him from a certain angle, you could swear that there was moss growing on him! This is because he’s a Grouch, a sort of Monster who embodies the idea of the immortal who’s crossed oceans of time. What that amounts to is that he disapproves of everything, especially things that prevent him from taking long naps. He’ll probably award extra points to whichever team makes the least noise.
The third judge is teenage malcontent Stanley Snottnowse, chosen representative of the senior class of Gooberville High. This is actually the result of a prank on the part of the rest of the student body, because Stanley hates everything that’s lame and boring, and few things are more lame and boring than the annual Race of the Rubber Duckies. He’ll sulk through the whole proceedings but may take a shine to any team that cheats blatantly and entertainingly. Barry and Siegward, being at least aspirationally antiheroes who scoff at civilised rules, may get his vote.
As for the rival teams, we’ve already been over the lawyers and their vessel, the Billable Hour, at some length. They’ll run a clean race and observe all the rules in the book, though they may loudly call foul on any miniscule breach of those rules the players might be guilty of. If the players sabotaged the Billable Hour, Bonefatius will use his Ice Ice Baby power to freeze the water around the raft, effectively sealing any holes. This will, however, so exhaust him that he goes catatonic for the rest of the race, with his colleagues being hampered from having to drag his inert carcass along. That said, they are probably the team most likely to win if the players don’t stop it – two out of three judges are predisposed to like them, and after all they’re supreme go-getters.
The Slayers Barry and Siegward are fielding the Ship of Theseus, a model trireme with a long of Styrofoam oars that may be used to hit competitors over the head with. They’ll cheat at every opportunity, and Siegward’s abilities as a Lout actually makes him a decent sailor. They are also not trying to win, only make the players lose; if they can sink both of their rafts at once, they’ll call that a victory. On the other hand, they suffer from the drawback that no one else likes them enough to be on their team, so they’re strictly a two-man operation.
The town’s premier fast-food dive, Papa Pastrami’s Pizza Palazzo, is joining the race on the Extra Cheese, formed like a slice of pizza with rubber pepperonis. Papa has Mama Pastrami, Figlio Pastrami, and Cugina Piccola Pastrami with him for the ride. None of them are great sailors, but they are hoping to make up for it on style by loudly singing opera at every opportunity, especially when their competitors are trying to concentrate on something.
Finally, the Gooberville chapter of the Bitter Losers Club (remember that one? I’m actually considering renaming it The Mildly Ashamed Boys, but it feels a little overly convoluted…) have listlessly thrown their hat in the ring with the Just My Luck, a vessel whose crowning glory is a giant plastic head that will spurt gushing tears and make a sobbing noise (“boo hoo hoo! Boo hoo hoo!”) when someone is working the pump. The Losers aren’t trying to actually win, as that would be against everything they stand for – they just want a chance to complain about their miserable lives to a ready-made audience. That said, if the players, the lawyers and the Slayers sabotage each other enough that neither of them wins, the GM should absolutely have the Losers beat them, just for maximum humiliation.
All right. That should give us plenty to work with. Next time, we’re dealing with the first stretch of the trek down the river.
