For once, I’m going to write about something hot off the presses! Specifically, here are my thoughts on Twilight Sword, brand spanking new RPG by Two Little Mice in cooperation with Free League. So let’s pick up a rusty sword and venture forth – and for goodness’ sake, don’t attack any chickens!
Yeah, like my snark indicates, this is basically The Legend of Zelda in TTRPG form, with a generous sprinkling of Final Fantasy, isekai anime, and a slew of other things that combines “kind of cutesy” with “faintly melancholic.” You play as a band of Champions wandering the Lands, fighting a monstrous Scourge and trying to bring back Hope in the face of Despair. There are rules for cooking. Monsters have elemental vulnerabilities. You ride giant chickens and get quests from annoying yet lovable little munchkins. It’s adorable.
The general system is basically D&D simplified – you have eight different Abilities that run from 5 to 9, and to do anything you try to roll under one of them with a d12. When a monster hits you, you lose Hearts, and if you run out of Hearts you get knocked out. Monsters don’t roll dice, but rather perform one of a set number of moves they have, such as inflicting damage or knocking someone down.
You have a Way (class) and a Kin (race), the former being your standard fighter, cleric, mage, etc, setup, but the latter being rather more idiosyncratic – the most “normal” thing to play is a Huma (effectively an elf), but you can also play a piece of corporeal shadow in a big hat or a burly Viking penguin. After a certain amount of character progression, you can choose a second Way to cross-class.
There is no PC death; if you get knocked out by a monster, it will either take you prisoner or steal all your gear and leave you to recover on your own. I love that last part – most games don’t actually want you to kill PCs, but they still make PC death constantly possible because they can’t tear themselves away from the hobby’s war-game roots, so the GM has to constantly flub rolls and come up with contrived reasons why the rules don’t apply. Here, we’re at long last being honest about it. You’re not gonna die, because that would ruin the story. Being defeated is a setback, not the end of the campaign.
Magic comes from the spirits of the land, so it’s very wholesome. Champions who follow the Way of Magic or the Way of the Light can learn spells – combat spells for the former, defensive and healing spells for the latter, utility spells for both. You can cast a spell once before it’s “expended,” at which point you can still cast it but it costs you Stamina. When you take a short rest you can replenish one spell, and when you take a long one you can replenish the lot of them. You have to roll against something to cast a spell, but even a failure gives you a minimal result – spells never just “fizzle.”
Cooking and alchemy is a whole thing whereby you combine a bunch of different stuff (foraged from the environment in the case of food, or collected from fallen monsters in the case of potions) and stir them together. The ingredients you put in provides a direction for what the resulting yums will do (e.g., if your base ingredient is red peppars, it’ll probably be something that helps stave off cold), though you roll to find out precisely what the effects are.
Weapons exist in a variety of form, most of which have an “old” and a “regular” version. You usually start out with an old weapon, and it’s normally the best you can loot from monsters, but the regular type is better. Arcane weapons, like staffs, can be used to shoot magical bolts for no cost. More impressive magical items, for instance ones that let you cast a particular spell through them, exist, but are stated to be rare. Armour subtracts from incoming damage and often have some sort of environmental protection too (e.g., wearing heavy furs makes you resistant to cold), but you can also just wear clothes, in which case the particular type of clothes you wear can offer some situational bonuses. Also, weapons can be breakable and degrade over time, though that is an optional rule.
You gain Hope (XP) from exploring new places (the GM is instructed to make such places visible and distinctive-looking from a distance, so the players know which direction to head in), defeating powerful “Boss” monsters, and doing acts of kindness for townsfolk. In doing so, you also decrease the Despair of an area, getting rid of the worst of the monster infestation and getting everyone in a better mood. Bring down Despair to 0, and the locals will throw you a party where you’ll get to meet everyone you’ve helped and be given gifts in thanks.
The game has a default setting called Radia that’s sketched out, ruled over by a menacing Scourge, but it’s clearly meant to be pretty easy to create your own Lands and Scourges. If you run a Legend (longer campaign) then the Scourge will have its own Despair rating that gets decreased along with the areas’, and once it reaches 0 it launches its final assault and the players will get to defeat it and save the realm. Hooray!
Oh, I love this thing, it’s so precious! And I also love that it’s going all in on its video game mechanics – there is zero pretension that this is some sort of gritty simulation where you’re supposed to be able to do anything you want, no, this is about doing the things you do in a light-hearted video game RPG, and everything follows the logic of one. Which also means that all the rules are really hard-and-fast and straightforward. It’s not “rules-light,” per se, because it’s still 200 pages (albeit with a lot of illustrations) and with a solid amount of D&D-ish strategy, but it’s a game where the rules are very easy to follow because they don’t try to cover every imaginable situation. This is a game about heroically fighting monsters and saving the world, so get a-fightin’ and a-savin’!
Also, and I feel like this needs to be mentioned because I honestly couldn’t believe it at first: there are no sAfEtY tOoLs. Not a line, veil or X-card to be seen! And this isn’t Shadowdark, where “suck it up” is the implied attitude – no, this is a bright, cheerful, friendly, feel-good game with, you know, colour and stuff. It’s absolutely marketed to people who want to chill out and not worry too much. And yet, no brittle admonitions about how you must treat everyone around you like they were made of glass because they’re probably one unpleasant thought from collapsing and then it will be your fault for not sanitising your every word?
Is… is woke hyper-fragility actually dying? Might I actually see a day when I can enjoy something light and breezy and it doesn’t make me miserable by lecturing me on how my autism is a crime against humanity? When words like “positive” and “idealistic” won’t immediately send me into panic mode because I know they’re code for “let’s kick around Mister Monster to make ourselves feel better”?
Wow. This really is a game about Hope overcoming Despair!
We have reached a historical moment: the very first World of Darkness citybook! Interestingly, the city so honoured isn’t one of the commonly romanticised American cities like New York or Los Angeles, but Chicago, a place that the book’s own introduction admits lacks a distinct character. In many ways, though, I think that’s a strength of the supplement and the early game in general. Anyone can be gothic-punk when living in an ancient, decaying metropolis. The tone of early VtM captured something a lot closer to earth and with more obvious connection to the game’s target audience: “I’m an interestingly dark, soulful creature of the night… so why am I stuck in this lame-ass dump?!” It’s about being an immortal, blood-sucking fiend in Flyover Country, and I feel like the game lost something when it gradually transitioned out towards the coastal enclaves.
Anyway, let’s dig in.
The book starts out with the expected flourishes, including by a Theme (“nothing is what it seems”) and Mood (“chaos”), as well as insincere assurances that of course you can change anything you want. There is also something I think is very interesting, though: an actual explanation for why the World of Darkness is so gothic-punk.
It’s like this. Vampires are old, and they tend to think of themselves as cultured. So they tend to encourage businesses that cater to a more traditional aesthetics and highbrow esoteric interests, artificially propping them up long after they would, in our vampire-free world, have collapsed from changing customs and public tastes. But vampires are also fundamentally parasites, and it is in their nature to always take a little too much. Thus, they gradually bleed their favoured institutions dry even as they’re holding them in place, resulting in a world where everything seems perpetually sickly and decaying while also stubbornly refusing to die. And of course, vampires are also completely heartless about anything that makes them money, resulting in rampant crime and plenty of down-and-outs, drug addicts, bums, untreated mentally ill people, and just general drifting losers… who, probably not coincidentally, no one will care about if they suddenly go missing because a vampire is feeling peckish.
Which makes a morbid sort of sense, and anchors the flavour of the setting firmly in the failings and dysfunctions of the game’s main characters. It’s a world a la vampire. That’s cool in a way that the other game lines never were, because they always placed the blame somewhere else – it was the Wyrm, it was the Technocracy, it was those filthy soulless normies; at the very most you took a little of the blame for not managing to stop them, but if there had been nothing but people like you in the world everything would have been great forever. Here, though? It was you. The world is like this because you’re in it. Deal with it.
We get a word on Prince Lodin and the general power structure of Chicago. In addition to the regular Traditions, Loding enforces some rules of his own: the police and the press are his to mess with and no one else may touch them, visitors to the city may not be permanently harmed, and keep things civil during Elysium (more on that later). He’s not, however, as all-powerful as he seems, because in fact the Primogen are pulling his strings, and a pair of feuding Methuselah who hardly anyone knows about are pulling theirs. Again, nothing is what it seems.
History! Back before Chicago even properly existed, the Methuselah Menele and Helena fought a great battle there and thrashed each other into centuries-spanning torpors. While they napped, Lodin made himself Prince by driving off the previous one during the Great Chicago Fire. He promptly killed all the Ventrue who had helped him, so ever since then all Ventrue in Chicago is Lodin’s progeny. Modius (remember him?) challenged him with the backing of some socialists and unionists, but Lodin ended up first sending him packing to Gary, then having his childe Ballard wreck the American steel industry just to destroy Modius’ power base among the steel workers. Yeah, I’m thinking that ended up retconned to hell and back, but for now? The reason for the Rust Belt is that Lodin was feeling pissy. That’s canon.
After Modius was dealt with, Lodin chilled for a few decades, but then Anarchs started creeping in. He massacred them in the fifties, but they came right in the eighties under the leadership of a charismatic woman named Maldavis who was secretly backed by several of the Primogen. Maldavis managed to oust Lodin’s puppet mayor and get a progressive one elected, and went on chipping away on Lodin’s power base until he went groveling before the Primogen and got them to turn on Maldavis in return for effectively making himself their puppet ruler.
Exceeeeept all of this was actually controlled from behind the scenes by Helena and Menele who was mind-whammying people even from torpor, with Helena usually backing Lodin and Menele running the opposition. They also control about half the Primogen each, though Menele is working on turning as many of Helena’s supporters as possible and then springing a trap on her. Helena has awakened from torpor, though she’s still weak and posing as a neonate; Menele is still napping and is in fact that mysteeeeeerious corpse that the players might have encountered in Ashes to Ashes.
Geography! My least favourite subject in school, except for PE, and time hasn’t improved it! It doesn’t help that the chapter is all jumbled up – roughly speaking, it describes areas and neighbourhood from a mundane, mortal perspective first, then goes back over them to explain how they’re important to vampires, but information is scattered throughout both sections and it all makes it terribly hard to keep track of what part of town I’m even reading about. A few highlights include the fact that Ballard (that obese Tim Burton-ish vampire who the players met in Ashes to Ashes) has nearly run his favourite restaurant out of business by insisting on taking a central table and then eating until everyone around him is sick. He has learned to keep the food down instead of immediately puking it up as vampires usually do when they try to eat regular food, but this apparently only makes the display slightly less sickening. Heh.
Also, there are occult temples in Lincoln Park that can teach you thaumaturgy – not very well, but they can, because thaumaturgy isn’t unique to vampires but is really just “magic.” See, this is one thing that I love about these early books – they weren’t so up their own asses about how vampires/werewolves/mages/whatever were SUPER SPECIAL AND BEYOND YOUR LIMITED COMPREHENSION. Regular people could learn some magic tricks, it was just easier for magical people. And conversely, there were things like Vampire Louis Pasteur inventing a de-vamp-ifying serum, because science and technology could actually interact with supernatural things. None of it was easy, there were practical reasons why it didn’t happen very often, but it wasn’t strictly gated away where the filthy normies couldn’t get to it.
Vampires refer to just about anything outside of Chicago proper but which is still technically part of the city as “the Outlands,” because they’re pretentious bastards. The Outlands include the airports and the Brookfield Zoo (handy for grabbing some low-grade blood when you’re desperate). Whether they include the city of Gary depends on whether you want to terminally piss off Modius by saying they do or you want to terminally piss off Lodin by saying they don’t (pro-tip: it’s safer to piss off Modius).
Elysium! This will later be a universal part of the setting, but here it’s described as a custom specific to Chicago. Basically, the Primogen like to be able to go to the opera or other highbrow places and discreetly scheme with each other there, and they would prefer it if no one interrupted them. So certain hoity-toity establishments are declared “Elysium” and you’d better not make trouble there or so help you. They’re also open to all vampires who want to attend, though if you do everyone will think you’re sucking up to the elders (which you probably are). Also, you can’t talk politics at an Elysium (because this is a place of respite from worldly concerns and and shame on you for trying to ruin the vibe), unless a Primogen brings up the subject first in which case it’s not only fine but mandatory (because of course addressing this incredibly important issue comes before your silly enjoyment). So basically, they’re kind of like the power-tripping admins of any online forum I’ve ever been on.
The Rack is the polar opposite of the Elysium, being the hot clubs where Anarchs hang out. The Succubus Club (which will get its own book, so be patient) is mentioned, and so is The Cave, which is this rugged working-class bar for manly blue-collar men, and The Blue Velvet, which is seemingly mortal-owned but oddly accommodating to vampires. The concept of Blood Dolls is also described, which is nice because it’s the kind of phrase that later books throw around and assume you’re familiar with. Basically, they’re humans trying very hard to act like vampires (without actually knowing that real vampires exist), including by sharing blood – which is very convenient for actual vampires, because it makes them look about 100% less suspicious when they’re in a Blood Doll hangout.
The part of downtown south of the river is called “the Hive” by the Kindred, the implication being that mortals are scurrying insects. Okay, I’m starting to think the Garou have the right idea re: the Kindred needing to have their undead asses kicked. Anyway, it’s described as both crime-ridden and inhabited mostly by poor ethnic minorities and the centre of business and politics in the city, and I’m not sure if that’s just bad writing or if it was a contradiction that really did exist in the real Chicago of 1992.
“The Barrens,” finally, is the vampire all-purpose name for any and every place where they don’t wanna go, apparently usually because it’s full of disagreeable poor people. You’d think they’d be especially interested in going there, then, since poor people can make less of a fuss about people chewing on them than rich people, but okay… Two examples are the Michigan Avenue Underground, where the street runs in two levels and the lower street is perpetually in darkness and vagrants tend to live there to stay out of the rain, and the Cabrini Green Housing Project, which is a ghetto for the poor that’s filled with street crime encouraged by real estate developers who want to drive the poor out so they can put up actual profitable building there. Well, that’s suitably bleak!
The real meat of the book is of course the NPC section, which does not disappoint. Something I really like is how it presents entire lineages of vampires, so you can read about why Vampire A sired Vampire B, how Vampire B inevitably failed to play the practical or emotional role that Vampire A had hoped it would, and how Vampire B then went on to sire Vampire C for its own reasons and to its own eventual disappointment. You really get a sense of dysfunctional family histories, with each generation resenting the one before and expecting too much of the one after it.
Right off the bat we get a deeper description of Menele (he’s the oldest Brujah, so he comes first in the list). Apparently he was once the king of a Greek city-state who got turned by “a Third-Generation Brujah” (not described as an Antediluvian, which might be significant) named Troile after the sacking of Troy (would you believe those bastard Troyans had stolen his wife?!). He then played a part in the founding of Carthage, here described as a Brujah-created utopia where vampires and humans managed to live together for mutual advantage. Sadly, Carthage was betrayed by Helena to its Ventrue and Malkavian enemies and their Roman pawns, leading to a long-running battle across history that included the eruption of Vesuvius and the fall of the Incan Empire (yes, really) before leading to that fateful showdown near what would become Chicago.
We also, sadly, see the beginning of power creep in that Menele has several Disciplines above 5 (yes, he’s a Methuselah, but remember how the core said that that meant he might have as many as fifteen dots of Disciplines combined? Yeah, that didn’t last long). Apparently his super-Auspex means that he can sense what’s going on around him even when in torpor, and his super-Dominate means that he can mind-whammy anyone who touches his inert form. Still not sure how those fairly modest abilities lets him be one of the power players in the city, mind you. Yes, I am simultaneously complaining that this is too much and not enough, whatsittooya?!
We’re also informed that Menele was responsible for most of the events of Ashes to Ashes, having groomed the ghoul who abducted Lodin and also nudged Modius into sending the players to Chicago to take the fall for it. He didn’t count on his body being claimed by a vampire hunter, though, so he might have gotten the players to extract it and then mind-whammied them into hiding it and forgetting where.
Other prominent Brujah include two of the Primogen, Menele’s childe Critias (a smartass Athenian sophist who fancies himself a great political philosopher, and who isn’t aware that Menele is pulling his strings) and Tyler (originally a peasant rebel against the medieval English crown, who went on to play a part in the forming of the Sabbat that she now keeps hidden, and Helena’s secret patsy). There is also as Balthazar / Sheriff, who like most other Brujah started out as a rebel and political thinker, but while most of them were some variety of socialist or civil rights activist, Sheriff was a Southern Confederate. Perhaps predictably, he didn’t get along well with his fellow Brujah and defected to become Lodin’s henchman since that offered him his best opportunity for being a smug, brutal, corrupt-hick stereotype. To thine own self be true, or something.
There are some Caitiffs (which at this point aren’t the result of “weak blood” but are just vampires who haven’t been properly raised as part of a clan), the most notable one of whom is Maldavis, who’s somehow managed to survive Lodin’s wrath. She’s interested in starting a new rebellion, but she’s mostly been replaced by other anarch leaders.
Gangrel! There is a Gangrel Primogen named Inyanga, who was a shaman way back in Africa. She’s somewhat less morally bankrupt than most elder vampires and tries to just feed off people who she thinks deserve it. She’s got some magic power tricks from her mortal days – again something that’s cool and flavourful and that wouldn’t be allowed under the later editions because RESPECT THE IRONCLAD LINES!!!! Ah well. Also somewhat creepy-cool is her childe Doyle, who worked in the butcher yards and found killing cows to be a spiritual experience that made him one with the animal’s soul. Like… ick, but iiiiiinteresting, but ick. He embraced a kind-hearted animal lover named Rose, but she got so horrified by his animal-slaying ways that she wants to kill him… and of course she’d never feed off of a poor, defenseless animal, only from those human jerks! Hee.
The Malkavians have no Primogen, though they do have a leader of sorts named Maureen who has the distinction of being the one who started the Great Chicago Fire. She runs an insane asylum and has a bunch of deranged progeny, including a pair who think they’re a stodgy married couple and their psychotic “son” (actually their sire). I love it, it’s so horrifying.
The Nosferatu Primogen is a guy named Khalid who used to be a Muslim general during the Crusades. He’s pursuing Golconda, but his anger management problem keeps getting in the way. His progeny includes a pair of abused children who killed their parents (he chose them for the embrace because he figured that becoming deformed undead monstrosities would actually be a step up for them) and who are now unwillingly served by the ghosts of said parents. First canonical appearance of wraiths? I’m not entirely sure.
The Toreador! Helena is one. She’s also from ancient Greece, though she’s not actually Helena of Troy even if parts of her backstory do involve running away from her husband to her lover’s family, only to have her husband follow and kill them all. Anyway, we already went through most things about her when talking about Menele. She’s got even more super-duper-Disciplines and can astral-project all over the place when in torpor and Dominate people from afar, which does seem like it would be more helpful in subtly directing things. She was the one who whammied Maureen into starting the Great Chicago Fire as part of her bid to get rid of the Menele-backed Prince and put Lodin in his place, by the way.
The Toreador Primogen is Helena’s grandchilde, Annabelle. She’s a vapid socialite with pretensions of being a great patron of the arts. Helena thinks she controls her, but actually Menele is only letting her believe that. She’s secretly Modius’ sire. She’s got another childe named Sophia who’s an exotic dancer because Annabelle thought that that could become the next daringly transgressive art form, but it turns out that vampires – who have no physical need for sex, though some indulge in it anyway for psychological reasons – don’t have much interest in strippers. Annabelle now treats Sophia as a failed experiment, much to Sophia’s Blood Bound heartbreak. See what I mean about the messed up family dynamics?
The Tremere are pretty few in numbers, but they do have a Primogen, named Nicolai. He’s one of those creepy perpetually-a-child vampires that you need to include in any self-respecting urban fantasy setting, though for him it’s more complicated in that he’s also a wizard of considerable knowledge and power while still being emotionally a child. He sired an old black guy named Abraham to help him deal with that pesky not-of-legal-age issue, and Abraham went on to accidentally sire Maldavis (who’s his mortal granddaughter – yeah, it gets convoluted) when she surprised him and he freaked out. Nicolai also has a number of thaumaturgical rituals that weren’t in the core (which was rather sparse on rituals in general), letting him do things like see into the past and turn into a bat (you can already do that with Protean, but of course no true Tremere would do anything like a Gangrel!).
In contrast, there are a lot of Ventrue, and they’re all Lodin’s descendants because he refuses to let any other Ventrue settle in Chicago. It’s all sort of creepy and narcissistic. Anyway, some of the more interesting ones are Ballard, our resident fat bastard with more money than God. Whose Ventrue flaw is that he must exclusively feed on his prepubescent male family members. I love Ballard, he’s so gross and terrible. Lodin uses him to run finances. There’s also Drummond, who used to be a railroad baron back when railroad barons were relevant, and who’s basically an idiotic man child who doesn’t seem to quite get that he’s a vampire. And finally, there’s Al Capone. Yes… yes, that Al Capone. Who’s a vampire. Because this is a very silly game that thinks it’s a very serious game.
Under “other” there are a couple of skeevy Sabbat vampires who are lurking around waiting for an opening that will let them take over, and an Inconnu who is supposed to just observe but has a soft spot for the Anarchs. There is also a demon in human form, long before those were retconned out and then reintroduced in Demon: the Fallen. She’s a succubus who feeds through sex, and she’s described as behaving kind of like Madonna in a music video. Also, “don’t bother describing her clothes – she doesn’t wear any.” Ooooookay, that’s somer extremely 90s grimdark fan service, I feel…
There is a few pages explaining who is in a coterie with who, which does help keep track of the politics. Notably, coteries are not portrayed as exclusive – you can be in two different coteries at once. The Primogen is considered a single coterie, for instance, but most of them are also the leader of their own mostly-clan-exclusive coteries. In addition, there are also three different anarch coteries with slightly different ideologies, the Sabbat and the Kindred of Gary are considered to be one each, and also there is a Gangrel biker gang and this vampire punk band called Baby Chorus.
The final chapter is a set of random encounters to introduce whenever the characters are wandering around Chicago and you feel like you haven’t screwed with their heads nearly enough lately. They’re divided into a number of categories that are supposed to reflect the themes of Vampire (the Beast, Paranoia, Horror, Nostalgia, etc). Examples include finding a vampire who’s drunk off his ass and ranting to a group of mortals about how horrible it is to be a vampire (breaking the Masquerade in the process); being approached by a pair of teenage girls who want to buy a pint of your blood, but can’t remember why they want that or where they got the money they’re meant to pay you with; running into an old friend from your living days, who remark on how strangely well-preserved you are; and accidentally killing a vessel only to have it immediately rise as a ghost who now exists solely to follow you around and complain at you. There are also some of the first, brief encounters with werewolves, such as one where you meet a werewolf kid who’s gotten lost and need help finding his way home, and a rather less cutesy one where you come across a massacre by rampaging lycanthropes and have to immediately roll to avoid frenzying while the the furries will likely be back any second. Most of them are pretty good, painting a picture of a world that’s at once gritty, whimsical, and a bit messed up.
Well, a few complaints aside, I really loved this book! The NPCs really pop, and the intricate relations between them feel like they’ve got a lot of potential – no one is as all-powerful or as infallible as they’d like to be, which means that anything you want to throw at the players can be some kind of scheme gone wrong. It all has a feel of some kind of dark, twisted wonderland, full of messed-up people acting on motivations that can range from the oddly sweet to the horrifically evil.
Next one up zooms in even more, and focuses on a single location of Chicago and what can happen there. Stay tuned for The Succubus Club.
We’re staying in the magical realm of Aysle for a while longer, because Queenswrath is a collection of short adventures set there. A “queenswrath” is apparently an Ayslish legal concept whereby a figure of ultimate authority – which has been exclusively Ardinay or Uthorion-as-Ardinay for the last few centuries – issues a general command for any valiant heroes who are available to go and deal with some dire and pressing threat to the realm or haunting and sinister mystery. So… it’s a quest, is what it is. Each one is started with an in-character description that the players will presumably find posted in an inn or however that works, and then follows the actual nuts and bolts.
In The Unholy Order pilgrims visiting a certain Irish monastery have been mysteriously vanishing. This turns out to be because an evil sorcerer, hoping to weaken the faith in Honourable religions, have killed all the monks and reanimated them as skeletons, and is now using them to kill any pilgrim who stops by. So the players find a monastery where only one of the monks will talk to them while the others are shuffling around in silence with their hoods pulled down, and in the middle of the night they will be invited to see a “secret miracle” that will just consist of them having their throats slit. It’s very Gothic. I approve.
The Fall of a Storm Knight has Tolwyn of Tancred, still the non-High Lord NPC who gets the most exposure, apparently betraying Ardinay. Except it’s actually an evil doppelganger posing as her. And yes, there will be a scene where both of them are pointing at each other and going, “I’m the real one! Kill her!”
The Tunnel is just a sort of linear dungeon through the Dover-Calais tunnel between England and France, where the players have to fight their way past harpies and a cyborg troll (it got hit with a double axiom wash from Aysle and the Cyberpapacy) before they can establish that the far side is controlled by Cyberpapal troops and that, all in all, it’ll probably be best to guard it carefully.
The Essence of Evil has the players recruited to free the spirit of Merlin from Stonehenge, except it’s actually Morganna Le Fey who’s trapped there. The reason she’s trapped is that Stonehenge is a Core Earth hardpoint, so it’s actually less magical than the realm around it, making Morganna too weak to escape. An interesting touch there. Anyway, Morganna will possess an innocent girl and leave the players to either come up with a way to non-lethally pacify her (gain Honour), kill her along with the host (gain Corruption) or let her leave to help Uthorion. The last is presumably the worst option, but I dunno, for a legendary enchantress her stats are pretty awful…
The Winged Terror sends the players to investigate who’s killing Ardinay’s ambassadors to an elven community. Not sure why there are “elven communities” in England – the game does have a habit of just handwaving why creatures native to the invading cosm has just appeared all over the realm even when they wouldn’t reasonably have been part of the invasion forces. Anyway, the reason for the deaths is that one of the elves is scheming to have his people defect to Uthorion’s side, so he’s convinced a griffin to attack and kill Ardinay’s envoys to plant strife between them.
A Blanket Across Time has mummy attack a security guard at a museum in Oxford. It turns out that it’s been sent by one of Doctor Mobius’ overgovernors to steal an Eternity Shard in the form of the baby blanket of Moses that’s part of one of the exhibits. There is some gratuitous Nile Empire intrigue about how the overgovernor actually wants the Eternity Shard for herself and doesn’t mean to hand it over to Mobius, but it’s not really relevant to the mummy-hunt.
Beachhead is an underwater adventure where a Corrupt uvwe (a seal-shifter, apparently) has had the bright idea of creating a gospog field from the corpses of uvwe slain during unrelated circumstances. The players will need to stop his soggy gospog from terrorising ocean-side communities. It’s kind of cool, but I feel like I could have used some more information on the uvwe, here – I went back and checked the main Aysle book, but no, they’re not mentioned there.
In Holger the Dane a wicked dwarf wizard is trying to awaken Danish folk hero Holger from a curse that has him turned to stone, and then convince him to fight for Uthorion against the “evil” Ardinay. This is presented as standing a decent chance of working, so I guess Holger isn’t that bright… Anyway, the players will have to storm or sneak into the castle of Kronborg which the dwarf has taken over and filled with his Viking minions.
The Horn of Darkness sees the city of Visby suffering a strange plague that’s actually caused by a “black unicorn” poisoning the drinking water with magic. Uthorion has also sent a succubus from Orrorsh to serve as the unicorn’s bodyguard. The pair hangs out in the Trojeborg Maze, which… isn’t really what the writers seem to have thought it was. Like, it’s not an actual labyrinth with high walls you can get lost in, it’s a complicated stone formation laid out on the ground. Ah well, it was before the Internet.
In The Crystal Obsession, the players are sent to deal with a crystal skull that holds the spirit of an evil Aztec sorcerer. Since smashing the skull will just release the spirit, they instead have to place it in a remote region which Ardinay will then declare it illegal to enter on pain of death. I can’t help it notice that while Great Britain is described as still having a functional government, Ardinay is pretty free about throwing out orders. It’s probably too much to hope for that this is Uthorion’s Darkness Device whispering in her ear, right?
In The Treasure of Cerne Abbas, a group of Cyberpapacy agents and a group of Nippon Tech agents have been snooping around the local chalk giant. It turns out that they both think that there is some kind of alien artifact buried under it. There is, though it’s just a message of interstellar peace and harmony and not a weapon or anything. So… Core Earth aliens are canon, I guess.
The Ghost of Bodiam Castle is a clever double meaning title. The players are sent to deal with a ghost who’s haunting a castle, but if they look into things a bit more, they’ll find out that the castle is itself a ghost – it spontaneously appeared, ghost and all, during the axiom wash, with the real thing having been transported stone by stone to America years ago. It’s not a “real” haunting, but a sort of projection of stories and fears surrounding the place. To get rid of the ghost, they have to go to the real castle in what is now the Living Land (and the hunting ground of a giant squid thing), destroy the hidden corpse of the woman the ghost thinks it’s the restless spirit of, and bring back proof of the same, in which case it realises that it’s not real and ceases to exist.
In The Golden Sickle, an island off the coast of Scotland has converted to Druidism (which isn’t a problem per se) and is being manipulated by a Corrupt noble (which is). The players need to go there, spring a Light-aligned spy from captivity, and ideally make the townsfolk realise what a greedy opportunist their mayor is.
The Music of Misery has the children of an Irish village disappearing to the sound of someone playing the flute. It turns out that it’s the work of a tribe of Corrupt faeries out for revenge against humans for making the magic go away once upon a time. The flute is a magical artifact that opens a gateway to the faeries’ extradimensional haven.
The Dragon Conspiracy, not unreasonably, is about a conspiracy involving a dragon. A bunch of Corrupt dwarves have mind-whammied the people of a village into thinking that they’re long-time friends and complained to them that they’re under attack by an evil air dragon. The dragon they’re fingering is in fact a noble fire dragon, but the dwarves have injured its throat so it can’t speak or breathe fire, and then cast a spell on it to make it resemble an air dragon. The players are sent to slay the supposed evil beast, but should preferably realise that something is hinky.
The Beasts Beyond the Light concerns a pair of political refugees from Orrorsh, who are being hunted by two werewolves in the service of Thratchen (who if you recall has covertly set himself up as de facto High Lord of Orrorsh while the Gaunt Man is dealing with his little trapped-in-a-possibility-storm situation). They’ve found out that he’s not actually reporting to the Gaunt Man, so now he wants them dead. Not sure how that’s such a big secret given that all player characters are assumed to know about it, but fine. The players are tasked with taking them to an abandoned abbey and having a big old monster movie showdown with silver bullets and holy relics.
In The Sleep of Death, a sorcerer has been robbing occult stores in London to build a sort of magical weapon of mass destruction that’s going to drive the whole city insane. He’s making use of a Hand of Glory to overpower the shopkeepers, which is an icky talisman that can put people into perpetual sleep that can only be broken if the Hand is returned to the corpse it was fashioned from. The players have to hit the books, find out how the relevant magic works, and then first clobber the sorcerer and then get the Hand back in its grave so that those snoozing shopkeepers wake up.
Assault on Urquhart has the players travel to Loch Ness, which now seems to have a real monster in it. It’s actually a water dragon in the service of a Viking chieftain, who in turn is there to raise an army of Vikings, half-folk and lesser folk to harrass any Light forces in the region.
The titular Henbane the Witch is Ardinay’s pet ferret, who is actually an evil mage out to assassinate her. The players need to figure that out and then hunt down a woman who has every nook and cranny of the keep memorised and can turn into a tiny animal.
Aaaaaaand finally, The Crown of Arthur has a vampire from Orrorsh and her ghoul minions digging up Glastonbury Tor looking for Arthur’s crown, which is an Eternity Shard. There isn’t much more to it than that, but the vampire gets a strangely in-depth backstory full of Gothic tragedy, in contrast to the far more sparse writeups most villains in this book gets. You feel kind of like she’s escaped from Vampire: the Masquerade…
Well, that’s a lot of content for a 66-page book! Most of it is really good, too. You really get a feel for what sort of place Aysle is, about the many forms that the Dark takes, and how things frequently aren’t what they seem. The way that the fantastic, extra-dimensional elements are blended with the history and landmarks of the actual British and Scandinavian countries (with, admittedly, a few fumbles on the details) is also particularly nice – this is the same thing that I liked in The Living Land, and that i missed in The Nile Empire, a strong sense of both what the realm normally is and what it’s been turned into.
Next, we’ll be heading into a full-fledged campaign. Stay tuned for The Relics of Power.
This week, I actually forced myself to do some work on the Monstrous Mishaps quickstart. Not gonna lie, it’s slow going. Part of the problem is that I’m just not in a Monstrous Mishaps mood. MM requires you to be irreverent, snarky, laid back. At the moment, I am feeling painfully serious, sincere and uptight.
But this needs to be done, because the delay is getting ridiculous – I was all set to publish the thing in 2025, and then one thing after another happened and now it’s looking like 2027 at the earliest. And to be honest, a lot of the jokes and references in this thing were dated even when I wrote them down! So let’s take a look at what I have managed to do this week.
First off, I have written the introduction:
Spring is in the air, and in the small town of Gooberville that means that the annual Race of the Rubber Duckies is coming up. Every year in your quaint little burgh, a bunch of people with no engineering or seamanship skills build and pilot homemade rafts down Bouncy Brook, trying to keep their rickety craft together and collect as many as possible of the yellow rubber ducks that’s released at the starting point, while pretending not to sabotage their opponents’ crafts at every opportunity. The winner – determined from finishing time, presentation, rubber ducks acquired, and how thoroughly soaked they got – gains eternal glory, or at least bragging rights for a few weeks.
This year, your Slew has happened to get its hands on a used raft in need of only moderate repairs and you’re determined to prevail. You just need to fix up the raft, ride it to victory, and not get sabotaged by all the people who despise you – how hard can it be?
As you stand in the back yard of the suburban house you share, you think that perhaps the answer is… a little bit harder than expected? The raft, purchased at an oddly low price by your curiosity-dealing friend Lisa Ludlock, is Christened “The Noodly Nightmare” and consists of a tangle of brittle rubber tubes haphazardly flung together around a wooden frame holding four plastic barrels. There is room for six people to ride the thing, but the method of strapping in is so complex that it half amounts to assembling the raft around you. Right now, many of the tubes have come loose or are flopping listlessly around the frame, and the barrels have sprung leaks in several places. The whole thing needs several more coats of bright paint, a new wooden board or two, steel wire by the yard, industrial-strength rubber patching, and possibly hopes and prayers.
You have the rest of the afternoon off from your various places of employment, and the race starts fight thing tomorrow. Time to get to work!
So… this isn’t great. The humour is too forced. The design of the raft is too basic. If I’ve learned one thing from Paranoia, it’s that the more specific a situation is, the more ways there are for it to be demoralisingly wrong! But it’ll have to do for now. At least it’s a starting point.
So, the next thing that happens is that the players will need to get to work. So let’s divide up the tasks. What needs to be done here?
Well, first off, we need a visit to the hardware store to get some wood, glue, nails and steel wire. So we’ll need to write up a description of a labyrinthine hardware store where everything is impossible to find, the staff are too morose and underpaid to be of any help, and a bunch of super-blue-collar guys hang around to scoff at anyone who isn’t as manly as them (and none of the pregenerated characters are especially manly).
Secondly, we need paint. We can say that Lisa the Flake insists on going to get it, but if the players don’t send anyone along with her – which she will be insulted if they do, unless they handle it really diplomatically – she’ll come back after the stores are already closed, without any paint, having been distracted by a sale in a clothing store. In which case, getting hold of paint somewhere else is up to the players’ creativity.
Thirdly, hyper-competetive Olive will want to head over the offices of DeSieve, Connive, Bamm-Boozle & Harris and sabotage the raft they’re building there. She’ll need to be physically restrained to keep from doing so (and of course that’ll make her feel insulted), and if she goes alone she’ll mess up, get caught, and result in the lawyers complaining to the race judges and getting the players demerits.
Some of the pregens’ Banes are going to be in play. Marissa is going to need some kind of sordid desire to act on, related to her grumbling back. We’ll say that she knows that the only thing that will make the stupid thing quiet down for now is if she can spend a few hours sleeping on the Ultra-Slackinator 6000, the high-tech super-mattress on display in Sleep On A Cloud, the town’s premier bedware store. She of course can’t ask anyone’s permission for that because the Guilty Pleasure Bane explicitly forbids it, so she’ll need to sneak off and try to break into the store on her own after hours. We can say that Barry Hussel and Siegward Trout will make an attempt to sabotage the players’ raft during the evening, so that the other players can deal with that while Marissa is off doing her own thing. If she denies her Bane, or tries but fails to satisfy it, she’ll lose 3 HP to a minimum of 1 before the race starts. That would normally happen in between Stories, but this is likely to be a one-shot, so we’ll bend the rules a little.
Winnie, meanwhile, has discovered that Abigail von Heckning is in possession of the Lower Left Wisdom Tooth of Guzzlin’ Gary, a legendary Vampire from out in Wisconsin. Apparently she got it on eBay solely for the bragging rights, but Winnie absolutely must have this rare and precious relic. Abigail, of course, will be reluctant to sell it, though she might agree in return for Winnie’s help in sabotaging the player’s raft race. Until she gets her hand on the Tooth, Winnie will be distracted and have a Moderate Disadvantage to all Keenness Challenges due to her It Must Be Mine! Bane.
Finally, DeSieve, Connive, Bamm-Boozle & Harris will send Shirley to sweet-talk Klaus into defecting to their team. She’ll lay it on thick, appealing to his company loyalty and the unbreakable bond of bureaucrats, but will also guiltily mention that Mr. DeSieve made threatening noises about lowering Klaus’ low salary if he refuses to be a team player. She won’t hold it against him if he doesn’t do what she says, but she will hold it against him if his team cheats – such as by letting Olive try to sabotage the lawyers’ raft.
All right. That’s a start. It involves all the major GMCs except for Nutty Elmir, who we can bring in later. Next time, we’ll start fleshing out some of these situations a little more.
Our trip through classical Paranoia continues. This time, we’ll see some adjustments to the basic concept that will stick around for a while, as well as parodies of bureaucracy and show business. Also poop. A surprising amount of poop.
The background for Send in the Clones revolves around recurring background character Teela O’Malley (Teela-O-MLY-6, technically). She’s sort of the setting’s all-purpose media icon – if some reference needs to be made to what passes as pop culture in Alpha Complex, it’ll probably involve her. Essentially, she’s the human equivalent of that Bouncy Bubble Beverage stuff that everyone in Alpha Complex is apparently always guzzling. Here, she’s decided that a superstar like her deserves immortality, and since good citizens are limited to six clones, she’s founded a secret society called the Clone Rangers who exist to create endless clones of her.
Still, all that takes a while to become relevant, because the players’ initial mission is completely unrelated. They are to go down into the sewers and search for the source of a pirate transmission that is broadcasting traitorous (and out of tune) songs through the PA system. The players spend the first act wading through sewage and dealing with traps set by a deranged Javere expy (he’s dedicated his life to hunting down a clone for stealing a loaf of synthbread!) before finding the pirate radio station. It’s set up in the abandoned studios of cancelled children’s program Captain Botaroo, which featured a jolly, German-accented robot executing commies and traitors. Needless to say, Captain Botaroo is still around and will be activated in short order.
The actual guilty parties are a gang of heavily armed prepubescent kids who are basically just doing it for a lark. The GM is instructed to really screw with the players’ heads about whether they really want to commit mass infanticide, all while the kids are cheerfully shooting at them and Captain Botaroo is running amok. Then, out of nowhere appears Teela O’Malley who gets the kids to settle down and then disappears as mysterious as she came.
Once back home, the players get haranged for a report, and if they admit to having met Teela, they are promptly scheduled for execution since they’ve been consorting with a traitor (not that that’s public knowledge, but fairness and reason don’t really exist in Alpha Complex). Still, they’ll grudgingly pardoned at the last second and sent to assassinate Teela. Aha, but first they need to get their gear for the mission.
That, as it turns out, is the entire second chapter. The players first have to navigate a Kafka-esque nightmare of offices, forms, and unhelpful bureaucrats before they can even get their basic ammo. Then they get sent to pick up the experimental equipment, which includes things like a force field that needs to be plugged into a wall socket and will black out all of Alpha Complex, a tiny robot that attaches itself to your shoulder as a “morale booster” (and records everything you say, and will totally snitch on you), and a sonic blaster that has a 25% chance of getting stuck each time it’s fired, requiring you to smash it against a wall to make it stop wailing.
It also includes the funbot, which is an automated morale officer who tags along and tells the same unfunny jokes over and over. If people fail to laugh, it starts spurting laughing gas at them. It randomly throws cream pies at people. Whenever the GM decides it would be either funny or convenient, it also runs off in a random direction. And of course, the players are responsible for it on pain of death. If it does get broken, they get treason points, and another funbot is promptly dispatched to the scene, as obnoxious as the last one.
This is also where the CRUD (Clone Recycling Unlimited Delivery) system is introduced. Apparently someone realised that while giving the players backup clones was a nice way to not have to go easy on them, having to roleplay a new clone getting activated and making its way to wherever the party currently is was still terribly inconvenient. So in this module, the R&D department has started outfitting Troubleshooters with sensors that check their vital signs, and when one dies a new clone is dispatched by means of high-speed pipe, effectively plopping down right where the last one expired. There’s a note that of course there is no reason why this should always work perfectly and that there’s all sorts of mischief the GM can work with clone replacement, but at least this way she won’t have to think about it if she doesn’t want to. And also, I feel like it just adds something to the dehumanising nature of it that you’re not just replaceable but instantly replaceable, that your untimely death isn’t even a brief hiccup.
Anyway, chapter three is the actual freaking mission. The players are sent to Alpha Complex’s entertainment division, where they deal with a few Hollywood caricatures and get put on a game show with convoluted rules and live weapons, the prize for which is to get to meet Teela. The first half is a quiz with laughably easy questions that you can, however, only answer by pressing the right button first, and there is no obvious way to work out from first principle what’s the right button. The second half is a sort of basketball match where lethal force is permitted, and where the players’ opponents are a bunch of towering super-soldiers. There is a specific minigame for playing out the match, complete with randomised behaviour for the opposing team, which is a nice touch.
Whether the players win or lose, they will eventually get sent to a room where Teela is supposed to be, but it turns out to be three different rooms and the first two the players enter have secret society meetings in them. The first is for a group called the Pepsi Generation, who I think would probably be a lot funnier to me if I knew anything about Pepsi commercials circa 1985. The second one is for the secret society that one of the players are part of, and they promptly get outed and have to decide who to shoot at. Fun times.
On the third try, the players find Teela in the middle of a ton of incriminating evidence about her mass-cloning business. The players chase her down to her cloning facility in the sewers (that’s why she was at the Captain Botaroo studios – they were right next door and she was checking to see what the ruckus was about) where they have to fight dozens of deformed Teela clones, her brainwashed minions, attackers from the Pepsi Generation, rampaging scrub bots, and whatever else the GM can come up with. And then someone brings down a wall and the whole place gets flooded with sewer water.
The adventure ends with the players getting out of the stinking mess and back home, where they either get executed for failing the mission (if they can’t prove they killed at least one Teela), executed for succeeding in the mission (Teela has somehow managed to get back in the Computer’s good graces, so the whole mission has been memoryholed) or executed for all the other traitorous stuff they probably got recorded doing.
The book ends with a few thoughts from the developers. Most notably, they mention that they initially thought about how they were going to retcon the destruction of Alpha Complex at the end of The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues (there was canonically more than one Alpha Complex in the first edition, but the one that got destroyed also explicitly had a Teela O’Malley in it), before they came to a liberating realisation: no one actually cared. Alpha Complex is a silly place and the last thing it needs is actual continuity. Given how poorly later modules that did try for a metaplot were received, this was probably a thought they should have held on to…
Well… I don’t know. I felt like this one kind of dragged, especially with the second part. Certainly to read, but I think it’d probably be annoying to play, too. I get that the idea is to get the players frustrated with just how impossible it is to get anything done in Alpha Complex, but I feel like they’d get less entertainingly frustrated and more bored. That’s not to say that there isn’t a ton of fun stuff here – the funbot is wonderfully obnoxious, the killer game show is inventive, and the fight in the cloning facility is cool and bizarre – but all the different parts fit together a little awkwardly.
Oh well. Next up is what seems to be the first attempt to write a sourcebook as opposed to an adventure module. Stay tuned for Acute Paranoia!
Oh joy. We have gotten to the Drakar & Demoner Expert rules. The ones that were the basis of the bloated, nigh-unplayable fourth edition. The ones that added complexity for the sake of complexity and page count for the sake of pagecount. The ones that were the worst idea ever.
Not that I’m bitter or anything.
Sigh… well, let’s get through this. This box of two books (labelled Rules and Magic) is, in theory, a set of optional additions to the second edition core rules, made so that the GM can choose which ones to include and which ones to ignore. The introduction assures us that it’s all on popular demand, and that “more skills,” “more spells,” and “more wilderness survival rules” were what players were clamouring for at the time. As I was four years old at the time, I can neither confirm or deny that, though I’ll admit that wilderness survival does come up a lot in fantasy roleplaying…
RULES
First up is an extended character creation system. We’re explicitly told that we can choose to play a non-human, this time – in both the core books, this was clearly a possibility but more sort of implied or mentioned in passing. We’re warned that some races, like elves, are especially challenging to play properly, though. Right…
Stats can now optionally be generated either by having one die for each stat automatically roll the maximum (e.g., humans have Strength 3d6, so you’d roll 2d6+6 for your Strength) or by rolling three full sets of stats and choosing the one you prefer. Okay, that’s actually a big improvement given that my constant gripe is that PCs will otherwise end up with far humble stats than most named NPCs. You also need to roll for social standing if you’re a human, dwarf or halfling, with some classes having restrictions – you can only choose to be a Knight if you happen to be of noble birth, for instance. All white ducks are burghers and all other ducks are paupers, apparently, I’m not sure what’s up with that. Any “uncivilised” race, like orcs, are also considered paupers. Oh, and all settled giants are peasants, while all other giants are paupers. Which implies that you can choose to play a giant – not sure that’s going to be a good idea in a game all about exploring cramped ruins, mind you. Class also determines your starting funds under this system.
You can now choose your age. Higher ages get worse stats but more points to spend on skills and higher starting funds.
Classes are about unchanged but still repeated here to include new skills. There’s one new class, the Jester, who’s effectively a Thief with some additional fighting and wilderness skills. It’s noted that the GM should be lenient about letting players pick whichever class they want regardless of their race, but to also not go too crazy with it, because a dwarf pirate would be “just silly.” I don’t know, they love gold, drinking and singing and they have impressive beards – I feel like there’s some overlap there… Percental rolls to see if you can choose a particular class seems to have been done away with in favour of classes just having a minimum stat requirement, except for Wizards who still have them.
Skill score are no longer percentages, instead the system is 1d20 roll-under with your score being effectively your percentile score divided by 5. I admit that that makes a lot of sense given that scores are going to be in the 1-20 range, that stats are already in that range so now there is a single rule for both stats and skills, and that the math is the same but you don’t need to roll two dice at once and keep track of which one is which digit.
Skills don’t get picked anymore, they have to be bought with Background Points. A skill starts either at a base value of 0-4 determined by its base stat, or at 0 if it’s too complicated to have a base chance. Then you have to spend points to raise it, with the cost for each stat being the base cost for the skill multiplied with the base cost for your existing skill level. For example, let’s say that you have rolled a Dexterity of 16 and you want a skill of 13 in Draw Weapon. Draw Weapon gives you a base chance from Dexterity, and for Dexterity 16 that’s 3. So you need to first buy seven points at a cost of 2 points each (Draw Weapon has a base cost of 2, and the 1-10 range has a base cost of 1) for a total of 14 points, and then another three points at a cost of 4 points each (still base cost 2 for Draw Weapon, times 2 for the 11-14 range) for a total of 12 points and a final cost of 14+12=26 points. Gaaaah.
Look, I get it, I get it! It’s supposed to give you greater freedom in getting precisely the character you want. But all I can see is endless finicky point-counting and equally endless opportunities to screw yourself over by mistake, not to mention your stats becoming a lot less important since they only affect your base chance, and that only for the skills that have a base chance; being incredibly smart now has no bearing at all on whether you can start out great at e.g. Botany, since you’ll just be buying it up from 0 points anyway. It’s just… dreary.
The last part of the chargen chapter yells at you to ROLEPLAY, DAMN IT!!!! and offers you a selection of life goals for your character. You’re encouraged to pick a couple, but since they have drawbacks (acting contrary to your life goals gives you a penalty) but no real benefits I don’t see much reason not to choose the absolute minimum you can. The goals themselves are fairly simple, things like Chivalry, Romance, Humour, Power, Wealth, Freedom. Fair enough as a roleplaying tool, but not exactly inspiring. Also, we’re told that elves absolutely care about nature and you can’t play one who doesn’t. Well, I wasn’t going to, but now I kind of want to just to spite you!
Skills! As I already hinted at, we’re switching from the percental scores. Instead, we’re doing d20 roll-under. Which, admittedly, is mathematically identical and requires keeping track of smaller numbers, so fine, I guess, but I still think that percentages have more charm. A critical success is now achieved by rolling a 1 and then getting a success when you do the roll over. A botch is a 20 followed by a failure.
And here come the eeeeeendless skill lists, boo hoo hoo hoo! Mathematics. Skiing. Dressing up. Shadowing, when we already have both Sneaking and Hiding. Bribery, because apparently offering to pay someone is so hard that you have to put points into it. I mean, that’s the problem with this whole “add a new skill for this thing someone might like to do” – it turns something that might have been an option for anyone to something you can’t even contemplate unless you have sunk a ton of resources into it at an early stage.
Some skills are okay, I guess, the ones that actually lets you do something that you explicitly couldn’t before. The aforementioned Draw Weapon is nice, for one thing, since it gives you a way to get ready for battle in a flash. There is also “Judo” and “Karate,” though they’re not really about the martial arts styles per se but just used to mean “throws” and “really good unarmed strikes.” Monks are the only ones who can start out with Karate, I notice, and they can also start out with Judo, so I guess now they’re a cross between their original Friar Tuck depiction and kung fu-ing shaolin badasses?
There is now also a specific dual wielding skill. Probably for the best, having two attacks per round instead of one is pretty powerful. Also, weapons are now divided into types, and your skill at any weapon of a type is at least one third of your highest weapon skill within that type. Which means that you’re not going to be completely hopeless with a shortsword if you know how to handle a broadsword… but still, it’s kind of stingy. Having Broadsword 18, which makes you a pretty serious badass, still just gives you Shortsword 6, and that’s in comparison to the 2 or 3 you’d have in base chance anyway. Oh well. Baby steps.
The more convoluted skill system needs a more convoluted experience system, so now we no longer get experience checks, instead the first time in a day you use a skill successfully you get an XP in that skill, and whenever you go a week without getting into trouble your accumulated experience points can be used to raise that skill for the same cost as with Background Points. You can also train during downtime, in which case you make a roll for the skill’s associated stat once a week (two if you have a teacher) and if you succeed you get an XP. It still takes foreeeeeever to get better in a skill, but I’ll admit that it will probably go a little bit faster. It’s very beancounty, though.
New combat rules! We can now include specific hit areas, so that multiple hits to e.g. the right arm means that you become unable to use it even though you’re otherwise still on your feet. Where a blow hits gets randomly determined. There are new lists of armour pieces, so you can wear armour on some bits but not others, or different kinds of armour on different parts.
There are grappling rules. They are mercifully brief.
If you have a score of 20 or more in a weapon skill, you can fight two opponents at once by dividing your skill between them – so if you have a skill of 26, you might attack one opponent with a skill of 12 and parry a blow from another with a skill of 14. Fair enough, though I’m not sure how often that will come up given how slow character progression is…
There are rules for different materials for weapons and armour, from wooden arrows to mithril swords and dragonshide mail. Weapons of silver get mentioned, which I think actually do come in handy for some critters in the Monster Book.
There’s some pretty finicky rules for morale, which I really think could have been simplified down as “roll Psychic Power for NPCs under such-and-such conditions to see if they run away.” Still, I do appreciate that it’s there.
Heroism! Characters can now be given Hero Points for doing mighty deeds. In fact, the deeds are so mighty that I’m not sure how you’re supposed to get even a single Hero Point – it starts with “kill a young dragon,” and I’ve seen the stats for those things, I don’t think it’s humanly possible to take one down by the rules that have been outlined! Like, there’s bound to be some kind of super-strategic ways of doing it like luring it into a mine and then collapsing it on top of its head with a well-placed system of pulleys, but there’s not exactly a mechanic for it.
Anyway, you can use Hero Points to buy up your stats, which is pretty much the only way you can get permanently higher stats after chargen, or buy some moderately useful but not overwhelming special powers like “speak any language enough to get by” or “heal naturally twice as fast as normal.” Heroes are warned that they’ll attract rivals who want the glory of being the one to take them down.
Some tips for worldbuilding are provided, like how much you earn on honest work in a week, and how much it costs to maintain your lifestyle. There’s some general explanation for how medieval social classes work and what separates a burgher from a peasant. We get some handy fantasy archetypes with suggested inspirations (the writers seemed to have been fond of Tolkien, John Carter, Star Wars, Lakhmar, The Belgariad – apparently not yet translated to Swedish at this point – and something called Ladyhawk that I should probably look into) and stat blocks. They include “damsel in distress (badass)” and “damsel in distress (floozy).” 80s gender representation at its finest!
MAGIC
So let’s see what more they came up with to nerf magic-users with…
Well, for a start, wizards can no longer learn any spells. No, first they need to spend points in a school that gives access to a particular set of spells, and the more powerful the spell the higher your score in the school has to be before you can learn it. So that’s a pretty blatant point tax right there.
The schools are animism, which is nature magic; elementalism, which controls elemental forces; mentalism, which is vaguely like psionics, with spells for mind reading, levitation, protective forcefields, and some general buffs; necromancy, which is creepy death-magic; and illusionism, which creates illusions. There is also symbolism, which is a weird one wherein you don’t cast spells, you draw runes and when you activate them they affect anyone who looks at them. Different races have restrictions to what schools they can learn – humans can learn any of them, but halflings can only learn illusionism, dwarves can’t learn animism or illusionism, elves can’t learn necromancy, and so on.
A wizard can only cast a spell with a degree of effect equal to or lower than his score in the associated school. Since you need a minimum score of like 3 to learn the simplest spells and a degree of effect of 3 means a -4 penalty on a roll that you probably start with having a score of like 10 in, I don’t see that coming up too often. Likewise, the fact that a wizard can only keep as many spells in his head as his score in the school is not much of a restriction, because again, you’d be lucky to have five or so spells in total.
Because here’s the thing, the XP cost for spells is brutal. Something like Invisibility has a base cost of 6, so raising it up from 0 to 10 will cost you 60 XP. If you train for an entire year, you’ll maybe be able to get that much together, and that still makes you pretty bad at casting that spell. Oh, and if you’re of average size, you’ll need two degrees of effect to cover yourself with it, so subtract -2 from every casting, so effectively you have studied a whole year to have a 40% success chance at turning yourself invisible. Cheesus, I know that no one in this game is especially cool or heroic, but they really didn’t want caster supremacy, did they?
Magic scrolls make an appearance, but they’re sort of crappy. To cast a spell from a scroll, you need to succeed at an Intelligence roll and a roll for the spell’s school, and it takes you a bunch of minutes besides. The scroll disintegrates when the casting is complete, and you probably spent enough silver on it to buy a pair of horses.
Spell range and duration are now calculated from your score in the spell. This serves very little reason except to make it harder to eyeball.
Spell lists! Animism has gotten all the spells that felt “nature-y,” like weather control and talking to animals. It’s also got healing and, for some reason, raising and lowering stats (not that changing a stat by a few points does terribly much in that system, but still…).
Symbolism, as aforementioned, works by creating a symbol which can then be activated, and which has an effect on everyone who is looking at it at the time of activation. It can do things like prevent them from approaching, striking them blind, drawing them forward, or afflicting them with seizures, all of which lasts for a few rounds per degree of effect. High specialised, but might be useful in the hands of a creative player – certainly there is something to be said for getting to cast the spell and then keep it in store so you know it’ll take effect when you want it to.
Elementalism is about throwing fireballs and spreading darkness, and also enchanting or cursing weapons, for some reason. You can also learn to summon elementals, the four basic ones in the core and an additional three: light, darkness and cold elementals.
Illusionism can create illusions, natch. It can also be used to confuse people, make them stumble, place people in enchanted sleep (?) and make yourself look super-impressive. Invisibility is for some reason not an illusionism spell but is mentalism instead. Yeah, I don’t know. More serious illusion spells can create illusions that are so realistic that they are effectively solid constructs, though they can’t be better at anything than the illusionist himself is.
Necromancy can create zombie minions (also skeleton or mummy minions, with some extra effort), control existing undead creatures, and spread supernatural dread. It’s also got a high-level spell that can suck the Power Points out of someone else, and another that lets the necromancer “claw his way towards the enemy’s heart” – it causes 1d6 damage per round for a number of rounds equal to its degree of effect, ignoring armour. Creepy.
Mentalism, finally, lets you fly, teleport, read minds, get psychic visions, and some similar utilitarian stuff.
Players can invent their own spells. It takes a year or more of studies in a highly expensive laboratory, as well as some tricky rolls, but if the GM agrees that the proposed spell is within the wizard’s abilities, he ends up getting it at a starting value of 2-3 or so.
Magical objects can be created, but require very high school scores. There is one spell for impressing a single casting of a spell in an object, another that makes the impression permanent, and a fourth that supplies it with its own Power Points instead of drawing from the user’s. Players are pretty much never going to get to do this unless the campaign has literal decades of training times. There is a rather simpler spell that just stores Power Points in an object for later use, though. There is a list of example magical objects, all of which are from mythology or fiction (e.g., Aladdin’s flying carpet) – not sure if they are meant to exist within the game world or not.
Alternate universes exist, and there is a high-level spell that lets you move between them. Universes are primarily defined by how far they are from the different elemental poles, so there could be places full of fire and darkness, places of wind and snow, places of light and stone, etc. A fairly handy way to come up with new ones in a hurry, I guess, though again, not sure when it will become relevant because who’s going to learn this stupid spell that costs 12 XP per point and has no obvious application other than to get yourself in even more trouble?! The life-extending spell that follows it, likewise, seems to exist only to justify why wizards so often seem to be immortal.
Wizards can summon familiars, giving them loyal and sentient animal companions at the cost of a permanent point of Psychic Power. Cool, cool…
There follows a section on herbs and potions, and this is actually a place where those extra skills are justified – each potion requires a roll in a certain one to make, so you can learn to mix poisons or to create healing poultices. For each herb that’s used as an ingredient, there is a later listing that tells you what sort of environment you can look for it in. That’s kind of cool, it’s practically a crafting system.
And that, barring some extra gear, is that. As my exasperated tone implies, I’m not a fan of this one. There are a few handy bits, but for the most parts this is rules added for the sake of rules – and them claiming that they were all optional didn’t stop them from making them all mandatory in the fourth edition, did they? Resist rules bloat, people! Rules once introduced never go away, they just hang around and clutter up the place! Hrmpf.
Next up is the Monsterbook. That one I recall is inoffensive enough.
We have reached the end of Cyberpunk 2013‘s brief run, the point right before it reinvented itself as Cyberpunk 2020, an edition that would prove to have rather more staying power. The last installment doesn’t exactly wrap things up – rather, it seems to have been meant as only the second in a long line of splatbooks-as-in-setting-magazines, the rest of which never (to my best knowledge) were never to see the light of day. To be specific, we’re going to be looking at the Rockerboys, probably the most idiosyncratic character class of the game… and, somewhat damningly, they ended up sharing the spotlight (as it were) with the Media class.
The foreword (in the guise of an “editorial”) does admit the problem and notes that a lot of players were confused as to what you were even supposed to do with the Rockerboy class, at least in a campaign that wasn’t explicitly about a rebellious punk band roaming the world and getting into trouble in between concerts. Whether this book ends up satisfyingly answering that question is a little more dubious to me, but points for at least recognising it.
Much like Solo of Fortune, there isn’t much of an underlying narrative or even much structure to the book. It’s written to be like a magazine with each article offering a snapshot into the world of Cyberpunk, which is great and all, but it makes it a pain in the patootie to write up a coherent account of…
Starting with the letters page, we learn that an exec is mad because the magazine implied that he drove someone out of business from sheer spite, to which the magazine smugly responds that next time he wants to get his side of the story across, he should agree to talk to their reporters when they ask him to. Also, apparently certain brands of sound systems are prone to exploding when you plug them in, and loony fans kill themselves at the loss of their favourite celebrity. Okay, admittedly three very Cyberpunk things right there.
We get the story of Samurai, which is the band where Johnny Silverhand (last seen messing up the rescue of his girlfriend in the core setting book) made it big. Apparently they broke up when their keyboardist went to jail for kicking her abusive boyfriend off a balcony and another bandmate fried his brain trying out experimental cyberware. DMS – a corp we’ll learn more of later – tried to get Samurai to sign on with them by threatening to expose Johnny’s past of going AWOL from one of those South American wars in the backstory, but Johnny just made it all public on his own and showed them his shiny metal middle finger. Rock’n’roll!
There’s a looooooot of geeky music talk and tech porn that leaves me painfully bored. Again, I realise that that might make me not the target audience here, and certainly a magazine of the sort the book is meant to resemble would have articles fawning over synthesisers and looking down their noses on people who play the wrong sort of music, but snooooooooore.
There’s a section called Hitler Was A Rockerboy. Yeah, that’s what we 2020s people like to call “clickbait.” Anyway, it basically just tries to expand the definition of “rockerboy” to any sort of charismatic public figure trying to enflame the masses with a political message, and suggests that “rockerboys” might also be street poets, performance artists, activists or politician. It’s suggested that medias are kind of like rockerboys except they try to persuade with facts and logic instead of storming emotions. There’s an interview with a gay comedian who was framed for murder for making some pointed jokes about the assassination of a gay-rights politician. Also, apparently the original rockerboy was this guy named James Manson who was killed in a riot that started when some feds tried to arrest him at a concert for corrupting the youth.
Super-rich people! Well, it wouldn’t be cyberpunk without a bunch of those presiding over the dystopian mess. There are apparently four major kinds: the spoiled brats who inherited their wealth, sports and media celebrities, oil sheiks (again the reminder that most of the Middle East is glassed but the parts that remain are obscenely wealthy because they’re sitting on the last remaining oil) and banana republic dictators, and corporate CEOs and others who have worked their way up. They spend their money on private islands, enormous yachts, security systems for the above, and amazingly tacky clothing. There’s one who refuses to come out of his personal virtual paradise, another who’s had his name legally changed to “God,” a third who’s building a massive harem. Okay.
Nasty tricks that the evil corporations play on poor innocent artists! First off, the aforementioned blackmail attempts – if they have some dirt on a popular artist, then he’d better sign up with them or they’ll go public with it. Or they can just buy his contract and either force him to bring his work more in line with their preferred propaganda or just keep him from working at all. One guy they hooked on a specially engineered drug that would shut down his immune system if he stopped taking it, and he only got free because some Netrunner friends of his raided the corporate database for the recipe. And then, some people afflicted with artistic integrity just mysteriously get killed in drive-by shootings and the like.
The premier broadcast corporation is Net 54, though they are competing with another one called Diverse Media Systems. The same guy, named Howard Wong, presided over both of their rises, but he eventually got killed when Net 54 tried to forcibly extract him back from DMS. And then his DMS stock mysteriously ended up in the possession of the CEO’s son, Jonathon Houghton III, and he promptly used them to oust his father from the board and take over himself. Wheels within wheels, huh?
Moooooore tech porn, sigh. The problem with it is that much of it is trying to be hard sci-fi, which means that a lot of it is a slightly lamer version of things we actually have today, and a lot of other stuff is a slightly cooler version of things that were considered hot back in the 80s. For instance, completely computer-animated movies are a thing, and people flock to see them not because of the story but because the technology is just so cool, man! Music and video that can be downloaded straight into your cybernetic implants so you can play them in your head is, I’ll admit, something we haven’t quite reached, though.
There is a pretty funny and flavourful side story about a “slow news night” that involves the reporters first getting into a battle between booster gangs (and then interview the survivors, who are impressed with how well the news team fought), then see the assassination of a cartel leader turned federal witness (and find out that the cartel tipped them off, because even gangsters want publicity now), then intervene in a corporate extraction, gets the extract-ee to give a statement by threatening to throw him out of their hover car, then hands him back to the corporation he tried to get out of his contract with. Heh.
Some popular TV shows (so TV is still a thing, apparently, though flat screens have replaced the big bulky sets I grew up with) include CyberSoldier, which is basically a fashion show for gun nuts, showing off all the sexiest mercenary outfits; CyberSquad, where reporters ride along with the cops who take down cyberpsychos; and You Decide! Court Date, where actual criminal trials are determined by votes from the viewing audience. Apparently You Decide! Court Date is so popular that there’s a similar show called You Decide! Soap Opera in the works, where the audience at home will similarly vote on the outcome of the plot. Er… okay, one of those is a horrific dystopian concept and one of them is something that has been tried a few times in the real world and mostly didn’t catch on because no one was interested enough, and I really feel like it’d have given it more punch if the latter had been cited as inspiration for the former and not the other way around!
There is an adequately cyberpunky short story about a media who realises that he suddenly had a rage attack after seeing a movie, and starts digging into it. It turns out that the security corp Arasaka is drugging whole neighbourhoods in a way that makes the people there respond to triggers to either get homicidally furious or chill the hell out immediately. They’re going to use the former to start a few riots so they can sell their services, then use the latter to make sure that their success rate at it is startling. The media ends up going into hiding after his netrunner friend got killed by Arasaka assassins. Nicely grim.
The most interesting concept of the book is hinted at throughout but only really explained towards the end – braindance, which is a way to record someone’s every experience and then let someone else relive it. Corporations like DMS have people whose job it is to go around having interesting lives that, with some creative editing, make for quality entertainment. There is also a sample adventure where the players take on a variety of roles surrounding a self-destructing braindance star when her party gets crashed by heavily armed solos. The characters are all pregenerated and not suitable for use after this adventure since they all have distinct secrets and agendas that are meant to come into conflict, but it’s cool for what it is.
So that’s about it. Much like with Solo of Fortune, there was good stuff in there, but you really had to dig for it. I can sort of see why they apparently abandoned the format after this one, it wasn’t working particularly well. Also, I feel like the game could really have used a little more ambience and a little less exhaustive detail about technology. A lot of the time it’s easy to forget that we’re in a dark and perilous future, because everything is described in the driest possible terms.
Well, this was full first edition. I might get to the second one eventually, but for now I think I’ll take a break from this one. Since things are at once so nitpicky and so scattered, I feel like I’ll want to reread the original five books once or twice to make things stick a little better in my head. In the meantime, I have plenty of other games to work my way through. Stay tuned for some of those!
Having covered the primitive reality of the Living Land and the pulp reality of the Nile Empire, this time we reach Aysle, the cosm of high fantasy where dragons soar in the sky, evil wizards raise the dead, and bold knights sally forth to do battle with the goblin hordes. And to make it more personally exciting, it’s all going down in my neck of the woods, since Aysle has flopped down over Scandinavia and the British Isles. So let’s see what’s going on in the old homestead!
To start with, we’re reminded that Aysle actually does not have a High Lord at present. It used to, though. Five hundred years ago, the necromancer Uthorion lead an invasion into Aysle from his native cosm of Orrorsh. He fought Pella Ardinay, champion of Light, and seemingly she won and routed his invasion – but actually, he had possessed her body and then killed his own to take control of the cosm. He ruled for five hundred years during which he corrupted the land and led multiple invasions into other cosms under the guise of “civilising them.” Then he got bushwacked by some Storm Knights at the end of the Possibility Wars series of novels, and Ardinay regained control, still connected to Uthorion’s Darkness Device and thus technically the High Lord despite being unqualified due to failing the whole “irredeemably evil” criterium. Meanwhile, Uthorion cheated death yet again by taking over the body of a Viking chieftain (because Aysle has Vikings, somehow), and is now scheming to take his dark evil power back.
Got all that? Phew.
So basically, Britain and Scandinavia aren’t being invaded in the same way that America and Africa are – Uthorion can’t push the borders while he lacks his Darkness Device, and he wouldn’t be able to extract possibility energy from new territories even if he could take them – but they are stuck in the middle of what amounts of an Aylish civil war. And there’s nothing on the telly anymore!
The actual cosm of Aysle is a flat world where the sun rises and sets by going up and down a hole in the middle like a yo-yo. There are people living on both sides of the disc, with one side being Upper Aysle that’s populated mostly by humans, and the other side being Lower Aysle that’s populated mostly by giants. The underground is the Land Between, which is populated mostly by dwarves. The giants used to rule all of Aysle, but then a human hero named Dunad did something heroic and it became possible to learn magic. Giants aren’t smart enough to be good at magic, so they got fireballed all the way back to Lower Aysle, at least until Uthorion took over and started pandering to them.
There are also elves who hang out on their own continent being snooty, as well as “half-folk” (harpies, minotaurs, satyrs, centaurs, etc; things that are shaped half like humans and half like some kind of animal) and “lesser folk” (trolls, gnomes, kobolds, ogres and other things that seem like someone had taken a human and hit her with an ugly stick – they’re not inherently evil, but they are sufficiently discriminated against that they have few reasons to be nice) . Also, Vikings are considered their own race, mostly because the other humans don’t want to admit kinship with them, and there are barbarians (like Vikings, only more generally chaotic than straight up evil), freetraders (who trade in stuff, including slaves, so they’re a bit shady) and corsairs (who board and plunder others, but they also free slaves from the freetraders, so they’re not all bad).
Again, thanks to that ancient human hero I mentioned everyone in Aysle is a little bit magic, as in, everyone is born with a single point in a magical skill and a single point in a magical knowledge. The two may or may not fit together enough to allow for any actual spells to be cast, it depends on precise day and time of birth. It’s a very bad omen to be born with a point in the Entity knowledge, which governs demons, ghosts, golems, and other things that should not properly be.
Religion is your basic fantasy polytheism whereby there are Gods of Honour who want to spread wisdom and enlightenment, Gods of Corruption who want to smash stuff, and Gods of Balance who try to mind their own business. Dwarves have their own gods, but they believe that they created the world and then sort of lost interest and wandered off, so screw those guys and focus on learning engineering, basically. The elves have a special order of monks who wander the world and learn about stuff, and those monks apparently warrant a special subsystem to represent their powers of discipline and enlightenment despite numbering about fifty worldwide. Because this is Torg, and everything needs its own subsystem!
The human parts of Aysle are ruled by six noble houses, three of whom are still Honourable and three of whom have grown Corrupt. The only two that are really particularly interesting are the Tancreds and Vareths. The Tancreds are a Corrupt house whose patriarch has served Uthorion for five hundred years in return for immortality, but with Uthorion’s depowering he’s now turned from a handsome young man into a twisted old one and has locked himself in his mansion. He’s also the brother of notable NPC Tolwyn of Tancred, who is one of the few from the original novel trilogy who actually turns up in the game a lot. She’s Ardinay’s second-in-command, so there’s some sibling yin-yang going there. The Vareths are actually a dwarven house that have been granted rule of human lands, and are also big on raiding the Lands Between for dwarven slaves. They are obviously Corrupt and the other dwarves are in rebellion against them.
The realm on Earth is next. Lady Ardinay has set up shop in Oxford outside of London and is cooperating with the British government from there. Most of the city is suffering from having gone medieval and losing electricity and so forth, but of course everyone has an extremely stiff upper lip about it. A bunch of giants have taken to wearing suits and getting jobs as bruisers for native crime bosses, so that’s a funny image. There are trolls and goblins in the London Underground. Scotland is mostly a pure Ayslish zone, so they’ve gone back to kilts and clan warriors. Trolls and dragons are common hazards up there.
Ireland had to call off the Troubles in response to the common enemy, and also because it’s too damn hard to make bombs work under the lower tech axiom. A bunch of Uthorion’s dwarves and giants were attacking Belfast when he lost the High Lordship and proceeded to start attacking each other instead, so right now the city is caught in the crossfire. Parts of Dublin are infested with ghouls ‘n’ goblins. The police asked some local dwarves for help and they initially agreed to keep the peace, but while on patrol they discovered the abandoned Guinness brewery and they haven’t been sober since. Heh. Ireland has also seen the return of the faeries – not from Aysle, though Aysle has them too, but native Core Earth faeries who had shut themselves in their own worlds to winter out the lowered magic axiom.
Scandinavia is under attack by Vikings, ironically enough. My native Sweden is implausibly holding its own, mostly because I think the writers were vaguely aware that we used to be a military superpower back in the seventeenth century and didn’t realise just how conflict-averse we’d gotten since then. Anyway, it helps that half of Sweden is still a mixed zone, so we can send JAS 39 Griffons at Uthorion’s dragons. We’re also exporting crossbows to Norway, who are doing rather worse and might fall soon since that’s where Uthorion hangs out. Okay, war profiteering, that does sound like us… Denmark is split in half between Uthorion and the Danish government and things are relatively quiet there for now. Finland is overrun by trolls, which mostly makes you feel sorry for the trolls, because Finns give zero shits and are already taking to the wilderness with skis and sniper rifles. Also, they’re getting some help from the Soviet Union, so that’s twice it’s gotten at least a tiny bit involved, I guess.
Culturally, Aysle is medieval but a little more historically so than your standard D&D – there are more burgher guilds and complicated feudal contracts and fewer absolute monarchs. Men and women are roughly equal, though, since magic is a great equaliser. In fact, skilled magic-users are considered the finest people of all, followed by brave warriors, followed by merchants and all that other riffraff. The economy is also on the magic standard, with the base unit of currency being worth the casting of a very simple spell.
World laws! Aysle is a cosm of moderate values in all four axioms – it’s got some magic, but it’s not all-powerful, it’s got some technology but only to the point of steam engines and primitive firearms, it’s got some miracles but the gods don’t physically walk the Earth, and it’s got some social development but people still have trouble with concepts like “multinational conglomerates.” It’s also got something called the Law of Observation which states that everything that is real must be possible to perceive and everything that can be perceived must be real, except for magic which runs on its own rules. I have absolutely no idea what that means, but okay.
There is also the Laws of Honour and Corruption which state that good and evil (in the chivalrous sense; Honour means acting like a just and gallant knight, Corruption means acting like a deceitful, bullying scoundrel) must make themselves visible, so theoretically all good people would be pretty and all bad people would be ugly. That obviously didn’t work for Uthorion, though, so when he set up shop in Aysle he snuck in a loophole whereby Corruption could be “siphoned off” into the land around you instead. That’s a large part of the reason why everyone went along with his rule as fake-Ardinay for so long; since she stayed beautiful even while wreaking havoc, they could only assume that her havoc-wreaking was, in some sense, the right thing to do even though they couldn’t figure out how. Anyway, now that Uthorion’s lost control, some places have gone back to the original programming while other places haven’t. So any Aylish zone will be either a beautiful, sylvan paradise where dark and twisted things hide in the shadows, or a wretched wasteland populated by people with fair faces and wicked hearts. That’s kind of cool.
People doing good or evil in Aysle also gain and lose points in traits called Honour and Corruption as they align themselves more fully with one or the other morality. Those traits provide bonuses and abilities as they increase; Honour lets you buff your friends, Corruption lets you harm your enemies. And yes, Ardinay has a hefty Honour stat and Uthorion has an even more intimidating Corruption stat, as you might guess. Like, Uthorion is literally so evil that people have been known to drop dead from his looking at them, whereby Ardinay spreads hope and joy by her every deed. Corny, but I love it.
There is a long chapter on the theory and mechanics of magic, which doubles as a general one for the cosmverse as a whole since most cosms have the same magic (albeit at different strengths). And… it’s something, all right. I’ll try to summarise…
Everything in the world is broken down into “magical knowledges” that are connected to each other in various ways. At the very highest level, you get the “Essences” of Life, Death, Time, and True Knowledge. Those are a little misleadingly named – Life is more like “creation” or “pure goodness,” Death is more like “destruction” or “pure evil,” and True Knowledge is more like “space” or “matter.” From those come the “Principles” of Light, Darkness, and Magic. Light and Darkness are the ways that Life and Death express themselves within the material universe embodied in True Knowledge, which means that Light encompasses things like truth and positive emotion, while Darkness is lies and negative emotions. Magic is the way that Life develops over Time and so is the way things actually happen and evolve. Life, Death, Light and Darkness further give rise to the Living Forces, which are all animal life, while Time, True Knowledge, Light and Magic create the Inanimate Forces that are all things elemental and material (which by this system includes plant life). Living Forces and Inanimate Forces further break down to seven different kinds of living beings and six elements (fire, water, earth, air, wood and metal).
To cast a spell, you need to have some training in both a magical skill like Divination, Conjuration, Apportation and Alteration, and the magical knowledge that governs the outcome of the spell. You want to cast a fireball, you need the skill of either Conjuration or Alteration, depending on approach, and the knowledge of Fire. Easy enough. But to create a spell, you not only need all four skills, but you need three knowledges – a pattern knowledge for what you’re targeting, a mechanism knowledge for what you’re actually doing, and a result knowledge for the outcome. So if you want to turn a man into a frog, you’d need Folk for pattern (because you’re targeting a sentient being), Aquatic for result (since you want to turn him into an amphibian) and probably Life or something for mechanism (since you’re imitating evolution by turning one life form into another).
There is an insanely involved process for figuring out how hard the spell would be to create, which involves the metaphysical distances between the knowledges and the route you take through a diagram to walk from Folk to Life and then back down to Aquatic. Add that to rolls upon rolls, and insert some special theorems to bring the difficulty down to something reasonable, possibly at the expensive of adding special conditions and requirements to the spell, divide the result between spell difficulty (how hard it will be to cast) and spell backlash (how much it’s going to hurt if you don’t do well enough at it) and you end up with a way to use magic to accomplish precisely what you set out to!
Or you can just pick a spell out of a spell list and cast it by rote, like a normal person. Honestly, it’s probably less of a headache by far. Much like the gizmo construction system in The Nile Empire, this seems less like something that’s going to be actually used and more like something that exists to explain why things are the way they are. And, honestly, I do appreciate it from that perspective – it’s kind of cool that magic isn’t just a flat list of effects, but there is an entire metaphysic behind it that makes you feel like a wise arcane scholar when you delve into it. And, hey, if you do go through the trouble and your character has crazy-high stats, you can actually go around casting free-form spells, just like in Mage: the Ascension! The GM is instructed that any player who wants to create a spell at the table has to do so entirely without the GM’s help, though, which honestly seems perfectly fair. You want to play at being a super-nerd, you’d better have done your own homework!
Creatures of Aysle! Humans have slightly higher maximum stats than humans do elsewhere, because everything is a little more heroic in Aysle. Elves and giants are even better, but they are also reliant on magic to make their superhuman abilities possible; non-Storm Knight giants can’t operate for too long outside of Aysle, because the moment they disconnect that pesky old square/cube law kicks in and they can’t support their own weight anymore.
Goblins are a lesser folk that didn’t exist before the invasion, when a bunch of Chavs suddenly shrunk and got pointy ears. Which I think is probably kind of classist and insulting, especially since goblins are described as having “a penchant for evil,” but I still think that the idea Cockney-spouting goblins is kind of hilarious.
Aysle also has dragons, one kind per element. Air dragons and water dragons are evil, fire dragons are good, plant, metal and earth dragons aren’t really one or another but you shouldn’t try their patience. Faeries (both Earthly and Ayslish), likewise, are divided into elemental families. They are kind of small and feeble on their own, but they have the ability to join together in casting spells, so they’re very powerful in groups.
Like all the Possibility Raiders, Uthorion can grow gospog thanks to the Gaunt Man. His look like big-ass wolves at early plantings and then gradually turn more dragon-like in later ones. The Wild Hunt makes a return from the novels, as a bunch of demonic flying huntsmen, though they seem a bit nerfed – in the novels, they were practically unstoppable and cut a swath through modern armies, here they seem more like fairly hefty monsters but not much else. They really can fly at speeds approaching a fighter jet, though, so I guess there’s that…
You get your basic fantasy equipment section, only made slightly more interesting by the descriptions of faerie arms and armour, and then the book ends. Hmm. I’ll admit that I enjoyed it – Aysle is fairly typical fantasy world, but it’s got just enough historical British and Germanic touches to keep it from feeling like a straight D&D clone, and the way the fantasy aspects and the modern aspects are starting to mingle in an almost Shadowrun-esque way is fun. I’m kind of noticing the absence of the kind of guide to setting adventures there that you got for the Living Land and the Nile Empire, but then the next book, Queenswrath, is all about adventure ideas so I guess that works out. Stay tuned for that one.
A couple of years ago, I got it into my head that I needed to introduce a new generation to the wonders of roleplaying, so I wrote up a simple system and setting that I planned to run for my regular players’ kids. Now, as I know zilch about kids (I technically was one at one point, but in all honesty, I was never particularly good at it!), so I just stuck to the principle that one should cater to one’s intended audience and asked my players what the little rugrats liked. Turns out, one of them liked robots, another was really into dinosaurs, and the third was fond of unicorns.
So I created The Magic Kingdom of DinoCircuit – a setting populated by dinosaurs, robots and unicorns. I’m honestly kind of pleased with how absolutely idiotic it is.
As for the system, I feel it’s at once light and flexible. You get a Talent from your race, you choose a Skill freely, and that’s about it for chargen. Whenever you do something, you roll a d6 for free, another d6 if you involve your Skill, a third if you involve your Talent, and a fourth if another player is helping you in some way. If any of the dice rolls 4+, you succeed. There are no hit points or similar injury mechanics, because this game is honest about the fact that the players simply aren’t going to fail at anything permanently, it’s just a matter of how many different approaches they have to try. Call it railroading or training wheels as you prefer.
Alas, my plans fell victim to my usual inability to get stuff done in a timely fashion. I did run a trial session for the players themselves, but I dithered and dragged my feet about running one for the actual kids, and I fussed over a particular part of the adventure that hadn’t worked too well, and then I got a new job, and, long story short, I never got around to it. And now I think the young’uns have gotten old enough that if I still wanted to introduce them to roleplaying, I’d be better off running an actual game, albeit probably not one of my high-crunch, grimdark favourites – I wouldn’t wish to scar them for life…
But, I figure I can at least show off the game itself to anyone who might be interested. You can download it here, and the link is also on the Links and Downloads page now. Enjoy.
Today, we’re going to tackle the classic adventure The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues. It’s got involuntary dance parties, cargo-cult recording studios, malfunctioning gadgets and a dungeon crawl. Awwwwww yeah.
The backstory for the adventure is that a bunch of secret societies and High Programmers are bickering over a wooden box full of Old Reckoning music recordings. This may, no joke, lead to the complete and permanent destruction of Alpha Complex (though that will be not so much retconned as sort of cavalierly ignored in later supplements, for obvious reasons). Low stakes, horrific human cost – it’s definitely Paranoia. Anyway, the players will not actually get sent after the Black Box, but it’ll keep showing up, and each player’s secret society will be chomping at the bit to get hold of it, thus encouraging them to try to get hold of it even while trying not to look like they’re trying to get hold of it.
Much like the previous published adventure, the module is divided into four missions. The first one, Bop Till You Drop, has the players sent to stop a series of pirate broadcasts of imitation commercial advertisements that is connected to a different traitorous scheme involving the Black Box. To be specific, the scheme is that the cafeteria food throughout Alpha Complex has been dosed with a drug that causes involuntary dancing (it makes very slightly more sense in context). The real plan is to play the contents of the Black Box once the drug starts kicking in, creating a Complex-wide dance party. The second part is likely to fail through a combination of the players’ involvement and other secret societies making a grab for the Box, but of course no one is in a position to stop the drug itself, so the mission culminates in massive chaos as hordes of people do “the Polypeptide Boogie” while the Computer is freaking out and working at cross purposes with itself in trying to get everone to cut that out. I love it.
The second mission, I Was A Mutant For The FBI, sees the players sent to infiltrate a group of mutant traitors that don’t actually exist, equipped with an assortment of clunky gadgets that are supposed to grant artificial versions of mutant powers (some do, some do but in a less than helpful way, others do something completely different). What they do find when they get to their destination is a deal about to go down for possession of the Black Box, which immediately gets attacked by rival secret societies, leading again to massive chaos which the players end up taking the blame for. They’re put in front of a firing squad. And then called away to their debriefing, where their superiors tolerantly admit that they were probably not to blame. And then they’re sent back to the firing squad, because Alpha Complex of Paranoia is like the Imperium of Warhammer 40,000 in that INNOCENSE PROVES NOTHING!
The third mission, No One Here Gets Out Alive, has the players get yanked away from their execution again, this time to get hastily issued a new mission – a subversive from Outside was captured during the last mission, and he’s been offered a stay of execution if he’ll lead a group of Troubleshooters through the abandoned, decaying stretch of corridors that lead to a way Outside. The prisoner’s help is vital, because the way is full of pitfalls, malfunctioning machines, deranged hermits, and secret society members lying in ambush (which is to say, it’s effectively a dungeon…). He has, of course, every reason to try to get the players killed along the way so he can flee, but never fear, he’s been outfitted with a remote-controlled bomb that the players can set off if he misbehaves! Oh, wait – someone replaced it with a smoke bomb. Also, his weapons, which are meant to be disabled, somehow turned out to be fully functional. Enemy action, or just incompetence? Honestly, who around here can even tell?
The players also get two bots sent along with them. The bots are maximally unhelpful while also having juuuuuust enough vital skills and information that the players have to work with them. Also, they quickly start to hate each other and plot each other’s deactivation.
Anyway, the mission ends with a massive shootout with the secret society members who are guarding the exit (and who have, just as a running gag, the Black Box in their possession), followed by the exit being bombed by Vulture Squadrons (the Computer’s shock troops; effectively, the people who come down like a ton of bricks on any player who tries to ignore the Computer and do things in a sensible way) to close it up, which instead just serves to blast an even bigger hole in Alpha Complex. Also, the Black Box gets lost in all the commotion. Oh well.
The final mission, Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?, consists of an oddly incoherent set of orders that amount to going Outside and getting hold of a whole bunch of Black Boxes and also a Corvette. What do those have in common? Nothing, actually, but two rival High Programmers gave the Computer their missions simultaneously, and the Computer got confused and mushed the two of them together. So out into the wild green yonder the players go. They need to gain the cooperation of one of two post-apocalyptic survivalist gangs, one who are a schizofrenic mix of dopey hippies and rugged cowboys, and one who want to be badass bikers but who have long since run out of fuel and motor parts so they just sit on their ramshackle bikes and push them forward with their feet. Yes.
If the players can swing that, they’ll find a self-maintaining recording studio populated by a bunch of nitwits who know how to act like they’re running a recording studio but have no clue how to do actual, well, recording. And, at the other end of the quest, they’ll find a gas station guarded by a pair of aritifical intelligences, one of whom runs an invisible floating super-tank. It’s all calculated to end with the players fleeing for dear life back to Alpha Complex with absolutely everyone hot on their heels, at which point the Computer panics and thinks it’s being invaded by Commies. At which point the module instructs you that you can either wuss out and pull a deus ex machina to defuse the situation, or you can just… not do that, and let Alpha Complex be destroyed, because why the hell not?
I’ve got to admit, I love this one. It’s got it all, including the malfunctioning gadgets (oh yeah, the artificial mutation gear is just the beginning!), a whole bunch of running gags (for instance, every mission ends with one of the players’ “quest giver” NPCs being executed or otherwise dying, until their finanl debriefing – if they do get to it and it didn’t all just go up in a giant fireball – consists of them sitting in an empty room for a few hours while the Computer pointedly pretends that their entire mission never happened), and just generally all the best sort of madness. Still not sure Paranoia is my sort of game, but reading through it has a lot of chuckles.
