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.
This time, we’re finally getting back into the setting proper, with Solo of Fortune, dedicated to the Solo class. Technically I think that makes it a splatbook, though I’m not sure if splatbooks were technically a thing back at the time… Either way, let’s have a look.
The first thing to explain is that this seems to be an early attempt at worldbuilding through in-world documents – the conceit is that there is an actual magazine in the world of Cyberpunk called Solo of Fortune (your monthly subscription of which you can have faxed to you, which I get the impression is meant to come across as very hard-boiled futuristic) and this book is an issue of it. The somewhat awkward bit is that while later versions of the trope would have OOC sections describing mechanics and the likes that were separate from the IC fiction pieces, here they’re all jumbled together. Which leads to such things as in-setting advertisements for guns that tells you that they do 3d6 damage. Sometimes there’s a fig leaf about how the in-game stats are an internal ranking system established by previous issues of SoF, but for the most part, it’s just kind of weird.
The book is basically a collection of odds and ends that are more or less related to being a Solo (which in the world of Cyberpunk is a catch-all term for anyone who does violence for money, from security guards to mercenaries), each of which is presented as an article. There are a few more fiction-like pieces that under the guise of “personal accounts,” where we can read about things like a firefight between a Trauma Team and some gangers or a vacationing Solo’s experience in Moscow (lots of clunky military-grade cyberware, lots of wannabe-American youths playing at being Solos by running around getting into trouble). Others are more about worldbuilding.
There is a helpful rundown of the different kinds of Solos that exist: military mercenaries, bodyguards, corporate security, bounty hunters, street samurai (basically freelancers, who might do any of the previous four kinds of work on a temporary basis) and specialists (who has one or two really specific skills that they are really, really good at, meaning that they get hired by people who think that those will be perfect for a particular job). There is a sidebar detailing what kind of stats, skills, and cyberware loadouts you’ll want if you’re going to play a Solo of that particular type.
Street gangs get a section, that fleshes out the information on them from the core. In the world of Cyberpunk there are boosters (who keep cramming cyberware into themselves until they go nuts), posers (who seek to emulate some celebrity in all things, including by getting cosmetic surgery to all look like them. Creepy and flavourful, I’ll give it that!), chromers (who are focused on being really into some kind of rebellious music), dorphers (who are all hopped up on some drug, and can be super-mellow or completely psychotic as a result), puppets (who are secretly working for a corp) and guardians (who have just banded together for protection since no one else seems to give a hoot). There are guidelines for playing a psycho killer gangbanger moving up in the ranks and losing all traces of humanity while you do so, which is, er, nice? I guess?
There is some information about “extractions,” which is when one corp kidnaps a key employee of another corp, with or without said employee’s cooperation, and an account of one of the corporate wars that have been fought in the setting. The latter is a little dry, but admirable thorough – you get taken through all the steps of sabotage, betrayal, different corps joining and leaving the conflict for their own reason, attempts to raise capital, and a lot of guerilla assaults and Net runs. That does give me an idea of what it all looks like, so that’s good. There’s also a guide to infiltrating a corp’s facilities (for purposes of extraction, for example), with a description of just what kind of defenses Arasaka L.A. has. Here my suspension of disbelief snaps a little, even more so than from the 3d6 damage advertisements, because… Arasaka just let someone reveal the defenses of one of their offices? In a magazine that anyone can read? Yeah, I’m thinking a lot of people would have suddenly been killed under mysterious circumstances if that ever happened, followed by a complete reworking of those security measures… Still, it’s definitely useful for those sneak-in-and-cause-problems adventures that cyberpunk games thrive on.
There is gun porn. Well, I guess it would have to be for it to be a convincing Soldier of Fortune pastiche, but I yawned my way through it. Same with the vehicle porn a little further ahead. I may not be a natural Cyberpunk player given how little I care about hardware…
European Solos! They’re richer and classier than American Solos and living lives of high-style James Bond decadence in between jobs. They also hunt each other down and fight duels (not necessarily, but sometimes, to the death) to show who’s more elite than thou.
Government spies are still a thing, megacorps notwithstanding. Like I noted in the Near Orbit post, the nation state might not be quite as extinct in this setting as the elevator pitch for it might imply… Anyway, the CIA, the KGB, Interpol and Mossad all get writeups, with stat blocks for a typical agent. The CIA is mostly messing with the Europeans, the KGB is mostly messing with the Americans, Mossad is mostly messing with the remaining Arabian oil states (because a lot of those got nuked to Kingdom Come in the backstory, remember; but that just means that the oil the remaining ones are sitting on has become even more priceless, so they’re richer than ever), and Interpol is just trying to keep foreign influences out of Europe.
Finally, there’s a rundown of armed conflicts throughout the world of 2013 that enterprising Solos might get hired for. Mexico, Argentina, the Philippines and Palau all have civil wars between corrupt governments and rebels that may or may not be any better. The native companies of El Paso are fighting some maximally hostile takeovers from international corporations. Cyprus ended up sheltering a lot of people from nuked Arabian countries, and now the rich, secular Arabs and the poor, religious Arabs are coming to blows, with the government trying to keep some kind of control. In Honolulu, two entertainment corporations are fighting over the fate of a ratings-grabbing TV (or should that be Net? Not sure) series, with one trying to cut it short by means of car bombs if necessary and the other determined that The Highly Profitable Show Must Go On.
Deep breath… A city in New Mexico is under attack by a belligerent Nomad gang. The super-rich residents of “super-yachts” sailing the Pacific want protection against pirate attacks on their luxurious abodes. Two corporations are battling over the mines on Navajo land, and the Navajo are also trying to have a say in the matter, funnily enough. The City of Santa Cruz wants to blow up the corp-owned oil rigs in its harbour. Aaaaaand Arasaka and another corporation are duking it out in Hong Kong. Whew.
So that’s it. For a fairly thin book it certainly has no end of stuff crammed into it. Some of it is useful, some of it less so. It was apparently meant to be the first of a series of similar books-as-in-setting-magazines, but I think there was only one more, focusing on Rockers and Medias. Stay tuned for that one.
I swore I would get back to it, so damn it, here we go! Before I choked on the smarminess and had to stop for a while, I had gotten through these parts:
Let’s try just a short one this time, and do the last ten pages that’s left of the second chapter. First off, we need to finish the gear section, which is rarely my favourite part of any game, but we’ll see how it goes.
There’s a list of 60 types of special doodads, and apparently you can hand them out randomly by deciding on a number of d12s to roll based on how pricey a haul the players have run into, and then rolling them. Works for me. Like that implies, the doodads are of increasing value, ranging from a Premium Bedroll (lets you recover 1 Stress during downtime) at a roll of 1, to a Belt of Unity (lets you spend 5 Hope to lead a Tag Team Roll with 3 players instead of 2). Huh. You know, I think I’d rather have the first than the last? 5 Hope is almost all the Hope you can possibly have at any one time, and a Tag Team Roll just means that more than one player rolls and then you pick the best result among them. That’s not precisely overpowered. Whereas getting rid of Stress is getting rid of Stress – who among us couldn’t do with being a little less Stressed, I ask you?
Let’s check out a few more. 55 is the Gem of Precision, which you can attach to a weapon and it lets you roll with Finesse when attacking with that weapon. That’s… a tiny bit better than usual if your Finesse is better than your Strength and Agility, I guess? But it’s going to be on the level of like one or two points, and you’ll be rolling 2d12 and taking the highest, so it’s not exactly going to matter a lot. This is meant to be among the coolest things out there?
A roll of 6 gives you… a pair of manacles that can be locked. Okay, that is even lamer, I’ll grant you. However, a roll of 5 (so technically a bit worse) gives you a pair of magical walkie-talkies with unlimited range and use. What is this I don’t even.
Some of the items are also “Recipes” which lets you create some kind of potion (from the list that’s next up) as a downtime move. Okay, can two people use the recipe at the same time? Can it be copied? The thing with “rulings, not rules” is that things have to make some kind of internal sense so you can extrapolate from them – this seems to run on video game logic, where an item and a skill is fundamentally the same thing! Aaarrgggghhh. Now I remember why I stopped this readthrough in the first place.
Okay, okay, so the game designers have no concept of utility and were probably just scribbling down the first thing that came to mind and called it genius, that’s about what I’ve come to expect from them. Let’s move on to potions! Those are a bit less annoying, most of them just heal you, remove Stress, gain Hope, add to damage, add to stats, basically just enhance your character in some way. There are some more interesting ones, though, like Death Tea that lets you instantly kill the next enemy you roll a Critical Success against, but if you haven’t done so before your next long rest, you die. Ooooh. Also, the Knowledge Stone lets you donate one of your cards to another player if you die with it in your possession.
Next there is a play example. The characters spend the time climbing up a mountain to a castle, where they fight a bunch of skeletons in the courtyard, and there’s a lot of over-complicated special rules being thrown around all the while. But! After reading through this scene, and then going back and rereading the rules chapter, I think that I have actually worked out how the flow of action is meant to go, which is at least a plus.
It’s like this. The GM says which of the players get to act, and try to keep the attention divided both fairly and reasonably between them. The players try to do stuff, and roll their Hope Die and Fear Die. If they succeed with Hope (Hope Die is higher than the Fear Die and the roll succeeded) or roll a critical success (Hope Die and Fear Die are equal), they just succeed. If, on the other hand, they either fail or succeed with Fear, the GM gets to make a GM move – most commonly, by having an enemy NPC attack someone. The GM can also interrupt even after a player succeeded with Hope by spending a point of Fear, which she gets more of whenever the players either succeed with Fear or fail with Fear (so a little less than half the time a player makes a roll, basically). So there’s a whole economy going on with Hope and Fear flying back and forth over the table and being used to power abilities and take actions and offset results and and and and and…
Wow. I hate this. I hate it. It’s an unholy bastard hybrid of really crunchy tactical gameplay, which I love, and the sort of smooth-flowing narrative play-to-find-out-what-happens you get in Powered by the Apocalypse, which I also love. This is ketchup on ice cream. This is two great tastes that completely ruin each other. This is the worst idea ever.
I mean, I’ve heard the idea of “GM fiat initiative” being criticised, but in my experience it works just fine in PbtA. But thing is, in PbtA the rule is really simple. The GM makes a move when:
A player fails a roll.
The game would get boring if the GM didn’t inject some new complications.
Given the fictional situation, it wouldn’t make sense for something not to happen.
That’s it. It’s perfect, functional, elegant. It doesn’t need a fiddly point economy to make it work. It just needs a good GM who has the trust of his players.
But this mess… It’s like they put in complexity just because they could, without any attempt to make the complexity orderly or functional. And that has something to do with why the whole thing rubs me so thoroughly the wrong way, but I still can’t quite put my finger on it. Like, the game has colourful weirdness and cutesy subsystems, and I love colourful weirdness and cutesy subsystems! And yet, the whole thing just puts me in instant fight-or-flight mode. It’s like every line of text is not only calculated to offend me, but to do it in a sneaky, ambiguous way that will make me look like a deranged jerk if I ever admit to being offended.
Yeah. I need to think about this more.
Well, stay tuned for a lot more of me trying to figure out where I’m sensing a threat from, because this brings me up to almost exactly one third of the way through the book. Next up is the chapter on GMing. I am honestly a bit afraid to see what these people consider best practice…
Before we start on the meatier supplements of the second edition, let’s get a couple of stand-alone adventures out of the way. They are neither of them terribly interesting, but I’m all about the completeness, yo.
First off, Dimön (“The Island of Mist”). In this fairly basic dungeon crawl, the players are hanging out in a small village called Utkante (“Outskirt”) when they hear about a mysterious island where something magical has apparently gone down and are offered the chance to buy a map to its treasure. The island, it turns out, is a magical nexus where spells are easier to cast, and that has made it the dwelling of a number of evil magicians, the latest of which just got killed by a demon he summoned. Thus, his underground lair is now ripe for the plunder, though it’s still riddled with traps and guardians – for instance, there are two demons bound in pentagrams that bar the way forward, a lazy troll who still lives in the basement, and a bunch of skeletons ready to be activated.
It’s all pretty basic, though some of the traps are downright mean-spirited – there’s one in the main treasury that not only insta-kills anyone careless enough to blunder into it, but also destroys the treasure while it’s at it. I’m not sure it’s described in the most helpful way at times – for instance, the dungeon is located underneath a lake in the middle of the island (which lies in the middle of a bigger lake, so things are already a bit complicated) and you have to submerge to reach the stairs leading into it, but then you… walk up, apparently? Because the water recedes around you? So I guess I guess the actual dungeon is inside like a hill at the side of the lake? Yeah, I don’t know, it just bugs me. And also, apparently the magician’s last, ill-advised ritual was performed on a sort of elevated platform elsewhere on the island, but that’s not connected to the dungeon itself, which caused me some confused flipping back and forth the first time I read it.
Also, my pet peeve rears its ugly head again: what’s with the uber-NPC hirelings?! The players have the option of bringing a pair with them from the village, and these guys have stats that didn’t get rolling no damn 3d6 seven times in order, I’ll tell you that much! Okay, one of them has actual skills that are nothing to write home about, but the other one is a monster with 90% in Broadsword and 95% in Medium Shield – effectively, he’s close to unbeatable in single combat by anything other than a super-strong monster! If he comes along, the players will effectively be his bumbling sidekicks! I just… why were you like this, Äventyrsspel?!
The module also contains a detailed description of the village of Utkante, complete with references to nearby lands. The writers seem to be very proud of it and like they mean for it to be the hub for multiple adventures, but… it’s honestly not that interesting? It’s stressed how everyone is happy and friendly and no one really wants anything, so the amount of conflict and plot hooks is effectively nil. The village priest is secretly guarding a dark evil magical sword, so I guess that’s something, but other than that I don’t quite know what I’m supposed to do with this image of pastoral bliss.
Havets Vargar (“The Wolves of the Sea”) seems to have been intended to launch its own setting for the game, but as near as I can tell that didn’t happen. The premise is that it’s medieval Scandinavia, except that monsters, magic, and non-human sentients like elves and dwarves exist and are fully accepted, just like in the default game. I feel like that raises a lot of questions that the module never goes anywhere near, but okay, I can kind of see the reasoning: since the implied setting for the game so far has already been “medieval Sweden, with fantasy stuff in without really changing anything important,” why not just go all the way and make the setting be literally that? Hey, it gives you a full set of places, languages and cultures without needing to come up with them, and there’s even already a “Pirate” class that can easily be renamed to “Viking”…
Anyway, the players are hanging out in Kaupang in Norway and get recruited on a trip down to Spain, where they’re going to loot and plunder the keep of a robber baron. We get a lot of information about Kaupang, with special emphasis to what happens if the players try to steal stuff. Considering that nothing much happens there in the story, that’s another thing that makes me feel like this was meant to be only the first installment of many… Be that as it may, the players get on the crew and start rowing. They might get attacked by pirates along the way, for which eventuality the module includes sea combat rules. They may also run into a peaceful merchant ship, in which case their boss pointedly does not allow them to attack and plunder it. So I guss we’re oddly well-behaved Wolves of the Sea, huh?
Arriving in Spain, the players set out with two dozen crewmates and have some encounters along the way, including an optional mini-dungeon in the form of an orc-infested cavern. I feel like in addition to the ship combat rules, this module could have used some sort of mass combat rules, because they’re going to spend most of the aventure having a whole bunch of mates along. For that matter, I also feel like the behaviour of their employer – who will, after all, be right with them the whole time – should have gotten more space devoted to it, because carrying out his orders (or not) will reasonably be a major focus. Oh well.
The robber baron’s keep is a fairly standard dungeon with guards, magical traps, hidden doors, and a few monsters in the sub-basement. Actually, the players should preferably stay out of the sub-basement altogether, there isn’t much there except for the creepy-crawlies and once they find the way there they’ll already have found the main treasury.
Oh, and this adventure has optional pre-gen characters. You should absolutely play one of those rather than rolling up your own, because again, you are never in a million years going to end up with stats this high if you try to get them the honest way.
All in all, nothing terrible, but not very inspiring either. Next time, we dive into Drakar & Demoner Expert, the advanced rules. This will probably inspire some strong language and tearing of hair.
We continue stalking through the early nights of the World of Darkness. This time, we’re going to cover the adventure that came with the Storyteller’s screen, called Blood at Dawn, and another short one called Blood Bond.
Blood at Dawn takes place in Gary, last seen in the sample adventure for the core rules. The players are offered a chance to gain feeding rights at a strip club that has up to now been the domain of the Prince Modius’ childe Allicia. They have to compete with a snooty elder at the negotiation table, but the whole affair gets interrupted because someone has found a corpse, clearly dead from a vampire attack, in the parking lot. The elder hightails it and Allicia tells the players that they will, basically, get the deal if they can make the corpse disappear.
The players either succeed at this or not (the “correct” answer is apparently to cramp the corpse in a dumpster overflowing with reeking garbage, trusting that the cops that eventually show up won’t care enough to dig through it), but either way the corpse will then mysteriously go missing. It’s gotten up and walked away.
What’s happening is that a none-too-clever “magus” (the first canonical example of what would eventually become the Awakened, for those keeping track!) is out to steal some of Allicia’s blood for his arcane research, so he called up a spirit that would first possess his son and, after it got in a fight with Allicia and drew some of her blood, would jump to her instead. However, our wizard’s kid accidentally triggered a nutty Malkavian, who killed him… and now the possession has kicked in anyway.
The Malkavian eventually shows up, forcing the players to have a very confusing conversation with him (he’s got five different personalities that each kick in whenever someone says something that interests them and who aren’t aware of each other’s existence), before the possessed corpse appears again and attacks them. It’s tough, it’s mean, and it can possess anyone whose blood it sheds – the idea is to freak the players out completely with a messy, confusing fight.
The stated theme for the adventure (yes, the thing whereby every single World of Darkness product had to have its own pretentious Theeeeeeme and Moooood was there from start to finish!) is people doing things for petty reasons, and it shows, in a really nice way. Every NPC is motivated by something terribly prosaic, no one has any higher aspirations, and even the evil deeds (including at least one murder) that are committed are done less from malice and more because someone couldn’t be bothered not to commit them. I like it, it really sells the feeling of a sullen, dreary world run by apathy and petulant self-interest. In other words, a world as seen through the eyes of an angsty, disaffected teenager – which is always what the World of Darkness was best at. It was never that convincing when it tried to invoke grandness and scope, but it was always great when it remembered to keep things personal.
Oh, and the nudie bar is getting an elaborate, loving description, because of course it is. Night-time hangouts really are the main characters in this game, I swear!
Blood Bond features the first canonical look at the Sabbat, who here appears as a sort of mix between a biker gang and a skeevy occultist cult, which I got to admit I kind of love. The players get in a scrap with a Sabbat pack that’s just blown into Chicago, and in the process of it accidentally un-stake an ancient vampire named Jefferson who’s been stuck inside the wall of an opera house for the past several decades. Jefferson immediately embarks on a quest of revenge against Neally, the vampire who staked him in the first place, and things get… kind of twisted.
The backstory for Neally and Jefferson is actually kind of interesting. See, they started out as polar opposites, with Jefferson being practically a saint and Neally being a scoundrel and hedonist. Their feud started when Neally stole Jefferson’s main squeeze, Emily, and ghouled and Blood Bound her. Jefferson searched for a way to break a Blood Bond, but the only people who know how to do that is the Sabbat, so he joined up with them and got driven evil and insane in the process. Meanwhile, Neally started feeling guilty about what he’d done and trying to be a better person – he’s still not that nice a guy, but he’s more of the “can be such a jerk sometimes” sort than the “complete amoral monster” sort. Have I mentioned that I kind of dig that the game, at least in this part of its history, tried for that sort of nuance?
Anyway, Jefferson, once freed, is determined to completely destroy Neally’s attempt at redemption. To this end, he re-seduces Emily, whose relationship with Neally has cooled in the meantime, and starts feeding her his blood. Since Neally regularly feeds from Emily, before long he’s gotten Blood Bound to Jefferson, which thanks to Jefferson’s Sabbat mojo lets him mind-whammy Neally from afar, forcing him to perform acts of utter depravity.
This is all creepy as hell and I love it.
Thus, the players start encounter Neally in the process of doing horrific (and more to the point, Masquerade-violating) things, while insisting that he’s not in control of his actions. They see him walk into a crowded club, use Disciplines to draw everyone’s attention and rip a mortal’s throat out in full public view. They find a child vampire wandering the streets and it turns out that Neally has been turning the kids at an orphanage into vampires. One of the Prince’s favourites seek their protection, because Neally is randomly trying to kill her.
At the same time, one of the players is supposed to have started an affair with Emily, just to make everything even skeevier. Which of course means that this player will also get Blood Bound to Jefferson. Oh yeah, major STD metaphore here! Not sure I’d feel comfortable roleplaying out a messed-up relationship with a thoroughly broken woman with most groups, to be honest – it would have to be one I was really amazingly comfortable with and who I knew would be into that sort of thing. Still, I appreciate what the module is trying to do. It all really brings home the feeling that being a vampire means throwing all the rules out the window, and that that means that you’re at risk for a thousand things that regular squares never have to worry about.
It all culminates in the players being called upon to broker a deal between Neally and the Sabbat (which requires them to spend a night raising hell along with the Sabbat pack, by the way), where they put him through a ritual to break the Blood Bond. It involves burying him alive (beneath a tombstone with his name on it, for added creepiness) and letting him dig his way out, now free of the Blood Bond but also completely insane. Jefferson gloats and takes both Neally and Emily with him as he leaves town at the head of the Sabbat pack.
Yeah, again, not sure this would be fun to play out, and certainly not with a casual group, but… it sure packs a punch, doesn’t it? And just like in the last adventure, I like how all the melodrama is ultimately rooted in the characters. There is history, but it’s the history of three specific people, not some vast world-changing conspiracy.
Next up is another landmark: the very first city book, Chicago by Night. Stay tuned.
So, having gone from the the core Cyberpunk 2013 box to a weird tangent about a different setting, is it time for us to return to Night City where, y’know, the actual game is supposed to take place? No, it is not. We’re going into space instead. I’m guessing no one had invented the term “core gameplay loop” at the time, but still…
Oh well. The short of it is, in the dark and distant future of 2013, there is a small but growing world of orbiting space stations and lunar colonies, the residents of which are starting to develop their own subcultures, traditions, and snooty disdain for people who aren’t them. There are factories, laboratories, and self-sustaining habitats. There are also government agencies and megacorporations sniping at each other, which means that there’s work to be had for cyberpunks. There’s nothing further into the solar system as of yet, but there are missions to Mars and Jupiter being planned.
The five major factions in orbit are the European Space Agency, who is responsible for most of the big habitats, including the Crystal Palace that hangs in the Lagrange Point between Earth and the moon; the Japanese Aerospace Bureau, who builds most of the hardware needed for space colonies and sells them to the others; the Soviet Rocket Corps, who does most of the grunt work of dragging materials up into orbit; the US Air Force, who has most of the troops and kill-sats; and NASA, who does most of the long-range exploration. Hey, I thought the USA was supposed to be a spent force in this setting, why are two of the big five still American? I feel deprived of my fictional schadenfreude! Hrmpf.
The environment of space! You have to worry about three major things here: gravity, air and radiation. Living in zero-g isn’t healthy in the long run, so you’re going to want to either live in a station that spins to generate artificial gravity, or at least spend some hours every day in a special swing that spins you around to generate the same effect. Also, learning how to get around is a whole thing and you’re going to need to put points into special skills for it. Air, likewise, is a problem if it runs out and you really don’t want to fire any guns because the walls are thinner than you’d think. Radiation, finally, can hit you from solar flares and engines, and there are demoralisingly realistic tables that set out just how screwed you are if you soak up too much of it too quickly. I’m kind of digging the hard-sf vibe, I’ll admit that much, but as always there’s the question of how to turn it into an exciting game – dying of radiation poisoning isn’t really what I want out of my fun dice-slinging…
Likewise, you may forget those all-purpose Star Wars space-fighters, we’re doing this properly here! You need a surface-to-orbit craft to get up there, then you need a trans-orbital craft to get around. The difference between rockets (that blast off and then fall apart) and shuttles (that are good for multiple trips back and forth) are explained. Deep space crafts are their own thing and are basically miniature space stations with their own gravity, though you probably won’t need to worry about those unless you’re part of a NASA crew heading for Jupiter. There is such a thing as military “deltas” and “cruisers” that can get up into low orbit for the express purpose of blowing shit up there, but they can’t get high enough to threaten the stations in geosynchronous orbit. As an alternative to lugging cargo along, there are also mass drivers that basically send big lumps of material on their way by effectively shooting them out of a magnetic cannon.
Space suits and the propulsions thereof are given some space, and so are the sort of weapons you might use in orbit – flechette guns where the projectiles are slow-moving but super-sharp, tasers, and “safety bullets” that are made to be as useless against hard targets as possible to make sure they don’t pierce the walls. Oh, and velcro. Expect to see a lot of velcro, because without it things tend to not stay where you put them.
Combat between space ships is… really not a thing. Or rather, it is, but it lasts for about two seconds before the combatants find out whose targeting computer is more accurate, and then there’s a big explosion and a lot of debris. Not the kind of thing you can turn into a very engaging minigame, it must be said.
The Crystal Palace is, as mentioned, the main place to be in orbit, being effectively a small city floating in space. Another major habitat called O’Neill One, is under construction. There are also two cities on the moon, Tycho and Copernicus. There is a snarky note that all of this has gotten funded by rich and powerful people because Earth is going to hell in a handbasket, environmentally and socially, and basically everyone who has the money to do so are working very hard on getting the hell out of there and barring the door behind them. That’s… probably depressingly realistic, also.
Culture! People who live in space called themselves “highriders.” They are predominantly ethnic Africans since there’s a mass driver at Kilimanjaro that can send people up into orbit. They’re into super-clean living because anything that can cause errors in judgment is a threat to everyone, but there are people who get addicted to “braindance,” essentially artificial scenarios projected directly into your brain. They also don’t wear a lot of personal adornments, since a lot of them are impractical, but tattoos and tribal scarring is a common way to stand out from the crowd. They still eat a lot of bland nutritional paste, but hydroponics bays can produce a fair amount of vegetables and things like fish and shrimp. Anything that leaves crumbs is right out, though.
The second half of the book is an adventure called Child’s Play. It calls for a group of 5-7 since there’s going to be a need for a lot of manpower. That seems a bit much given that I’ve never once managed to maintain a group of more than five people and right now I’m down to three again… Anyway, they get hired by a nameless employer who brings them to the Crystal Palace and puts them through some training before directing them to go raid an orbital lab. Along the way, they get to take a look around the Crystal Palace and bump into an Interpol inspector who Will Become Important Later. The description of the station from the inside is pretty nice.
Anyway, the players have to hijack an inter-orbital shuttle that’s scheduled to make a supply run at the target station, and once there they need to use a combination of hacking and bamboozling to get in, quite possibly ending up fighting the internal security. They make their way to the secure lab and find out that – the lab is creating genetically engineered humans fit for zero-g life! The bastards – they’re trying to turn this into Eclipse Phase! Noooooooo!
Anyway, the players make their getaway, likely with some fetuses in vitro and a friendly five-year-old German monkey-boy (the GM is instructed to adjust his level of gratuitous cuteness to the group’s tolerance level. Heh), but they get shot at and start venting oxygen. They have no choice but to return to the Crystal Palace, where they find out that their employer is going to kill both them and the kid, so they have to make a desperate break for it and try to make some sort of deal, possibly with the Interpol inspector from earlier. Hopefully, they only get cheated of their pay and sent back to Earth with a megacorporation murderously mad at them – practically a “happily ever after” by cyberpunk standards.
It’s all very complicated and I feel like I’d need to read the whole thing three more times to really understand all the intricate realistic considerations and details… but I have to admit that it’s got a certain charm, to the point that I’d even consider running it. There is something terribly interesting about having a (comparatively) hard sci-fi setting with lots of cold equations and unforgiving constraints, and figuring out how to give the players choices and options within them.
Anyway. The next one up in this series is Solo of Fortune, so we might actually get to see some more of the regular setting. We’ll see.
Vapors Don’t Shoot Back has the hapless player get stuck in a “tournament” between two High Programmers, Nevo-U-MYN-6 and Black-U-BRD-5. The contest is as bitter as it pointless, being fought to the death (preferably that of the High Programmers’ various pawns, but possibly their own as well) over what amounts to secret bragging rights among the select group of ULTRAVIOLET citizens who know or care what’s going on. The players, of course, have no way of knowing this except maybe at the very end; their master, Nevo-U, is perfectly capable of masking his self-serving agenda as official, Computer-sanctioned missions, including by having Computer terminals give the orders. It’s pointed out that similar tournaments can be used to justify the GM’s own adventures, or just to explain oddities and bizarreness around Alpha Complex. Heh.
In Mission One: Standard Tournament Elimination Round, the players are sent on a mission to kill a bunch of traitors (who are actually another Troubleshooter team who have been told that they’re on a mission to kill a bunch of traitors). I note with some regret that there doesn’t seem to be any outrageous malfunctioning equipment issued for this mission. Ah well. The players have to survive a ride with driver who has a serious need for speed before being sent down an extremely elderly elevator to a warehouse where they’re on a collision course with the enemy team. Unbeknownst to both of them, some actual secret society traitors are at work in the warehouse, looking to blow up the roof so that the algae vats on the next floor collapse into the warehouse, covering everything in nutritious goo. Also, the warehouse has a bunch of stubborn sorting robots who might try to pick players up and put them on shelves at inopportune moments. All in all, though, it’s not terribly interesting, just an opportunity to shoot things.
In Mission Two: The Cheating Begins, Nevo-U finds out that Black-U has located one of Nevo-U’s most valued assets, a miniature computer core that he uses to test programs before uploading them into the Computer proper (which is terribly treacherous – the Computer doesn’t like competition, even miniaturised competition!). It’s hidden in an old weather station Outside, and Black-U has a bunch of security troops heading that way. Nevo-U hastily sends the players to fetch the computer core first – on the pretext of an official Computer mission, of course. This chapter is a bit more interesting and includes things like the players (who, let’s remember, have probably never even been Outside before) having to figure out skydiving from watching a single vague education video before being flung out of a plane, possibly even with their parachute strapped on the right way.
This one is a little more funny, and it does give us our first canonical view of what Outside is actually like. Which is, honestly, fairly idyllic, all things considered – the players can run into a lot of hostile predators, but none of them are horrifically mutated. Also, there are savage survivalists with bows and arrows, so at least some parts of humanity have only been reduced to the Stone Age, not the depressing state of Alpha Complex. Heartening to know!
Anyway, if they can nab the computer core and get it back to Alpha Complex, they promptly get arrested because the Computer (or at least the parts of the Computer that they’re dealing with at that particular time) has no recollection of sending them on a mission. A hint that things are Not What They Seem… though in all honesty, it’s probably not that unexpected that the left hand does not know what he right one does in Alpha Complex…
Still, with some invisible help from Nevo-U the Computer suddenly “remembers” the very important mission it sent the players on, and dispatches them on Mission Three: The Finals. Nevo-U has found Black-U’s hidden headquarters, which is… on a facsimile of a pirate ship floating in an underground reservoir. Crewed by robot pirates, and commanded by Black-U himself with a parrot-bot on his shoulder. The players, who have never been near enough water to swim in before, are forced to make their attack on jetskis, all while artificial underwater geysers erupt to indicate where a cannon ball has supposedly dropped (which can still knock one of those non-swim-enabled players off their jetski if they get hit by one).
Okay… yeah… this is the good stuff. This is what I come to Paranoia for.
Anyway, if the players win the day, they can search the ship and find evidence of the illicit tournament. The module ends on a cheerful note that if they do anything as silly as try to present that evidence to the Computer, the best thing that can happen is that they get ignored, and the worst thing is that they get executed after a lengthy show trial – because clearly, anyone making absurd accusations against above-all-suspicion ULTRAVIOLET High Programmers must be a traitor!
All in all, fun enough, though maybe lacking a bit of the punch I remember from reading these modules as a wee lad… the spectacular finish aside, of course. Still, it’s early days yet. I definitely recall things getting a lot freakier.
All right! In our readthrough of Torg, the roleplaying game of let’s-throw-everything-in-and-see-what-happens, we have started reading the original core rules, found out that we needed to read a novel trilogy to understand the original core rules, done that, gone back and finished reading the original core rules, and made an initial trip to the Living Land. Now we’re heading to everyone’s favourite cosm, the ridiculous pulp reality of the Nile Empire!
Though I would again like to point out that it would stand out more if Torg as a whole wasn’t already ridiculously pulpy. Look, it just bugs me, okay?! Anyway…
The Nile Empire has appeared over Egypt, natch, and is spreading in every direction. It’s a place of roughly 1930s technology mixed with isolated displays of ramshackle super-science, the subtle influence of brooding gods, ritualised magic, and an odd tendency for people to put on a mask and go jumping between rooftops at night. Its High Lord is Doctor Mobius, who is a sort of proto-supervillain out of schlocky 1930s pulp fiction; maniacally evil, larger than life, and always embarked in a new sinister scheme or a new fiendish invention.
Mobius comes from a cosm called Terra, which is identical to Earth except that everything is more cheesy and bombastic. He was the son of an ancient Pharao who tried to usurp his older brother and got killed, but the descendents of his followers recently resurrected him with a magic ritual and he set about mastering the sciences of the new era. He become a Recurring Villain (TM) for a number of the heroic “Mystery Men” of Terra, but then suddenly disappeared. He had found a Darkness Device called the Kefertiri Idol in the shape of an ancient Egyptian statuette of a crocodile-headed deity, and used it to disappear into the cosmverse, plundering worlds of their possibility energy. A number of Mystery Men have since gotten wind of this and have followed him to Core Earth on the principle of, “this time I will put an end to Doctor Mobius’ reign of evil! For justice, righteousness, and mom’s apple pie!”
There’s a list of Mobius’ long-term goals, none of which are very surprising – he wants to become all-powerful and live forever, basically, and he’s interested in any kind of technology or magic that promises to help with that. We also get his stats. For a world-conquering uber-villain they are relatively modest, though he does have a value of 37 in Weird Science, in a system where 15 is respectable, 20 is impressive, and 25 effectively superhuman. So basically, he can probably do just about anything you can imagine if he just gets the time to cobble some gadget together.
Relation to other High Lords is what you’d expect, he has a loose alliance with Baruk Kaah because he figures the lizard dude is too pathetic to be a threat, he is actively hostile to Jean Malraux because Jean Malraux a loser and everyone hates him, and he’s wary of the other three.
We get an outline of the Nile Empire’s government, including a bunch of NPCs. Basically, Mobius has a couple of ministers with specific areas of responsibility, and below those he has a mini-boss squad of ten “Overgovernors,” most of them are some kind of colourful criminal mastermind in his or her own right. Some of them are loyal, some of them are plotting against him, some are even starting to reconsider their evil ways. One that stands out is Wu Han, who’s a Fu Mancho expy who is a sinister Orieeeeeeeental who likes poison and traps and other things that no decent Englishman would ever stoop to, no sirree. I feel like that’s kind of stepping on the toes of Nippon Tech, since their whole deal is that they’re negative Asian stereotypes (admittedly Japanese rather than Chinese ones) so this is just another way that the Nile Empire just does what the setting as a whole is doing, only sligthly more flamboyantly. And yes, Wu Han has ninja minions, because of course he does.
Many of Mobius’ followers obey him out of religious devotion and because he’s promised to restore the glories of ancient Egypt (though he has no plans of actually doing that). It’s noted that he’s gotten a lot of converts on Core Earth by promising to restore Egypt’s fortunes there, and apparently that has gotten a ton of impressionable people on board. I don’t know enough about Egyptian culture to be sure here, but I don’t think that makes sense – the people who live in Egypt today aren’t even that closely related to the people who lived there in ancient times, ethnically or culturally, and certainly I have trouble seeing a devoutly Muslim country being excited about bringing back paganism. But, I guess we can chalk that up to it being a pulp reality where ridiculous schemes stand a genuine chance of working as long as that will make things more dramatic.
There is a rundown of Mobius’ army, which is your basic World War Two setup with tanks, propellor planes and infantry. The only thing I’ll note here is that tallying up the numbers listed, it seems that Mobius has about 70,000 men or so. This is in contrast to modern Egypt, who has an army of 300,000, while Israel – who is only one of the countries Mobius is fighting against – has twice that. Ah well, chalk it up to slapdash research in the pre-Internet era, though it does add to the difficulty of being overly worried about this guy actually conquering the world… Anyway, Mobius fights his war by dropping “reality bombs” over areas he wants to horn in on, which causes the axioms to switch over to Nile Empire ones for a brief time, during which he rolls in with his armies and trounce the defenders, whose 1990s-era weapons and vehicles are suddenly too advanced to function. Then he raises a ton monuments all over the place, some of which are actually stelae, thus adding the area to his realm.
There’s a long section about the major cities of the Empire and some specific and generic locations. Cairo has become a sort of anything-goes city ruled by gangsters and home to a thriving black market, since Mobius has decided that trying to control it is more effort than it’s worth. He instead rules from his palace in Thebes. There are a lot of descriptions of crusading journalists, hardboiled private detectives, weird pagan cults, mysterious curses, grubby-but-not-monstrous criminals like smugglers and spies, and pretty much anything you would expect in a period adventure story that wasn’t trying over-hard to be realistic. It does all paint a pretty vivid picture of what sort of adventures you could set up here.
Likewise, there is a section on the land outside the cities. There are scorching deserts with mysterious and possibly cursed oases, an island populated by amazon warriors (most of whom weren’t amazon warriors a few months ago, but who have embraced girl power by way of hitting things with a sword in a big way), secret laboratories where Mobius’ scientists work on new super-weapons, steaming jungles filled with tribes of noble savages and tribes of savage savages (because it’s the Nile Empire, so everyone is either a positive stereotype or a negative stereotype). There are underground gold mines where Mobius sends Israeli prisoners of war to work them to death and I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.
The state of the war! Mobius is basically in a slow stalemate on every front. He’s not advancing into Libya because Qaddafi has threatened to set off a nuclear bomb in the middle of country’s oil fields if he comes any closer, so for now Mobius is just extracting a regular tribute in crude oil and calling it a day. He’s not advancing into Israel, because the Israeli are fighting back like mad bastards – understandably, given that they’re being invaded by what seems like a bizarre mix between the Pharao of Exodus and an even-crazier versus of Adolf Hitler, which I’m sure is hitting every cultural trigger they’ve got. He’s not advancing into Ethiopia because the altitude is playing havoc with his military equipment, and he’s not advancing into Sudan because in Sudan a bunch of African countries have banded together with some Soviet support and are giving as good as they’re getting.
Actually, I’m honestly not sure why the Communists aren’t all over the Possibility Wars. The Americans have trouble enough on the home front, but the Russians actually beat back their invasion before it started, so why aren’t they running around bailing out smaller countries with troops and thus also putting them firmly under their thumb? “Never fear, proletarian brethren, Soviet Union will come to rescue! Unlike American imperialists pigdogs, who are too busy getting eaten by dinosaurs! Getting eaten by dinosaurs is ineeeeeevitable consequence of decadent capitalism!” I think there’s some mention in a later book that Nippon Tech is doing sneaky things behind the scenes to keep the Kremlin too tangled up and inefficient to launch any sort of coherent action, but it still seems a bit iffy.
Anyway, we move on to world rules. First are the axioms. Social and technological development are, again, at the level of the 1930s or, though women have full equality. The spiritual axiom is a lot more powerful than it is on Core Earth, and religious miracles (specifically tied to Egyptian paganism) are a fact of life. Magic is a little more modest and has to be mastered through rigid formulas – no flinging fireballs around all willy-nilly. There are two schools of magic, mathematics (which function by tying magical effects to the movement of the heavens) and engineering (which functions by tying magic to architectural or mechanical designs). Interestingly, that means that they’re basically “magic that’s half religion” and “magic that’s half science,” indicating that the lines in the Nile Empire are a little blurrier than elsewhere. Add that to the fact that “weird science” are effectively “technology that might as well be magic” and you have a pretty fun and flavourful mix.
In addition to the axioms, there are also World Laws that set the cosm apart. Firstly, the Law of Morality states that each person is either basically good or basically evil. You can go from one to the other by being corrupted or redeemed, but everyone falls into one category or the other at a given time. The definition of “good” here amounts to “unselfish” or “community-minded”; a good person thinks about others before themselves, a bad person thinks about themselves first and others never. Secondly, the Law of Drama commands the GM to keep adding complications and raising the stakes at every turn. Finally, the Law of Action gives heroes extra power; when spending a possibility for an additional roll on an action, a Storm Knight can spend a second possibility to make two addtional rolls and choose the better one to add to his total.
Pulp powers! They’re basically superpowers, but rather less comprehensive than your typical caped flying brick. You can take pulp powers for your character before the game starts, but each one you take has a possibility cost, and you’ll need to pay it out of your acquired possibilities after each adventure, and if you fail to pay up even once, you lose the power, permanently. Powers are things like flight, invisibility, force fields, the ability to grow or shrink, the ability to talk to animals, and similar handy but not godlike feats. You can also take power flaws, which are specific weaknesses (possibly but not necessarily connected to your pulp powers) that grants you possibilities whenever they come into play in a way that actually matters (exposing you to your weaknesses under controlled conditions doesn’t count, therefore – it has to be when it’s really inconvenient to you to take a beating from them), thus helping to pay that extra possibility tax on pulp powers.
How do you get pulp powers? Ehhhh, you were probably hit by lightning or something, don’t think too hard about it. Welcome to the Nile Empire.
Gizmos are the creations of weird science, which can coincidentally recreate the effects of pulp powers, though they can also just add some extra bonuses to perfectly ordinary skills and abilities. There is a long, complicated description of how you create gizmos, which include drawing up an actual blueprint with all sorts of interesting symbols representing the gizmo’s abilities, energy consumption, sturdiness, and all that sort of thing. Each thingamabob you add makes the gizmo harder to create, but you can offset that somewhat by adding special make-it-easier thingamabobs. And then, at the end of all that, you’re cheerfully informed that you’re of course not supposed to actually use these rules, they’d slow the game down way too much and the Nile Empire is all about the fast-past action, silly!
…
…
… Torg, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, I actually find it kind of endearing. These people sat down and created a mathematically precise, highly flavourful subsystem that no one was supposed to use, that was just there to give you an idea of how things would work mechanically if you were to resolve them mechanically. That’s some serious commitment to the game-as-simulation-engine ethos, you can’t deny that.
Magic! Nile Empire magic relies on astronomy, in particular on the position of the planets. To cast a spell, you need to figure out where some subset of the planets are, and if they’re in a particularly auspicious position, it makes your spell stronger. There is a helpful description of why the spell that raised Mobius from the dead had to wait until the planets were correctly aligned, and precisely what sort of bonus his cultists had on their casting. Like I said, commitment! Anyway, it all serves to give Nile Empire magic a slightly grittier, more ritualistic quality than the sort of spellchucking an Ayslish mage can pull off.
Mathematics (as in the magic school) can do some slightly Egyptian-themed things like command crocodiles, create an oasis in the desert, raise mummies and heal with rays of sunlight. Engineering has a few spells that lets you loft heavy blocks, find or dismantle traps, or find a path through a maze, but its main shtick is binding spells or pieces of technology to architectural designs. In effect, it lets you create the sort of underground maze full of still-miraculously-working-after-centuries traps that the Nile Empire is full of. Not sure if it’s something that a player character would have much use for, but it certainly fits into and justifies the setting.
Miracles make use of the same astrological requirements and enhancements as magic, so there’s another way that the two overlap in the Nile Empire. Egyptian priests can do things like lay down curses, spread plagues, blight or bless fields, bring fortune in war, and other high-level stuff. Again, more flavourful than actually useful for a player character – I think these are mostly meant to be used by Mobius’ minions, with the players focusing more on pulp powers (not that that’s too shabby).
The section of critters has a number of giant animals (apes, insects), as well as “walking gods” who guard pyramids and take the form of actual deities, but aren’t quite as all-powerful as all that. Gospogs are present as in all cosms, here they take the form of increasingly deformed and disturbing mummies in their later plantings. Also, there are Martians who look kind of like big spiders when they’re not masquerading as humans through their technology and are on some sort of mission from (Terra’s) Mars that no one is quite sure what it is.
The equipment section is mostly forgettable, but I want to note that includes rules for using a bull whip as a weapon, if you want to get your Indiana Jones on. And then, after a bunch of pre-generated characters from the Nile Empire, the book draws to a close.
I’ll admit that I can see the appeal of this one. It’s a weird kitchen-sink mess, but it’s also got an odd sort of specificity and flavour to it, a sense of how it’s all supposed to work. The weakest part of it all is really how little interest the writers seem to have had in the actual place of Egypt, its people and its culture – there are some hand-waves about how the pulp tropes are meant to have an “Arabic slant,” but they don’t seem to have really known themselves what that meant in practice. It feels more like ancient Egypt mushed up with 1930s America, without any attention paid to the (mostly Arabic, mostly Muslim) state of the modern (or for that matter 1930s) northern Africa. That’s something the Living Land (and as we’ll later see, Aysle) benefited from; the writers actually felt comfortable with the original state of the place they were transforming, and it made it all the more vivid how it had been forcibly changed.
But oh well. I understand that’s a common criticism of the game, and it doesn’t change the fact that the Nile Empire, too, seems like a fun place to adventure in.
The first edition of Dragonbane / Drakar & Demoner wasn’t particularly long-lived. Two years and two published adventures (and, admittedly, two issues of Sinkadus magazine to add some extra content) it was already time for the second edition. Let’s have a look.
That guy on the cover is Elric of Melniboné, by the way, taken from one of Michael Moorcock’s novels about him. It has nothing to do with him, his world, or the game of Stormbringer other than using similar rules, but I guess Äventyrsspel didn’t have a budget to commission its own covers at the time.
So, the rulebook starts with a choose-your-own-adventure section where you go investigate a haunted mine, fight a bear, and get in a scrap with a wizard and his goblin (?) minions. I still love these things, but I’ll note that here, the task resolution rules used for the choose-your-own-adventure are completely different from the ones in the actual game, which does seem like a flaw if this is meant to give you a sense for how the game runs… Oh well.
Character creation has changed a good bit since last time. There are still seven base stats that are rolled up with 3d6, but Skill has been renamed to Dexterity, Power is now Psychic Power, and Body has become Physique. There are now ten character classes instead of four: you can be play Merchant, Thief, Wizard, Warrior, Scholar, Hunter, Bandit, Pirate, Knight or Monk. There is also an entrance roll for all of them, so there isn’t a “default” option of being lawless if you fail to qualify for any of them. That seems a bit needlessly unhelpful. Though I’ll grant you, you still have Dexterity x 8% chance at making it as a thief, so unless you’re terribly clumsy you’ll usually have it to fall back on.
Anyway, each class gives you a spread of skills, and you choose three of them as your Expert skills and five as your Normal skills. Each skill is based on a stat, and your starting score is 50 + 2 x that stat for an Expert skill, or 20 + 2 x that stat for a Normal skill. Any skill you don’t choose either starts at 0% or at the related stat in percent. So you’ll be looking at something like three skills at 70%, five at 40%, and the rest at either 0% or 10%.
Which, I must admit, is a lot nicer and more streamlined than the fiddly-specific rules from first edition, while also giving you more of a chance to set up your character the way you want. You’re still going to get horribly killed by the kind of monstrosities the published adventures sends you up against, but at least you’ll be roughly competent.
Wizards have some additional rules. Spells are now divided into four levels, with the fourth level being completely forbidden for starting characters, and the other levels determining what your starting score is if you choose that spell as an Expert or Normal skill. You’ll end up with a score between about 60% and about 5%, with about 35-45% being the average. So if you start as a wizard, you start as a fairly sucky wizard, which is pretty much the same as in first edition. Oh, and magical healing is a fourth-level spell, so you’re not going to have a healer in your party. That’s going to increase the meat-grinderiness considerably.
Also, wizards no longer start with any fighting skills, at all, and they can’t carry metal or their magic doesn’t work. They’re amazingly squishy.
The skill list is basically the “effective” skill list from first edition, but here they’ve streamlined it. All the knowledge skills that scholars used to get are here, for instance. Since all the classes work the same now, scholars also no longer get a base chance in all the knowledge skills, so they now have a few rarely-relevant specialties and the rest of the time they are pristinely useless. Don’t play a scholar, kids.
Persuasion – you know, just talking people into things – has gone from being just 5 x Charisma in first edition to being a skill here. And to add insult to injury, it’s one you start at 0% in, so you don’t even get a base chance unless you’re trained… and no class has it on their list of selectable starting skills, except for wizard and there I think it was an oversight (wizards can choose to know any skill that isn’t a weapon skill, see). Did… did someone just completely abuse Persuasion during playtesting and convince the designers that it was grossly overpowered?
Improving in skills has gotten a lot tougher. See, you can’t just train in your off time, you also need experience. Which in this game means successfully using a skill in the course of play – never mind that you might just have a 5% chance at that, it’s still the only way to improve. An even getting experience doesn’t necessarily raise the skill, you still have to succeed at an improving roll at the end of the adventure. Not the game session, mind, but the adventure. So basically, if you didn’t pick the skill at chargen, you’re pretty much never getting good at it – you’d need to play for a thousand years for it to happen.
And that super-handy healing spell? Yep, can’t pick it at chargen. You need to learn it during play, starting at 5% (in first edition, you could learn new spells and they started at Intelligence x 3%). Which costs a ton of money to even get to that point. So yeah, the designers apparently felt that the game wasn’t deadly enough.
ETA: Here I must write a correction, since I spotted a line in the book I hadn’t noticed before. A wizard’s starting score in a new spell is his Psychic Power in percent, rounded to the nearest multiple of five. So realistically, once you get the 4000 silver coins together to learn the healing spell, you’ll likely start with it at 15%. Still pretty brutal, and far below the first edition’s relative generosity, but not quite as demoralising.
Combat is mostly unchanged. Weapons are no longer as breakable – depending on which of two optional systems you use, a weapon can break after taking a single extremely powerful hit, or it can break after taking a number of still pretty hefty hits. All weapons except quarterstaffs and longspears can potentially break a weapon. Impaling rules have disappeared.
Oh, and casting a spell now… seems to take two rounds? Like, this is something that after thirty years I am still trying to figure out, but that seems to be what it says – you cast the spell with one action, then you release it with your next action. So that’s nerfing wizards even harder. This was not the case in the first edition, as near as I could understand how it worked there, and in the fourth edition it seemed not to be the case in the core rules but then became the case in the advanced rules that came later… Yeah. If someone has a clue, let me know!
Magical items are much the same, they give you the ability to cast the spell that’s in them at 95%. Weapons and armour with permanent enhancements and potions that affect you with a spell of a certain strength when you drink it also exist. Demon weapons seem to have disappeared, though funnily enough they’ll be making their return in a late third edition adventure, aaaaages from now.
The bestiary has been extended, and like a bunch of other things different creatures have been put on a more similar level – no more giving elves a ton of spells just for existing! All the creatures from first edition make their return except for wolves – I think we can assume that they still exist and just didn’t make the cut, or maybe meek Swedish players didn’t feel like killing an endangered species. Trolls are among the ones that return, but have turned a lot dumber and are no longer noted as being great magicians – they’re now more lumbering Tolkienian brutes than the cunning folk from Swedish folklore. That feels like a shame.
Among the new arrivals we have… the ducks (“mallards” in the modern English translation). Who are ducks, like Donald. Yeah, one day I’m going to really do my research and figure out where this idea came from – I know it didn’t start here, they were imported from Rune Quest, but why they made sense there I have yet to discover. We also now have orcs and halflings, again bringing us closer to Tolkien, and a few other fantasy standards like unicorns, griffons, harpies and centaurs. Oh, and ghouls, for some reason. They’re called likätare (“corpse-eaters”), but whatever, they’re ghouls.
The sample adventure with this edition, Sarkath Hans Gravvalv (“The Tomb of Sarkath Han”) apparently has the distinction of being regarded as the worst adventure ever published for the game. I’m not entirely sure I understand why, though. It’s very basic, certainly – the players get sold a map to a tomb full of treasure, they cross some wilderness including a troll bridge that has gotten taken over by elves, and when they find the tomb it turns out that the trolls who used to run the bridge have come here to plunder it. The only really annoying part with it is that the players can pick up hirelings in town that are statted out in a way that’ll make them ridiculously more powerful than the players are likely to be. Oh, and one of them starts out with a staff that stores Power Points, which is something that doesn’t even exist in this edition, and back when it did exist in the first edition it was something that cost a ton of money and took a year for a player to create. Like, can we just play as these guys instead? They seem like they’re better suited to be the heroes! But other than that, it’s a fairly by-the-numbers mini-adventure.
Overall impression? I think this was a step in the right direction, and certainly less messy, though a few cool things were lost along the way. Fourth edition would eventually come along and change things beyond recognition, but funnily enough the current edition has in many ways returned to what the second edition set up. Having actually run this edition, I can also vouch for the fact that it plays pretty well. I house ruled those skill raises pretty thoroughly, though.
The problem with most roleplaying games is that their premises collapse the moment the players fall on their asses.
Which, unless you really railroad them within an inch of their lives and fudge every dice roll, is going to happen. It’s just a fact of life. People mess up. Humiliating accidents happen. We all know that from our real, actual lives set in comfortable First World environments… and the sort of high-risk shenanigans we get up to in TTRPGs offer a lot more chances for things to go demoralisingly wrong.
The problem is, most TTRPGs try to emulate fiction, and in fiction people tend to succeed at anything that is broadly achievable. When they fail, it tends to be because it was hopeless right from the start. If the hero loses a fight, it’s because he’s not skilled enough and needs a training montage. Or his opponent was unkillable by mere steel, and he needs a special magic sword. Or some nefarious traitor slipped drugs into his breakfast stew. It’s never just because, well, he had an off day. He zigged when he should have zagged. He was a little too slow with that one parry. Hey, shit happens. You win some, you lose some. But not in fiction.
So what TTRPGs produce – partly since they have randomised elements like dice, but mostly because they have the ultimate randomised element of human beings making bad judgment calls and misreading situations because they haven’t read the script – is usually less like the sort of fiction they’re supposed to be based on, and more like a parody of the same. It’s Conan the Barbarian, except he falls on his face when trying to scale a wall. It’s Lord of the Rings, except the Fellowship wanders in circles for a week because they can’t figure out the map. It’s Robin Hood, but the Sheriff’s men spotted the ambush because someone burped at the wrong time.
And it gets worse the more high-powered and dignified the game is meant to be. There’s a reason why the origin of the hobby was a bunch of random schmoes skulking through a dungeon and trying to steal some gold without being eaten by a giant slime mold. When your first-level halfling thief trips and falls into a bottomless chasm, well, it’s about what you’d expect, isn’t it? But when a game is meant to be beautiful, evocative and heroic, the cracks start to show. When your immortal champion of light and justice trips and falls into a bottomless chasm, it’s really kind of wretched.
I think that if you want tonal consistency in your games, you really just have two options. Call them comedy and tragedy. The senseless setbacks will happen. You have either be prepared to laugh, or be prepared to cry.
I don’t mean, of course, that your only options are non-stop slapstick or wall-to-wall angst. You can run fun adventures or intricate intrigues or passionate drama or anything you want. What I mean is that the potential for comedy or tragedy (or both) have to be there right from the start. You need to set the game in the sort of universe where things can suddenly go wrong and where everyone knows that they can suddenly go wrong.
For a good example – and one of the few franchises that I think actually lends itself well to roleplaying – you can look at Star Wars. There you have epic conflicts and pulse-pounding action, to be sure. But it all takes place in a world where silly things happen, even to characters who are stalwart heroes or fiendish villains. Darth Vader goes to rout the forces of good through his terrifying presence and unmatched dogfighting skills… and gets sent spinning into space because some jerk managed to shoot him down from behind. Luke Skywalker has a vision of his friends being in danger, so he runs to the rescue… and completely blows it and ends up needing them to rescue him. It doesn’t mean that they’re not an inspiring hero and a terrifying villain, it just means that they’re both at the mercy of a bad die roll.
Among roleplaying games, the one that comes to mind for leaning into this is of course Paranoia, where things getting wildly out of control is meant to be part of the fun. It definitely embraces comedy. And in (ahem) my own labour of love, Monstrous Mishaps, I of course do the same thing. The more ridiculous and dignity-free a way the players find to succeed, the better it fits the game’s themes. Which is, I still think, an excellent way of doing it.
But I actually think that a better example for how you can open the door to randomness without going all out on it is the early Vampire: the Masquerade books I’ve been reading my way through.
And, look, I know what you’re thinking. VtM? The game that’s justifiably blamed for the entire “roleplaying is aaaaaaaaart, man!” vibe that dominated the nineties and encouraged GMs to force through their Incredibly Important Themes no matter how badly they had to mutilate the game to do it? The gold standard for pretentious, oppressive metaplot? And, well, yes, that’s fair. But I mean the very early days.
Because, you see, in those early days, the premise of the game was still that you were something that shouldn’t exist… but that you existed anyway. And that coloured everything. It took place in a world that had lost the plot, where there was no justice and no consistency, just cold facts of the environment. You were a vampire, but you weren’t a sleek, elegant movie vampire – you were just some person who had gotten stuck with the powers and limitations of a vampire and had to figure out what to do about it. You weren’t guaranteed success or failure, because if the universe had been in the habit of guaranteeing anything, it would have made sure you never existed in the first place.
You could see it in the NPCs, too. A lot of them were powerful, sure, but they were also usually not wholly successful – their backstories usually read like a laundry list of phyrric victories and disappointments, of half-measures and derailed plans. You could just hear the dice rattling in the background. The game clearly took place in a world that usually refused to serve up simple, satisfying plots, where pratfalls didn’t break the ambience but just gave you another thing to feel gloomy about. It embraced tragedy.
Needless to say, it didn’t last, but still… it makes reading those early books informative.
