Having suffered through the dullness of The Player’s Guide, this time we’re going to look at a shorter but considerably more colourful supplements: Awakening: Diablerie Mexico. Like Milwaukee by Night (which we’ll get to soon!) it’s considered to be kinda-sorta part of “the Chicago chronicle” despite neither of them actually focusing on the Windy City – they both just sort of hang nervously in its orbit, making brief little forays into the big, wild world outside, bless them. Let’s see we can bring back from there.
Awakening: Diablerie Mexico starts out by delving into the subject of, well, diablerie, the act of one vampire feeding on another and a major no-no in Kindred circles. High-generation vampires do it to low-generation ones because it lets them decrease their own generation and thus raise their power cap, and ancient vampires do it to younger ones because they can no longer survive off of mortal blood but only vampire blood will do. Also, some vampires do it because they’re just sick bastards – when it comes to vampires, I think we’ve learned by now that “because he’s a sick bastard” is a perfectly plausible reason why one does something…
There’s a mention of the theory that the Kindred as a species exist solely because the Antediluvians know that when they’ll wake up at the end of their current torpor, they’ll wake up thirsty, and only the blood of thousands upon thousands of lesser vampires will be able to sate them. Gehenna will thus be an orgy of diablerie, as all of Kindred kind is extinguished – presumably except for a few Fourth Generation vampires who can replenish their numbers for the next time the Antediluvians need to feed. That’s kind of creepy-awesome.
We also get a number of ways that you can be found out to have committed diablerie, one of which is having an Auspex-trained vampire check your aura. I don’t really like this at all, because that’s entirely too easy and ruins the paranoia of wondering whether some other vampire might be going off and doing the unspeakable on the sly. I mean, aura reading isn’t even that hard, it’s the second-dot Auspex power. Every other Toreador, Malkavian and Tremere can do it. That means that diabolists simply can’t be part of vampire society, or someone will find them out. Okay, the aura taint does fade after half a year or so, but still, that’s a lot of time to be off the radar.
Also, we’re introduced to the Ritual of the Bitter Rose, which is something the Tremere cooked up that allows more than one vampire to take part in diablerising the same victim and all get a generation bump. It’s almost useless, though, because if you use it on any vampire above the Third Generation it only works if the vampire is really tremendously old or powerful, and even then it has to be at least Fourth or Fifth Generation. Okay, this adventure is about happening to discover both the Ritual and the location of an ancient Fourth Generation vampire at the same time, but I don’t like how neurotic White Wolf is already getting about putting up guard rails and making sure that nothing can be used without their expressed blessing.
I mean, I can only assume that at this point they had gotten a bunch of playtest results and were panicking over the fact that a lot of players (being players) had gotten the idea in their heads that you “won the game” by working your way up the generations and finally diablerising Caine himself, so this was them putting in multiple stop gaps. But honestly now… the thing that should stop players from going crazy with diablerie is that really old vampires can defend themselves, and even if you somehow take them down they’ll have childer and Blood Bonded servants and allies who will all raise a fuss. It shouldn’t be a problem.
Also, one thing that the book doesn’t even bother to discuss is that it’s kind of useless for some 13th-generation schmoe to diablerise a really old vampire, since you only gain one generation at the time anyway. He’d need to work his way down the list, starting with vampires as young and dumb as himself, and only hitting a major wall and having to quest around for sleeping ancients once he got to the Eighth Generation or so. Before that, you don’t even need the Ritual of the Bitter Rose to show that sharing is caring, you just need to take turns hunting down the most recently embraced childer of some Seventh Generation Elder; there is no real lack of those. Hell, just go to a Sabbat city and dig up a few graves, they’re not going to miss one of their “failed shovelheads”…
Oh well. We also get some alternative uses for Elder blood, like how it can be used to heal aggravated damage. Nothing about it giving you temporary Discipline dots, like Menele’s blood did in Ashes to Ashes, because the rules are getting more boring already. Shame.
Then we get the life story of Mictlantecuhtli, who’s an ancient Gangrel embraced by a mysterious stranger that might have been the Gangrel Antediluvian. He wandered America in the years long before Columbus, eventually finding his way down to the Mayas and setting himself up as a god of a city called Tzental. After a few centuries of ruling supreme and snacking on his childer, he started feeling sleepy, though, so he had himself intombed beneath a pyramid along with a whole bunch of magical traps. He also had a bunch of his childer join him, after raising their generation to the 13th with magic (supposedly so they’d have an easier time waking up if the tomb was invaded, but actually so that the players won’t have a whole slew of Fifth Generation vampires to diablerise in the bargain!).
So Mictlantecuhtli snoozed, and Tzental was eventually abandoned, fell into ruin and was forgotten. Meanwhile, some of the research notes he’d made in his self-studies of blood magic got stolen and eventually found their way to the Tremere, who used it to create the Ritual of the Bitter Rose. I don’t know, I guess it’s meant to be ironic or something?
Anyway, to start the adventure the GM is to have the players (who are assumed to already be diablerie-enthusiasts) first hear the legend of Mictlantecuhtli and suggestions that he might have been a vampire, then find that the mortal scholar they tried to contact about it suddenly got killed (offed by another vampire who was keeping tabs on him to keep him from telling the wrong people about this very thing), then get contacted by the world’s geekiest Malkavian, a guy named Shaeffer who suffers from the single-minded compulsion to keep adding to his stores of esoteric knowledge. He’s been researching Mictlantecuhtli too, and he wants to compare notes.
This is all assumed to take place in Chicago, by the way, with some of the minor NPCs from there mentioned as bit players. That’s what I meant about it being still kinda-sorta connected to the default setting – it can be started from anywhere, but we still have this assumption of Chicago as being where vampire PCs hang out.
Anyway, before they can meet, Shaeffer gets killed by another vampire named Pietr, who is a stereotypical cackling villain whose internal monologue (as seen in an introductionary fiction piece) has a lot of gloating about how stone-cold baaaaaad he is. He’s actually already found Tzental, but he got sent packing by the tomb’s guardians with a set of gnarly scars all across his face to show for it, and he thinks he can learn the Ritual of the Bitter Rose from Shaeffer’s research and use it to gain enough power to go back. This is noted by the text itself to not make much sense – the Ritual is mostly just useful for groups of Kindred wanting to share a kill – but it’s shrugged off with Pietr just being that nuts.
A few days later, the players get a package containing Shaeffer’s research, which he mailed to them for safekeeping before being offed. It contains both the Ritual of the Bitter Rose and his best guess for Mectlantecuhtli’s resting place in Mexico. Time for a messed-up cannibalistic road trip! Yay?
Getting to Tzental is of course an endevour in its own right, and the players have to grapple with both regular wilderness-traveling logistics and the unique challenges posed by vampiredom – for one thing, it’s noted that Kindred can’t regulate their body heat, so they’re actually more sensitive to extreme heat than puny humans are (albeit less in danger of actually dying from it… unless they pass out under the open sky with no one to pull them into cover before dawn, of course).
The area around Tzental is also guarded by a “mated pair” of elderly werewolves (this being before that whole Garou Shall Not Mate With Garou thing was canon, I guess) whose ancestors swore eternal oaths of friendship with Mectlantecuhtli and who now stubbornly keep watch even though they’re all that’s left of the tribe. Also, they might be faithful to the memory of one particular Kindred, but they still really freaking hate every other filthy vampire in the world, so that’s bound to be interesting.
Then they get into the tomb, and… well, it’s a dungeon, is what it is. Vampire: the Masquerade officially has dungeons. The hobby keeps trying to escape them, but it can’t seem to stay away from them – the whole thing just grew up around them and now you’d have to redesign it practically from the ground up to keep dungeons from being the perfect fit for the play experience. Of course, the “monsters” are a little more gothic than your regular kobolds and gelatinous cubes, being things like the mad ghosts of sacrificed priests, an insane ghoul (one of Pietr’s, abandoned and trapped inside when his master fled) and of course the childer of Mectlantecuhtli, who wake up as soon as the tomb is breached and start preparing to defend it. Likewise, while there are some “normal” traps like spike pits and pressure plates, there are also more psychological ones like waking dreams where you need to display Conscience, Courage or Self-Control to pass and a mirror that forces you see your Beast instead of your reflection. And of course, instead of healing potions, there are magically preserved pools of blood and free-roaming rats.
In the end, the players can find Mectlantecuhtli, but of course by then one of his childer is in the process of feeding him blood to make him awake up, and there’s a nice big boss fight. Not sure that this is quite the system I’d choose for having nice big boss fights since the game usually tries to focus on things other than direct combat, but, well, it’s a dungeon, it needs to have a boss at the end. If they bring him down, they can use the Ritual of the Bitter Rose to share the level-up three ways. Then, when they head back out, Pietr turns up and ambushes them for their kill-stealing ways, just as an extra nasty surprise.
All in all, this is a pretty entertaining adventure, and it’s certainly lush with flavour and backstory. It’s only really possible to run for a group of players who are willing to be monstrous even by the exceedingly low standards of vampires, and as I said, I have certain doubts about how well the format even works for this game and this system. But it’s certainly fun to see a very traditional adventure structure decked out in Vampire‘s aesthetics.
Next up we’re continuing to stay close to Chicago – in particular, we’re going to neighbouring Milwaukee for our second city book, Milwaukee by Night. Stay tuned.
We’ve reached the end of the first publishing year of Torg, as well as the end of the first published campaign, The Relics of Power. The first installment was great, the second one a little shakier. Let’s see how it wraps up.
One thing I could have mentioned earlier but didn’t for the sake of simplicity is that the Destiny Map doesn’t just lead to the resting place of the Possibility Chalice. It in fact points out two sites, one where the Chalice is, and another one (the titular Forever City, natch) where you’re supposed to take the Chalice once you have it to receive some vaguely defined goodies. So in the finale, the players set out for that one.
We first get a fiction piece telling us what the various baddies are doing. The Cyberpapal Inquistion is interrogating an upload of DeVris (remember him from the first part?) and berating him for not getting the Destiny Map and thus putting the Cyberpapacy out of the running. DeVris points out that he isn’t high-level enough to solo an entire party of players, which is a valid point that makes you wonder why Malraux sent him out on his own, then. I can only assume it’s because Malraux is a loser and everything he does has to be half-assed. Anyway, the Inquisition scoffs at DeVris and downloads his software into cyber-hell. Meanwhile, a vampyre named Victor Manwaring (remember that weird rat who spied on the players last time? Yeah, that was Manwaring) gets ordered to tag along with the players and steal whatever they are looking for, and Doctor Mobius has done something scientific so now he can send a pair of Walking Gods – who are creatures who look like ancient Egyptian deities but who are nearly mindless and usually just manifest inside pyramids to guard them – out into the world to do his bidding.
Also, we get a scene with Katrina Tovarish and Nicolai Ondarev, who are a Soviet psychic and her handler. They originally appeared in the novels, where they stopped the Tharkoldu invasion of Russia with frankly embarrassing ease. Katrina has had a vision again and is insisting they need to go off somewhere.
The adventure starts with the players rowing Amethyst’s Viking longship into London’s port and being met by Tolwyn. Before they can talk very much, they get attacked by cybernetic warrior monks. There’s a nice touch where one of the monks uses an extremely British-working-class girl (that is to say, she’s pretty, chipper, not overly burdened with morals, and smells faintly of fish) as a human shield at one point and the players have to rescue her, which does add some colour to an otherwise samey fight scene. Anyway, the players fend them off and take a prisoner, who they bring to Scotland Yard, which gets a lot of lavish description despite just being a backdrop for an interrogation. The captive claims that they were supposed to steal the Possibility Chalice and then deliver it to their contact on the Orient Express, to be combined with something called “the signal fire” that was mentioned on the Destiny Map.
However, that’s a fib, based solely on the fact that DeVris managed to send Malraux a picture of the incomplete Destiny Map while waiting for the players in that old Indian temple back in part one. Malraux can’t find anything without the five tiles that the players were bringing, but he could read the inscription, which mentions “lighting the signal fire to call our distant saviours,” so he’s arranged a trap. The captive knows this, but he’ll both use a miracle to make himself impossible to disbelieve (which is a bit iffy, I feel, since telling a player that they must believe an NPC is the same as telling them that they shouldn’t believe him, and that’s a frustrating combination to have to roleplay), and if they still press the issue a sleeper agent at Scotland Yard sprouts cybernetic weapons and try to kill him. If the players can save him, he will admit that he actually doesn’t know if the signal fire is real, but he does know that he was meant to deliver it to one Cardinal Rouchefoucald, and what the introduction phrase to him is.
Rouchefoucald is the head of the Cyberpope’s intelligence and sabotage operation in England and has all but paralysed the British government recently (which I guess might be why it’s been so oddly passive?). Tolwyn will think that the Orient Express is almost certainly a trap, but that it’d be super-helpful of the players to go there and bump off Rouchefoucald for her, because if there is one thing the Cyberpapacy needs it’s to become even less threatening. The players can refuse if they want, though, and move on with the adventure. If the monk didn’t spill the real truth, of course, then the whole “signal fire” thing will look like a mandatory plot hook and they’ll pretty much definitely go.
The players set out for Europe by boat, only to get attacked by an evil ice dragon halfway across the English Channel. They then get sucked into the GodNet. No, not the Cyberpapacy realm, the GodNet – they are physically transported into Evil Catholic Cyberspace for no apparent reason. See, this looks very much to me like the writers were just desperate to cram this thing in somewhere, because they’d made a big deal about it but were realising that it had very little actual relevance outside of one particular geographical area that, in turn, had very little actual relevance to the rest of the world (because it’s run by Malraux, and Malraux is a loser). So… they still end up having to fight a dragon, only now the dragon is pixelated, which is… kind of different, I guess? Also, some cybernetic Uvwe might show up to help them. Ooookay. Then they randomly get out of the GodNet and can move on with their lives.
In Europe, they board the Orient Express, which the game admits is not the original Orient Express since that one would have departed from Paris and Paris is in a bit of a state right now. Rather, it’s a revamped line that goes between Brussels and Venice. Either way, as you might guess the game absolutely seizes the opportunity to create a genteel mystery where the players rub shoulders with a ton of colourful passengers, most of whom are hiding something.
There’s a supposed Aylish merchant named Horace Blessed who is actually a Core Earth con artist who’s gotten strong-armed into serving as a stalking horse for the Cyberpapacy, directing people to the supposed “signal fire” so they’ll walk into a trap. There is Katrina and Nicolai, posing as a nun and priest (I did say that I’d like to see some more of the cast of the novels, I guess…). There is Manwaring, out to give the players some discreet nudges in the right direction. There is a bunch of Japanese tourists, one of whom is inevitably a Kanawa spy. There’s a pair of obnoxious American tourists who are actually cyberpapists in disguise. And of course, there is Rouchefoucald, waiting for some suckers to walk into a series of traps that he’s set up with a shiny jewel posing as the “signal fire” as bait; one of them injects the would-be thief with Jaz and then uses it as a connection to download his soul into the Hell region of the GodNet. And that’s just the first one in a series. Eeep.
Anyway, in whatever fashion, the players are going to get into a fight with Rouchefoucald and his cybernetic minions, with a lot of shooting and crashing through windows and running around atop the train and other fun stuff. Hopefully they will ultimately kill or capture him, and discover that the “signal fire” doesn’t actually exist. After that, it’s off to Tibet, where the Forever City is meant to be located.
I suppose that given my constant griping about how Malraux is a lame villain, I should be grateful that the early parts of this adventure, at least, shows him off a little and gives you a sense of how he operates. Which is to say, with a combination of underhanded deception, Gothic-Catholic fanaticism, and cyberpunk techno-horror. And… fine, I guess, but I still think that the Cyberpapacy is poorly designed and handled, and I’ll probably go over that more when I get to its own book.
So, to Tibet it is, and the players have to spend some time searching the area from the air to find something that looks like a mysterious hidden city. They might also get attacked by a Nile Empire dirigible if they try to get too ambitious. Once they’ve found the spot, they have to make the trek on foot (obviously there aren’t any convenient landing pads in the ruined ancient city; a chopper would probably work, but getting hold of one in a hurry would be tricky), running into some yetis along the way because why not (as I may have mentioned, Core Earth isn’t quite our own world, it just looks like it on the surface), and also having to race Manwaring, who’s now also gotten the scent of the Forever City and is making his way to it at the head of a bunch of gospog.
After a lot of environmental challenges, the players manage to climb all the way to the City. If they dragged their feet, Manwaring is already here and they get ambushed by him and his gospog. If they made good time, they spot him arriving after them, and can arrange their own ambush. Either way, though, he escapes once the fight start going against him.
The Forever City is a weird mashup of architecture from a ton of different cultures, including some oddly modern-looking ones and some that doesn’t even seem human. Buildings have recognisable (but no longer functioning) indoor plumbing and central heating. The players end up having to fight a pair of Doctor Mobius’ long-range Walking Gods, who parachuted in here once they found the city. They’re not terribly tough, though, for all their buildup. Manwaring is watching them the whole time, though the method by which he avoids the sun feels oddly inadequate to me – he conjures magical darkness around himself, but from the description it seems that that only slows down the rate that he takes damage in the daylight, and even then he has to cast the spell again every time he wants to move to a new position. Feels like he should wear himself out pretty soon, is what I’m saying. Why exactly did Thratchen send a damn vampire on a mission that would likely include a lot of moving around in daylight, anyway?
The players eventually find a strange pyramid where they have to solve a riddle to figure out that they need to use the Possibility Chalice to send a message into the cosmverse. At that point Manwaring attacks them for a final boss fight, and after beating him they get a flashy cutscene where a beam of light shoots off into the sky and have a trippy vision where a Ravagon encourages a kid to torture a captive Storm Knight. The players can send the kid a telepathic message to Resist Peer Pressure, leading to him running from the Ravagon instead. And… that’s the end.
So I know what you’re thinking – what the hell was all this about?! Who built the Forever City? Who are the “distant saviours” that this was supposed to summon? Sorry, you’re going to have to wait another ten books to find that out. Welcome to the 90s, the decade of metaplot madness. Okay, the book does mention that the whole thing causes more Storm Knights to manifest across the world, so that’s something, I guess. Still…
Oh, and along the way, the adventure also mentions two bits of political worldbuilding: Ayslish who fight Uthorion are granted honourary British citizenship, but the rest of Europe is decidedly suspicious about people from other cosms, especially if they aren’t human in the strictest sense of the world. Fair enough, though I feel like the game’s interest in the realistic sociological consequences of cosmic incursions has decreased significantly since The Living Land got so excited about them… Also, China’s reaction to the Possibility Wars has been, basically, to sit behind its borders and sulk even harder than usual. Maybe that was the country’s image in 1990, I don’t know? These days, the idea that the Chinese wouldn’t absolutely jump on a chance to set themselves up as Earth’s primary defenders while America was otherwise occupied… well, it just feels bizarre.
So, my various gripes aside, this was pretty cool. Fighting Catholic cyborgs on the Orient Express, awesome; weird ancient city that offer tantalising hints about how human history might not be quite what everything thinks, cool; vampires and giant god-monsters and dog fights over the Himalayas, I love it. The series as a whole does showcase the game pretty well – it could be more balanced, but at least every faction got some kind of chance to shine.
Next up we’re getting a bunch of short-short adventures after this long-long adventure, in The Cassandra Files.
I would say that this is where it got silly, but it’s Paranoia, so it was already pretty silly. I will say that this one feels a little like someone just threw their hands up and decided to give zero craps, which is maybe not entirely a good thing – yes, a certain meh-just-go-with-it spirit is explicitly part of the game, but maybe giving just one or two craps might help? Anyway, let’s get into it and we’ll see what we can make of it.
So, the backstory for this adventure is that a doohickey called the Transdimensional Collapsatron was discovered as part of a long-dead High Programmer’s possessions and accidentally activated, and it transported three wizards from Dimension X to Alpha Complex. Yes, wizards. You know, guys in robes and pointy hats who can make stuff happen by chanting and waving their hands. They’re part of this sci-fi comedy game now. See what I mean about this being maybe a step too far in the sure-throw-it-in way of thinking?
But okay. Wizard magic (“Shaping the Force,” in their own nomenclature) works on the same rules as mutations, though wizards are actually good at it, and know some entirely new spells/mutations like throwing fireballs, spreading magical darkness, and communicating across language barriers. The GM is cautioned to make it clear to the players that the wizards, while certainly an intimidating outside-context problem, aren’t all-powerful – they act stressed when they have to fast-cast something, their magical force fields shrink a little every time they deflect damage, sometimes their spells just plain go wrong and cause a big mess that they clearly didn’t intend, and so on. Don’t get the players so demoralised that they won’t even have a go at them, basically. You can’t have their efforts go badly and hilariously wrong if they won’t make them in the first place!
Like most adventures so far, this one comes with half a dozen pregen characters, though here they are a bit more flavourful than usual since they are not-too-subtly also meant to fit fantasy stereotypes – we have a grumpy short guy who likes messing around with tech, a gung-ho Femme Fatale member with lots of combat training, a happy-go-lucky runt with sticky fingers and a mutation that makes him super-persuasive, a big dumb meatbag who’s immune to psychic influence… All good stuff, and like I said, a little more interesting than the usual selection of samey, one-dimensional little backstabbing nitwits. Like I keep saying, the game designers chose an incredibly narrow premise, and while that’s great for making the game distinct, it also makes it very challenging to come up with material for it after a certain point. The way these supplements keep dragging in more and more things that don’t strictly belong in a “classic Paranoia adventure” (though keep in mind that things stayed purely “classic” for maybe two or three books before the drift started; by Vapors Don’t Shoot Back, the players were already boarding a pirate ship) is a pretty direct result of that, I’d say.
The adventure starts with the wizards, their moronic lizardman flunky Randy in tow, appearing at a vehicle repair facility (they interrogated some clones demanding to be given “transportation home” and this is the confused directions they got). The players get sent in after them, get saddled with a bunch of shell-shocked civilians who glom onto them and keep getting in the way, and get some sense of what the wizards are capable of. They also follow them into the facility where they have to deal with malfunctioning and psychotic bots. The wizards ultimately teleport away.
The second altercation with the wizards happen at a power station, where the wizards managed to plug in the Transdimensional Collapsatron but couldn’t get it to work properly, resulting in some other fantasy thing being transported in. A few suggestions are given, from a bunch of hungry hobbits to a fire-breathing dragon. The players will have another inclusive altercation with the wizards, though this time they might also be able to communicate a bit with them – the wizards are beginning to despair of getting home under their own power and so are thus more receptive to anyone who might even conceivably be willing and able to help. Either way, they eventually disappear again.
Through it all, the Computer is being unhelpful as usual, but it’s also being rather less… Computer-y. What I mean is, it keeps being sarcastic and abusive in its pronouncements rather than doing its usual dissonant-serenity, “you are mistaken, citizen. No one is screaming. The Computer is your friend” thing. That’s another thing that makes this adventure feel like it was just cobbled together by someone who just didn’t feel inspired at all by the setting as it as.
The third time the wizards show up, it’s at a travel information office (they wanted information on how to travel back home, but… well, that was a bit of a non-starter). There, they’ve managed to capture a powerful psychic mutant who they feel is a little closer to their own kind, so when they flee this time, they’ll leave Randy behind to take her with them instead. Randy can tell the players approximately what is going on, though of course he’ll do it in the slimiest way possible so that they doubt every word. Also, as an additional complication, a bunch of sleeper agents from a rival Alpha Complex also try to capture the wizards and the players end up having to fight them for the privilege of losing them all over again.
Finally, the players corner the wizards in an R&D facility just as they’ve managed to get the Transdimensional Collapsatron to work, and they all get sent back to Dimension X. It’s your basic fantasy setting, in spite of the pulp-sci-fi name, though befitting Paranoia it’s got a black comedy slant to it, with everything run by comically-sociopathic wizards who treat their human “herds” with the same care and compassion that the Computer treats its cloned citizens. There is also Randy’s species, who are the wizards’ evil soldiers and enforcers.
Once back home, the wizards are once more on certain footing, but they’ve exhausted themselves and aren’t up for dealing with the players right now, so they yell for some lizardmen minions to come help them, and strike a quick retreat into their dark evil dungeon (because of course they have a dark evil dungeon) along with the Transdimensional Collapsatron, leaving the players to deal with the mooks and get their bearings. Once they have figured out where they are (Randy is still with them and can advise), they don’t have much choice but to embark on a dungeon crawl to secure their way back home. Fortunately, a bunch of R&D clones and a bot got accidentally brought along, so there’ll be both someone capable of rigging up the TC and a power source to connect it to… assuming the players can keep them from being killed or destroyed, of course.
So it’s a dungeon crawl, and in most respect a fairly linear and basic one – the players pass through one chamber after another, blunder into traps (theoretically they can avoid them, but that’s unlikely to happen, so the best they can hope for is surviving them), fight monsters, and maybe find some loot along the way. There is magical healing items sprinkled throughout, to make up for the fact that there’s not going to be any instant clone replacements. Some of the more memorable encounters are a gelatin cube (not a gelatinous cube, gelatin. Raspberry-flavoured, in fact), a succubus (lucky that Alpha Complex clones get stuffed full of hormone suppressants that render them immune to such temptations), an over-friendly and near-invincible dog whose drool causes all metal objects to rust into uselessness, and two tribes of talking penguins who try to get the players to side with them. One room has a mixed bag of monsters sitting around waiting for it to be time to walk off on their patrols – they’re the wandering monsters of this dungeon, see? Oh, and at one point, there’s an orc, to justify the title, but he’s actually the dungeon chef and can’t put up any kind of fight.
In the end, the wizards turn out to have vacated the premises when the players got too close to their sanctum, having left the Transdimensional Collapsatron and a note telling the players to just take it and bugger off home. So presumably they do. The epilogue suggests that the Computer then sends them off on new and deadlier adventures in other dimensions, teasing a supplement called Vulture Warriors from Dimension X. I’m pretty sure that’s a joke, but there is in fact a second-edition supplement with that name…
Anyway, this was fun and all, but… yeah. It felt a bit too gimicky, despite my stated position that the best adventures so far have been the one who have been slightly gimicky. I guess the part that’s missing for me is the thin line of logic tying the obvious inspiration to the realities of Alpha Complex? Like, in all the other adventures, when something wildly out of genre turned up, there was always some sort of fig-leaf explanation for why it totally made sense, honest, and that just made it funnier. Here, wizards aren’t, e.g., powerful mutants who just happen to wear robes and carry staffs for spurious reasons. They really are wizards. Nor are they exaggerated, parodied or otherwise ridiculous like the aliens in Clones in Space were. There’s no joke there, is what I guess I’m saying, beyond them simply being in the game in the first place – which is strange and disjointed, but not really funny, per se.
Oh well. Next up is the final book published for the first edition, HIL Sector Blues. We’ll see if that’s a return to form.
The campaign Ärans Väg (“The Path of Glory”) that started out in the previous installment here continues with Maktens Portar (“The Gates of Power”). Last time, my complaint was that the open-ended nature of the adventure, while nice in itself, didn’t make it a particularly good fit for the first part in a series. Let’s see how it goes on.
The adventure starts out by giving a bit more backstory for the setting, which states that the elder races – elves, dwarves, halflings and giants – used to rule the land, but fled with the coming of humanity. Some of the dwarves hid their kingdom behind a pair of magical gates, the Gates of Power, which were locked with three keys. Alas, the keys were lost, and the dwarves ultimately felt that they weren’t safe anymore and had to flee towards some unknown fate, leaving behind a great many treasures in their abandoned mountain halls.
Flash forward about 700 years, and there’s a war going on in the lands to the east. The warring parties are the necromancer Dakoth, the noble servants of the god Eledain, and the sinister-but-not-actually-the-problem-this-time minions of the god Sathmog. All three are scrambling for troops and equipment. Mogdath, a “death wight” in the service of Dakoth, discovered the Gates of Power. The treasures inside interested Dakoth, and so did the still-viable mines and foundries of the dwarves, so he sent Mogdath and a bunch of orcs, ogres and skeletons into the dwarven city through a magical portal. The orcs immediately managed to trigger some traps, so large parts of the city collapsed on top of them. Mogdath is now running a mining and weapon-forging operation with what manpower he has left while waiting for reinforcements through the portal.
Meanwhile, the players are assumed to have gotten hold of the keys and used them to open the Gates (it’s suggested that Doriath recruits them for an expedition through the Gates if they haven’t played the previous adventure). Things are about to get frantic.
Before the players get any further, though, a major NPC pops out of the bushes. His name is Tefalas and he’s a monk in the service of Eledain who’s been sent to killinate Mogdath. He’s been given a magic dagger who’ll suck Mogdath’s spirit into itself if he’s stabbed with it (which will be relatively easy with prudent use, since it’s got a single-shot spell on it that gives a +50% modifier and +10 damage to the first blow you strike with it, and he only has to take 1 hit point of damage to get dagger-sucked). Since he’s kind of crap with daggers, he’s happy to lend the thing to any player character who feels called upon, though.
After that, the major enemy NPCs get introduced. Mogdath is, again, a “death wight,” which is an evil ghost that’s so powerful that taken physical form. This is actually a hindrance in some ways, because it means it’s vulnerable to regular damage, but it does mean you can lift and carry things, which Mogdath makes use of by having magical weapons and armour. Mogdath also has two “dark wights” with him, who are a sort of in-between points between barrow wights and death wights – they are semi-solid, so they can kind of pick things up but it’s difficult, and they’re immune to any damage but fire and magic. They’re called “Daz” and “Gozer,” because this game doesn’t take itself terribly seriously. Anyway, his last lieutenant is a grouchy “night worg” named Sharch who’s an evil soul bound into the reanimated body of a two-headed wolf whose howling paralyses people.
There isn’t really a plot here; rather, the entire adventure is a big dungeon. We get told where all the NPCs are at the start, and also that Mogdath will get informed almost immediately after the Gates are opened. The GM is instructed to decide how he reacts to that news, with a few suggestions – he might investigate on his own, send Daz or Gozer to spy on the players, gather his troops to hunt them down, or just wait and see if they will oblige him by stepping on a trap. It’s noted that he will try to protect the orcs and ogres, since they double as his work crew – again, he’s less interested in the remaining treasure than he is in using the city as a mine and forge.
Some treasure is certainly to be had, though it’s inconvenient to get to – half of it is in the throne room where Mogdath is sitting, and half is still trapped and under guard to keep the orcs from trying to grab it and bringing down even more of the ceiling. Still, if the players can get to some of it, the sort of items they can wield are game-changers – there is an amulet that heals 3d6 hit points, without the need for a roll or the expenditure of Power Points, for instance, and that right there will turn the game a whole lot less gritty in a hurry. Of course, it’s noted that if Doriath is along, she’ll totally call dibs on everything magical.
The idea is for the players to fumble their way through the mountain, constantly attacked out of the darkness by terrifying creatures, and hopefully at some point be able to dagger-suck Mogdath. Though the GM is also mischievously informed that Tefalas doesn’t know what Mogdath actually looks like beyond “a wight,” so the players might end up catching Daz or Gozer instead, and after that the dagger is useless. Oh dear.
They are then supposed to get to the eastern land. They can technically do that by trapping a wight in the dagger and then tapping on the magic portal with it, which will cause Dakoth to think that a wight wants to get through and activate the portal… but not only do they have no real way of knowing that, but it’ll put them smack into Dakoth’s stronghold, so it’s probably not a great idea. What they are meant to do is break open the floor under the lavatories and follow the underground river beneath it out. I… am honestly unsure how they are even going to know that they need to do that, instead of just retreating out through the Gates like sensible people, much less how you can expect them to think of that particular, highly specific solution. Yes, Tefalas might tell them that the dagger needs to get to the east quite quickly so that it can be ritually destroyed, but come on, surely he had some plans for doing that himself that didn’t include underground rivers?
So the same problem that applies to the last adventure applies even harder to this one. But, other than that, it’s actually not bad, and the darkness and terror makes a nice contrast to the pastoral whimsy in the last one. Having actually run it, I can also vouch for it going pretty well, though I admit that I can’t actually remember how the players found their way out. Probably I railroaded them shamelessly. Oh well.
The trilogy will be concluded in The Heart of Darkness! Before then, though, we’re going to get our first look at the game’s main setting Ereb Altor in Kandra.
Howdy, parrrrrdner! We’re heading back on the trail, and this time we’re going to be riding all over, because this time we’re covering the overall setting book for Deadlands, none-too-informatively titled The Quick & the Dead. It’s honestly all but required reading, because the core book was rather sparse with its setting info – in most books the introduction gives you a teaser of what the setting is like and then it gets filled in later in the book, but in the Deadlands core the teaser was all the description we ever got about the complex alternate history setting of the game. Mostly what we learned was that the Civil War is still ongoing, there’s a major gold rush in California after half of it fell into the sea, and magic and weird science are both running rampant and are powered by evil manitou. Let’s see if we can get a little more meat on our bones this time.
I am pleased to report that unlike last time, the cover art doesn’t lie to us – there really is an instance in the book of giant sand worms chasing steam cars across mountains shaped like tormented sinners. About time I got my money’s worth!
We start out with a bunch of rule tweaks and new Edges and Hindrances, presumably on the principle that they need to go somewhere. They’re okay, nothing much to talk about. I do note that there is a Hindrance called Ferner that makes you not fit in with the local culture, and there’s an Edge called Kemosabe that makes you fit in with the local culture, and I’d kind of like to know what happens if you take neither of them. Like, what’s the baseline of fitting in, here? Oh well.
There’s also an Edge called Veteran of the Weird West that gives you a bunch of extra points at the cost of a randomised effect which can be a punishing Hindrance or something even worse. So it’s basically drawing a Joker when assigning Traits, only by choice. I guess I can see how it might be used if you want to be a jaded old-timer rather than a greenhorn.
There are specific rules for revolver duels. I dunno, I thought the basic system already covered it pretty well, but okay.
We get a bunch of new premade characters, which is always nice. These seem to be a little more down to earth than the one in the core – like, you get a snake-oil salesman instead of a mad scientist, a card sharp instead of a huckster, that kind of thing. So I guess the idea is that they led with their more colourful options, and now they’re fleshing it out with some more general ones. That’s cool. I do note that while these characters are all ones that would fit into a Wild West story, they do not necessarily fit well into a group of wandering adventurers – a sheriff would be bound to a particular town, a spy would be getting specific missions, etc. Ah well. I guess you can always use the given stats and claim that they represent the job you just quit.
Now for the meat that comes with the spaghetti! The player-available section is meant to be a gazetteer written by Lacy O’Malley, last mentioned briefly in the core as one of the few men to have survived an encounter with a Hanging Judge. He writes for the Tombstone Epitath, which is a sort of tabloid that no one really believes in but are actually right about most of the crazy things going on in the Weird West. The paper’s motto is “Believe It or Else!” Heh. Anyway, every section that the players get to read has a reference to a later section that the players don’t get to read, and I’ll cover them together to make it less confusing. Here goes.
Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy launched a big offensive towards Washington in ’71, making heavy use of mad science gizmos developed in a base in Roswell, New Mexico. It had a lot of early success, but the Confederacy pushed too hard, resulting in a lot of mad scientists going crazy or deserting and the campaign petering out. The Union also raided Roswell, stealing a lot of cool crap, so Davis arranged to have the surface of Roswell wiped out by a massive explosion and the area around it covered in ever-burning ghost rock, claiming that it was an accident. The base is still active underground and the site for a lot of Confederate R&D, but now no one knows it’s there and aren’t particularly keen to go exploring through the burning inferno around it.
Following all that, both sides realised that the Civil War would be won or lost on mad science and access to ghost rock, so they started racing to establish train connections to the Great Maze in California. They have both promised huge bennies to whichever rail company can get there first, so of course a whole bunch of them are sabotaging each other like crazy, blowing up each other’s rails, robbing each other’s trains, shooting each other’s workers, and whatever other underhanded methods they can think of. A lot of trains are now sporting heavy armour and cannons as a result, for some bizarre visuals.
There are six railroads who have a realistic chance of winning. Bayou Vermillion is run by a New Orleans voodoo king named Simone LaCroix. He has zombies laying rail for him, and anyone who attacks him is likely to be added to them. Black River is run by a ruthless girlboss named Mina Devlin who has an all-female bands of gunslingers called the Wichita Witches who aim for the groin. She also practices black magic on the side. Iron Dragon belongs to a Chinese warlord named Kang. He has the distinction of having made a deal with the Sioux for passage through their territory, something he got by dealing with some kind of monsters at a place called Devil’s Tower. Slightly more about that later.
Wasatch is owned by Darius Hellstromme, the Weird West’s premier mad scientist, based out of Salt Lake City. He’s less interested in winning than in getting a chance to field test some of his more sinister creations. Dixie Rails and Union Blue is the Confederate and Union company, respectively, with the former owned by former General Robert E Lee and the latter by Joshua Chamberlain. Dixie Rails does well when Lee has time to manage it himself, but he keeps having to delegate it to his idiot nephew, at which point it lags behind. Union Blue is doing worst overall, because Chamberlain is trying to be honourable and upright about the race for the west, and that’s never going to work.
Union President Ulysses Grant and Confederate President Jefferson Davis are both up for re-election. Davis is planning a major offensive to get an excuse to declare martial law and hang on to power a bit longer. Except he’s not actually Davis anymore – he’s been replaced by an evil doppelganger who just wants to cause as much death and destruction as possible. Lee is suspicious of him and is tempted to launch his own run for President, but of course if he does that Dixie Rails is definitely going to crash and burn.
There is some helpful advice about travel. Stage coaches are faster and more comfortable than riding, and taking the train is best of all where there’s a line. Just keep in mind all that stuff we just talked about where the rail companies are in a state of war, so that option might get eventful too. Paper money is iffy since no one is sure which side will win the Civil War and render the legal tender of the other worthless, so gold and silver coins are best. Telegraphs offer quick communication, but don’t trust them too much, since the Reckoning they’ve got gremlins in them that mess with the messages.
The Pinkerton Detective Agency has been tasked by the Union to investigate weird stuff and hush it up (Lacy O’Malley is understandably not happy about it). They are especially interested in Harrowed, and have a special facility in Denver where they can semi-reliably bring the human in a Harrowed to the fore and offer to recruit them. If they aren’t interested, or the attempt fails, it’s kill-it-with-fire time, of course. The Pinkertons are led by Harrowed Abraham Lincoln (yes, really), who has special, hand-picked agents called Spooks who stride around in black dusters and scowl grimly at people.
The Texas Rangers are similar to the Pinkertons, except for operating in the South instead of the North, and lacking the aforementioned special assets and colourful leadership. They still try to recruit Harrowed when they can, though.
In the Great North-West (Washington, Idaho and Oregon) you get Sasquatches, Wendigos and Wolflings. Sasquatches and Wolflings are non-supernatural abhuman races, looking like great big apes and great big humanoid wolves, respectively. Sasquatches really hate Wendigos and the two fight a bitter war in the wilderness every winter, with the Wendigos prass-ganging Wolflings as cannon fodder. You become a Wendigo by eating human flesh – a white Wendigo if the flesh belonged to your kin, a black Wendigo if it belonged to someone else. If you instead withhold food from someone who is starving, you might become a winged Wendigo. Since Sasquatches are against more Wendigos being created, if they spot someone moving through their lands looking hungry, they’ll try to sneak them some food without being seen – though if they catch someone attempting cannibalism, they’ll forego all subtlety and just kill them.
The High Plains (Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska and Dakota) contain the Badlands, where you get giant bats swooping down and snatching you up. Worse than that is Worm Canyon, where there’s a cult of black magicians who worship the giant worms that live there. They have to sacrifice one victim to the worms every month, or the worms take one of their own number instead, so the cult has spread the rumour that there’s gold in the canyon. When someone gets sacrificed to the worms, one of the hills assume his tortured likeness within a few hours. See the cover picture, it’s awesome.
The High Plains are also the site of Devil’s Tower, and the Black Hills where people dig for ghost rock. Devil’s Tower, if you recall, was the place where Kang went and did something cool so that the Sioux would give him leave to lay his railroad through their lands (to carry the ghost rock from the Black Hills, natch). The book is being annoyingly coy about just what’s going on here – “tee hee, you’ll have to keep your players away from here for a little longer,” nyyyyyeeeehhhh bite me – but apparently it has something to do with mad science and giant scaly bears with machinery on their backs that controls them. Yeah, I don’t know.
Yellowstone, also on the High Plains, has a portal to the Hunting Grounds in it. Manitou and nature spirit sometimes wander out, making things around there very strange. It appears not to be the same portal that Raven used to enter the Hunting Grounds to slay the Old Ones and cause the Reckoning, so I guess there’s more than one.
The Disputed Lands (Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Utah) are the borderlands between the North and the South and thus the site of much bitter fighting – not just between the regular armies, but between outlaws and militias who claim to stand with one side or the other. Famous outlaw Bill Quantrill (never heard of him, but I guess he’s famous?) has come back as a Harrowed with the ability to summon a band of spectral warriors. When his human side takes over, he flees from them and tries to find his old pal Jesse James, who he hopes can help him. When the manitou takes over, he rejoins them and they go on a rampage again. There is also a mysterious gunslinger called the Revenant who rides into town and calls out the foremost lawman there, shoots him, and leaves. The Revenant is actually a sort of embodiment of lawlessness and crime, can only be killed by being shot in the heart by a lawman, and has stats up through the stratosphere.
Salt Lake City has become “the City of Gloom” from all the pollution caused by factories built by the mad scientists who congregate there. The foremost one is, again, Darius Hellstromme, who has figured out that the Weird West runs on fear and is doing horrific experiments with it. In one notable instance, he elminated a monster infestation of a town, and then created a new one to replace it, to see what would happen with the fear level if the source of it get exchanged. He’s got labs all along the rails of his company, Wasatch, and scary things occasionally escape from them. A bunch of Mormons have figured out that he’s a jerk, but since he’s considered the city’s great benefactor – he invented the steam wagons that lets people outrun the sand worms in the desert when entering and leaving the city – they have to keep it quiet for now. They have formed an organisation called the Danites to work against Hellstromme in secret. Also, some people are hunting those sand worms by dropping dynamite on them from flying contraptions, which I felt deserved to be mentioned.
California is even more disputed than those other states – both the Union and the Confederacy claim it, especially since the Great Maze by the coast has a ton of gold, silver and ghost rock in it. Both of them have armies in the area and fleets in the sea outside, and in addition to that, there are Chinese warlords (like the aforementioned Kang) and a Mexican armada raiding back and forth. General Santa Anna has also come up from Mexico at the head of an army, most of which consists of zombies run by an immortal Aztec wizards he’s somehow befriended.
Perched just off the Great Maze is the City of Lost Angels, ruled by a mad preacher named Ezekiah Grimme. He’s actually an abomination in human form who uses black magic to cause a famine throughout the region and then has his goons snatch up people no one will miss (and in the middle of a gold rush with plenty of transients and down-and-outs, there are always plenty of those) and cook them into a feast after his weekly sermons, making sure that all the serving people in the area remain pathetically grateful to him. Urk. His inner circle have the power to throw specially consecrated bones on the ground and have them transform into half-skeletal slaves called Bloody Ones. Even more urk. Also, Grimme’s magic prevents people who attend his feasts from becoming Wendigos, since otherwise it’d get a little obvious.
The Great Basin consists of southern California and Nevada. It holds Death Valley, which is haunted by a band of specters consisting of skulls with glowing eyes clad in black cloaks. A prospector named Pogo Joe had his entire team wiped out by them, but he managed to bounce away from them on his titular mad science contraption. There is also the Devil’s Postpiles, where people you bury have an enhanced chance of coming back as Harrowed, but they always come back with the manitou in full control. Also, all the people who were buried there but didn’t become Harrowed rise temporarily along with a new Harrowed and join it in slaughtering whomever buried it.
Fort 51 is where the Union’s colourful 10th Cavalry Regiment, “the Flying Buffalos.” They use mad science rocket packs in battle, and weird lights seen above Fort 51 at night is supposedly them training. In actuality, Fort 51 is the Union’s equivalent of Roswell, where they develop all their craziest crap. The Flying Buffalos really are stationed there as security, though.
The Mojave Desert! It has sand worms (“Mojave Rattlers” – they don’t rattle, but anyone who sees them soon start quivering) in it. That’s about it. I feel like those critters are more interestingly used in the last two places we saw them…
The Grand Canyon is haunted by the Crushed Man, who’s the ghost of a white man who ran off with an Indian girl but got captured and thrown off a cliff by the warrior she was promised to. Now he roams around, grabs hold of travelers and jumps off a cliff with them in his arms. The only way to kill him is with an arrow made from the bones of his murderer, feathered by a scrap of the dress of his beloved. Oh, and there’s also a gang of outlaws called the Laughing Men, but they kind of pale in comparison, I feel.
The dead of a small Texan town recently rose from the dead and staged a localised zombie apocalypse. It was actually due to a Bayou Vermillion train crashing and spilling its cargo of zombie juice. This is bound to happen again sooner or later.
Remember those prairie ticks from the core? To those you can add the Texas Tummy Twisters, which are a parasite infection that you get from drinking tainted water. They grow in your stomach and then hijack your spinal cord, making you stagger around as a puppet and trying to infect other people. They can kinda-sorta see through your eyes, but they prefer opening a discreet hole in your belly and peeking out through it. I think I am permanently traumatised by the whole idea and I love it.
The Sioux Nation, covering parts of the High Plains, is ruled by the four wicasas, representing the four prominent tribes of the Nation. Three of them want peace with the white man and a return to “the Old Ways” of pleasing the nature spirits and using absolutely no technology. The fourth is Sitting Bull, who is spoiling for a fight and very willing to use the white man’s weapons against him. He was the one who made the deal with Kang to allow him to lay rail through the Sioux Nation, with the secret agreement that Kang would also covertly deliver weapons to Bull. Bull’s followers call themselves the Order of the Raven, which is a not-particularly-subtle hint that Raven is around, whispering in Bull’s ear. Bull is waiting for the presence of the Deadwood mining camp and the mining in the Black Hills to result in an inevitable diplomatic incident between white men and Indians, and then he’ll use that to start his war.
The Sioux don’t let any white men roam around freely – they can only come and go by the Iron Dragon railroad, and they can only mine in parts of the hills they’ve been approved for. Anyone caught trespassing gets nailed to a spear along the road to Deadwood. Also, on rainy nights the corpses get down from their spears and go hunting for more white men to add to their number, which is a nice touch.
The Coyote Confederation in Oklahoma is the southern equivalent of the Sioux Nation. It’s ruled by a mysterious shaman known as Coyote, advised by tribal chieftains Quanah Parker and Satanta. Coyote and Satanta follow the Old Ways, while Parker has taken to guns in a big way. The Confederation is chummy with the Confederacy and keeps raiding Union sympathisers in the Disputed Lands.
Coyote (or Isatai, as his mother called him) hides his face inside a red hood and his name behind the Coyote title, because he had a vision from the mythical trickster Coyote saying that he’d lead the people to greatness by doing so. The vision was actually from Raven, and the mystery act is to make it easier for Raven to assassinate Isatai and take his place as Coyote if he started getting difficult. Man. Raven is kind of an asshole.
The Apaches under Geronimo are harassing Confederate ghost rock shipments in Arizona. They are assisted by the fact that the previous war leader, Conchise, has mentally entered the Hunting Grounds and bound a powerful nature spirit to his service, granting the Apache preternatural stealth skills for as long as his physical body remains alive, after which he’ll serve the spirit for eternity. That’s kind of poignant.
Deadwood, Tombstone and Dodge City get special writeups – not because they are the most significant of places, the book admits, but because they’re the Wild-Westiest. Deadwood, in Dakota, is in the middle of the Sioux Nation but connected to the outside by the Iron Dragon railroad and exists to service miners digging for ghost rock in the Black Hills. A big ghost rock vein to the south was accidentally ignited at some point, and it’s still burning – the smoke is ever-present, and on days when the wind is in the right direction, you can hear the wail of burning ghost rock. Oooh, creepy. Just generally, everyone in town is in a state of nervous frenzy from knowing that the Sioux could decide to wipe it off the map at any time.
Frontier legend Wild Bill Hickok was recently bushwacked by a no-good skunk, and has risen as a Harrowed (seriously, do any famous people just die in this game?!) and is looking to reclaim his six-shooters with the help of his old friend Calamity Jane. Kang is smuggling opium into Deadwood on his railroad. A bunch of ne’er-do-wells loyal to General Custer are sneaking around the woods killing Sioux.
Having seen all three seasons of HBO’s Deadwood, I’ll admit that I’m somewhat amused at the idea of having Al Svearingen turn up and rant about how much he hates these rotting Harrowed COCKSUCKERS!!!!
Dodge City in Kansas is composed of equal parts North and South loyalists, all there to get rich by hunting buffalo, and is about as terminally exciting a place as you might imagine from that (running joke: why is the town called “Dodge”? Because if you want to survive there, better get used to doing it!). Also, the Union Blue and Black River railroads have both reached Dodge and is working to proceed west from it while fighting each other relentlessly, the Union and the Confederacy both have a ton of spies here scheming against each other, and the Coyote Confederation is right next door and strongly disapprove of white men over-hunting buffalo. There’s a lot of ways to get killed here, is what I’m saying. On the bright side, Wyatt Earp and his giant moustache is working as a deputy and determined to Clean Up Dodge.
It’s kind of light on supernatural menaces, though – the only thing mentioned is that there are ghouls living in caves who come out at night to eat corpses. They’re too chicken to be dangerous to the living, unless you try to follow them home.
Tombstone in Arizona is connected to the Bayou Vermillion railroad and is the eastern endpoint for the “Ghost Trail” to the Great Maze. It’s hassled by the Apache and the French Foreign Legion (working out of Mexico) alike, and the closest thing to a law in town comes from a gang called the Cowboys. They’re opposed by Doc Holliday, who freaks them out because he’s dying anyway so he doesn’t give a shit, and also if they shot him his mate Wyatt Earp would hear about it and might be mad enough to get over there and raise a fuss.
Tombstone also houses the home office of the Tombstone Epitath, covering such weird occurrences as a group of undead conquistadores who keep trying to rob travelers of their “stolen silver” around town. The reason being that they were cursed by an Indian shaman whose people they’d enslaved to mine silver for them, and now they can’t rest until they’ve replaced as much silver as they extorted from the Indians. They can’t actually attack anyone who doesn’t carry silver, so that’s a plus.
The in-character section ends with a mention that America isn’t the only place where everything has gone wonky – all other parts of the world are seeing monsters and magic arise too.
After that, we get the “No Man’s Land” of semi-secrets. First off is Knacks, which you can take like Edges at character creation, but never after that since they represent some occult circumstance at your birth or early childhood (like being born with a caul across your face). They all give you some reasonably nifty ability that you can activate by spending a chip, with varying effects depending on the colour chip you spend (like ignoring some amount of fall damage for a white chip, seeing in the dark for a red chip, and negating all damage taken from an attack for a blue chip).
After that we get relics, which are supernatural items that seem to have been charged with some kind of strange energy from their legendary history. They are generally weapons for good rather than being secretly powered by the Reckoners like most other magic, though some can be decidedly creepy – for instance, the Sword of Cortez does a ton of damage, but the more you use it, the more your right arm starts oozing blood until you’re dripping it everywhere you go. Mmm, cool, I guess, but I am not much for extra-special magic items – it’s so hard to figure out how often, and in what way, you should give the players a chance to get hold of them.
The final chapter in the super-secret part of the book (remember, we went through most of it at the same time as the player-facing ones!) concerns black magic, which is special powers that only baddies can have. What, the magic that players can get wasn’t skeevy enough?! Anyway, it’s super-easy to use because the Reckoners want it to work, and also it’s a cheaty NPC thing so of course it’s going to be better than anything the players get. The kind of powers it provides are fairly standard magic stuff, like dealing damage or making you invisible. Somewhat interestingly, the powers are described purely mechanically and the GM is instructed to supply “trappings” that explain just what form it takes for a particular villain (e.g., whether a damage-dealing spell creates a blast of black lightning or causes the target’s internal blood vessels to burst). So this is the origin of that idea for Savage Worlds, I guess.
So that’s it. Okay, pretty decent stuff. Not very easy to get an overview of, though – even with me mushing the IC and OOC information together, you probably noticed that I had to go back over past information a lot. For example, I had to explain Kang once as relating to the railroads, once as relating to the Great Maze, once as relating to Dakota in general and then again as relating to Deadwood in particular. Now, double that for the IC-OOC split, and you can see that you have to skip back and forth like crazy to get some sort of overview on Mr. Kang.
But, that aside, I feel like we have a better idea of the setting now. Next time we’ll delve into Book o’ the Dead, which detail the Harrowed.
Due to my intense desire to avoid reading more of Daggerheart right now, I’ve decided to instead take a serious look at another one of these new-fangled roleplaying games that were written after my beard had already started going grey (specifically, it was published in 2020 – which is new-fangled compared to almost every other game I talk about here, you must admit). For the purpose, I have chosen Mörk Borg (“dark fortress” – the “mörk” part is pronounced like in “murky”). I’ve had my eye on that one for some time, but I’ve never quite been able to figure out if it’s an actual game or if it’s just some sort of practical joke – when you read through it, most of what’s on the page looks more like some sort of edgy modern art piece than a coherent game. Still, people assure me that it’s good, actually, so let’s embrace the Nordic doom and gloom and dive in…
Immediately we are informed that the end is nigh, no one has seen the sun in years, people are leaving their children to fend for themselves because they’re too busy making human sacrifices to apocalyptic gods, reality and nightmare is mixing and blending. Some people think they might save the world, but honestly, they’re probably dead wrong.
The main religion of this dying world is the Two-Headed Basilisks, who worship two god-monsters: SHE, who dwells in the mountains of Bergen Chrypt and has spawned and slain many young, of which the only survivor is HE, who makes his lair in the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead. They both have two heads. HE has Verhu, who is an arrogant prophet whose dire predictions always come true, and Gorgh, who is full of bitter resentment of his more famous brother. SHE has Lusi, who “looks up and down. Yet all shall be well” (?) and is associated with denial, and Arkh, who claims that Verhu’s prophesies are actually ones he has stolen from her.
The Two-Headed Basilisks rule the city of Galgenbeck in the land of Tveland. They enact a brutal Inquisition that captures sinners and heretics and tortures them without letting them die, because they believe that only those who face the final day alive and harrowed will get to go to the paradise of the Shimmering Fields; suicides, in particular, are despised. The head of the order is Arch-Priestess Josilfa, who might have made a bargain with the evil god Nechrubel for eternal life. Nechrubel is “the shadow that covers all… melancholy, crop failure, conflict and war.”
In the north of Tveland lies the sinister forest of Sarkash, which has started growing a little too fast for people’s comfort. In the center of Sarkash is the cemetery of Graven-Tosk, and in the center of Graven-Tosk stands a gothic ruin called the Palace of the Shadow King. The Shadow King who rules there has many sons who wander the palace grounds and playing tricks on commoners.
East of Tveland, across “the bottomless Múr” and connected to the mainland by three gargantuan bridges, is the kingdom of Grift, ruled by King Sigfúm the Kind. He is preparing his people for the time when they will all commit mass suicide by leaping from the cliffs. The Two-Headed Basilisks consider him a vile heretic.
West of Tveland is the land of Kergüs, and in the northern-most part of Kergüs lies Alliáns, the spire-city where the wicked Queen Anthelia rule. Anthelia is eternally hungry for life, colour, and warmth, and she drains them greedily from anyone who offers them to her.
South of Tveland is Wästland, where King Fathmu IX rules from the gaudy city of Schleswig. He is a selfish and greedy monarch who endlessly sends his army out to loot and plunder and sends his taxmen out to bleed the peasants dry. Wästland is also where the mountains of Bergen Chrypt and the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead can be found. Suicide cults gather in the Valley to escape the pain of their lives or to seek out Verhu and try to convince him to change his prophesies.
Beyond the these lands is only the Endless Ocean. Everyone who has tried to cross it have returned, some of them even alive.
Okay. This is all a bizarre jumble. But I can’t deny that I get a kick out of how relentlessly bleak it is. Why, it downright fills me with patriotic pride to know that Sweden, who once gifted the world with Kult, has not lost the knack for out-glooming absolutely everyone else ever!
Heading into the mechanics section, the first thing we get told is that every in-game morning, the GM has to roll a die. Which kind of die depends on how long the game is meant to last, from a d100 to a d2. If the result is a 1, a randomly determined line of prophesy comes true. They are all rather cryptic and poetic, so the GM will have to do some creative interpreting. Once six prophesies have been fulfilled and the GM rolls another 1, the world ends and you are instructed to burn the book. No way, man, this thing costs 450 crowns! I’m not too nihilistic to also be cheap!
For character creation, you can either start as a completely nondescript character with fully randomised gear and stats, or you can pick one of six classes. If you do the former and happen to get one or more “scrolls” (which are used to cast spells – you neither need to or can learn a spell by heart, spells are effectively gear in this game) with your gear, then you roll lower dice for weapons and armour. Weapons vary between a femur bone used as an improvised club (1d4 damage) and a mighty zweihänder (1d10 damage). Armour subtracts a die of damage taken, from 1d2 for the lowest kind to 1d6 for the heaviest.
You roll 3d6 for your four Abilities of Strength, Agility, Toughness, and Presence (charisma/willpower) and translate the result into a modifier between -3 and +3. If you chose a class, you get some modifiers to the roll for Abilities. To do stuff, you roll 1d20+an Ability modifier and try to beat a Challenge Rating from 6 to 18. Your starting hit points are 1d8+your Toughness modifier, minimum 1.
Combat! At the start, the GM rolls 1d6. 1-3 means that the enemies go first, 4-6 that the players go first. Players roll with Strength to make melee attacks and with Presence to make ranged attacks. Enemies don’t roll to attack, when an enemy attacks a player the player rolls with Agility to parry or dodge instead. Natural 20s are crits, granting extra damage on attacks and a free attack if you were defending, natural 1s are botches and causes you to lose your weapon on attacks and to take extra damage when defending.
If your HP ever goes negative, you’re dead. If your HP reaches exactly 0, you’re “broken” and have to roll to see if you’re just knocked out, if you’re mutilated, if you’re dying, or if, never mind, you are in fact dead. A short rest restores 1d4 HP, a long rest restores 1d6. If you have an infected wound (which you can get from the attacks of certain enemies) you can’t regain HP from resting but in fact lose more HP daily.
Enemies have a morale value that they have to roll under when their leader is slain, when half their numbers are slain, or when they lose more than half their HP. If they fail they break and run.
Characters change when the GM says they do, which usually happens when they’ve accomplished something of note, like found a treasure or slain a big-ass monster. When they change, they try to roll over their maximum HP with 6d10, and if they succeed that maximum increases by 1d6. They also roll 1d6 for each of their Ability modifiers, and if the roll is higher, they increase that Ability modifier by 1, but if it’s lower they reduce it by 1 instead. They can also randomly stumble on some silver or a scroll.
Scrolls are as mentioned effectively spells you can cast. They come in the form of sinister black magic “unclean scrolls” which hurt or disorient enemies, and slightly cuddlier white magic “sacred scrolls” which heal, influence, or provide communication. You can attempt to use scrolls 1d4+Presence modifier times per day, and you need to succeed at a DR12 Presence roll to get a spell off. Fail, and you take a bit of damage, get dizzy and can’t try casting again for a few minutes. Botch, and some extremely creative and horrifying miscast effects take place (e.g., “five twisted, skeletal arms burst from your back. The hands are mischievous, violent, and terribly cruel”).
There’s a table of “the Basilisks’ Demands” which read like some kind of freaky spell component (e.g., “a sliver from a sinner’s grave”), but I can’t find anything that references them. Okay…
We get introduced to “Omens,” which are a sort of hero points (only obviously not called that, because this isn’t a game for heroes!). You can spend them for rerolls, extra damage, that sort of thing. When you run out completely and then take a long rest, you regain a die’s worth of them (1d2 for most people, but some of those classes that are coming up get more).
Next up are a whole bunch of tables – very, very colourful ones – for random traits you might assign your character. Examples include having “very recently murdered a close relative. Very recently” and “rotting face, wears a mask.” Eeeeuuuuuurggggghhh. Don’t get me wrong. I love it. But eeeeeeuuuuuuuurrrrgggghhhhh.
Okay, here are those classes, and no points for guessing that they won’t be quite your usual fighter-caster-rogue set… The first one is the Fanged Deserter. He’s a fighty type, and also, he has a special bite attack. He also can’t use scrolls, ever – “if you begin with one, reroll, eat it, or use it as toilet paper.” He can pick from a bunch of special assets including a horseshoe that can be flung like a boomerang and might have come from Death’s own horse, or a sling woven from the long hair of one of your fallen mates. Heeeeee.
The Gutter-Born Scum is a fighter of a more roguish type, getting by on dirty tricks and luck. Less Strength, all Presence and Agility rolls have a lowered DR. Can choose among such special assets as temporarily blinding people by spitting on them and having a chance to escape certain death because the Reaper himself would prefer not to have to deal with you.
Okay, I am coming around to the idea that this game might just be awesome.
The Esoteric Hermit is the closest you get to a pure caster. He automatically starts out with a scroll, and can also choose a special skill that lets him randomly generate temporary single-use scrolls at the start of each day. He also gets extra Omens, all of which being at the cost of having very low HP, crappy weapons and poor Strength.
The Wretched Royalty has apparently been either overthrown, exiled, or maybe just gambled away his kingdom. Either way, he isn’t good at very much, but he can have some special assets with him that he’s managed to hold on to, like a talking horse that’s smarter than him and a court jester who distracts his enemies.
The Heretical Priest is kinda-sorta-but-not-really a cleric or paladin – they don’t start with any scrolls, but they can use scrolls while also wearing medium armour, unlike everyone else. Otherwise, they have good Presence but poor Strength, and can choose to start with assets like a “list of sins” that apparently reveals any evil-doers. In this setting I’m thinking it would probably reveal almost everyone, but I guess it’s all relative and some things are surely worse than others… Like the Hermit, the Priest also gets extra Omens.
The Occult Herbmaster, finally, does not get any starting special skills like the others, but instead finds ingredients to brew two randomly determined potions or poisons per day.
All the classes come complete with an unnerving backstory that you can roll randomly for, letting you determine such things as the Gutterborn Scum being born from a dead woman hanged at the gallows and the Esoteric Hermit having just sort of sprung into being in a ritual circle somewhere, without anything to explain where he came from. I am actually beaming as I type this. Also, many of the background items mention specific places in the setting, which I approve of; they slot you right into the world you’ll be adventuring in instead of letting you be a generalised adventurer.
There is an antagonist section. Some of the monsters in it are a little nondescript, basically standard fantasy mooks with some extra gore, but you also get things like you needing to kill any goblin that wounds you within 1d6 days or you’ll turn into a goblin yourself, and trolls growing bigger and stronger every time they get wounded and survive, meaning that they come back for payback tougher than the first time. Also, apparently King Fathmu is really interested in finding the cure for zombie bites, for some reason.
There is one thing called an Undead Doll that results from the Tvelandish custom of punishing “relic thieves, defamers and corrupt clerics” by imprisoning their children in porcelain doll shells and letting them starve to death. The kids commonly return as angry undead, I can’t imagine why.
There are hirelings for players to pick up, but it’s noted that they don’t work for pay but out of a pathetic need to belong. Also, they are cowards who’ll run away at the first sign of trouble, so you get what you pay for. The four kinds are Earthbound (one quarter human, three quarters dog), Wickheads (freaky things with lanterns for heads), Prowlers (regular human crooks) and Pale Ones (who are just weird and no one is sure where they come from or what they are).
There is a sample adventure called Rotblack Sludge, or The Shadow King’s Lost Heir. In it, the players get pulled off the execution block in the Palace of the Shadow King (whether they were guilty of anything seems to be up to themselves to decide) and informed that they can get clemency if they head into a local dungeon and get hold of the Shadow King’s eldest son, Aldon. The players do so and find plenty of skeletons, an old guy sitting catatonic in a high seat who randomly wakes up and starts chatting cheerfully before drifting off again, and the titular Rotblack Sludge which is a burning-hot underground river with a monster called the Gutworm living in it. There are pillars in the middle of the Rotblack Sludge where skeletons are standing eternally playing the violin. This has no bearing on anything, it’s just there.
The players can find Aldon, but they’ll have to drag him out, because he’s a lazy ass and thinks prison is fine since he gets fed and no one expects anything of him. There are also other prisoners who plead sweetly for help but attack the players if they’re set free. The master of the dungeon is a “cannibal warlock” named Fletcher, who is feuding with another dungeon resident named Lesdy. Lesdy is trying to take control of the Gutworm away from him, and Fletcher was hoping that he could hold Aldon for ransom and make the Shadow King deal with her for him. Presumably there is some kind of bargain that’s possible to strike there…
So, all in all? Yeah, this is pretty darn cool. There are like a hundred blank spots that the GM will have to fill out himself, and like a thousand ambiguous wordings and unclear rules that he’ll have to make his own judgment calls on, but that honestly seems to be meant as part of the appeal. I got admit, as someone who is perpetually chasing Completeness and never manages to achieve it, it’s kind of liberating to see a game absolutely refusing to even try…
And of course, one of the many things that the game does not allow itself page count for? Safety Tools (TM). Yeah, I know I have an unhealthy fixation on those, but for real, they make me genuinely miserable to see, and here I am just so, so, blissfully… unmiserable! Joy of joys, there is still room in this world for people who want some spice!
I’m sorry to say it, but this was the first book in this series I didn’t like at all. Any supplement called a “Player’s Guide” or “Game Master’s Handbook” or whatever tends to be underwhelming, to be honest – usually it’s just a big bundle of material that wasn’t deemed important enough for an actual book. And this one shows some early signs of what the game would eventually devolve into, all droning on about abstract concepts with no hint of the deliciously sordid realities that these early installments thrived on.
And also, the art is ugly. And I have approximately zero visual taste – if I can see that the art is ugly, then I can only assume that it must be absolutely atrocious!
But let’s see if there is any value to be mined from it.
We start out with a long piece of in-game narration, written by a Catholic priest named Alfonso Rialto, describing what he knows and believes about vampires. Most of it is right, some of it is wrong, and all of it is decidedly slanted towards his world view. Alfonso is clearly not a very nice man, making casual references to vivisecting and torturing vampires, and blaming them for such modern evils as sex education, interracial marriages, and fluoride in the drinking water. Apparently he used to be with the Inquisition, but they have since kicked him out, because apparently even they think he’s gotten too damn creepy. There is also a note from a Camarilla Justicar, reporting that all known copies of the text have been recovered and anyone who came into contact with them killed.
And okay, this is fine as far as it goes, and it does seem to be the first-ever example of the World of Darkness’ trademark “everyone sees things from their own incomplete and biased perspective” shtick, which is one that I’m quite fond of. But I’m also not sure it’s particularly fitting for its place, seeing as this is a book meant to focus on pimping out your PC, and your PC is going to be a vampire, not a nutty over-zealous warrior priest. Hell, the Inquisition, for all that it gets mentioned a lot, hasn’t even featured much into the game yet – the vampire hunters who show up tend to be solitary operators.
Next up is another new thing fated to become a tradition, namely premade characters. Here, we’re presented with a finished character for each of the seven Camarilla clans, each one being intentionally stereotypical and meant to be used when you just want to play “A Gangrel” or suchlike. So the Brujah is a street punk with strong political opinions, the Gangrel is an introvert who prefers to hang out alone in the woods, the Ventrue is a corporate go-getter, and so on. The one that stands out a little is the Malkavian (because it’s hard to make a “typical” Malkavian), who is described as basically being a cheerful nutcase who likes poking things to see how they’ll react. Oooooh dear, I can see decades of fishmalks spawned by this single page…
Merits and Flaws – advantages that you can purchase with your freebie points at chargen, and disadvantages that give you more freebie points at chargen – are introduced for the first time. I hate Merits and Flaws. The charm of the Storyteller System is supposed to be that it’s nice, simple and easy to push out of the way to focus on the True Roleplaying, but White Wolf could never seem to leave it at that but absolutely had to keep adding wrinkles and subsystems and “realistic” mechanics that were invariably as broken as they were fiddly.
There’s a gazillion new Abilities. I hate them all. Ability bloat almost invariably make it impossible to create a character who has basic competence in anything, because wherever you place your points, it’s going to be so hyper-specialised that it’s vanishingly unlikely to come up. Oh, you are trying to race after the bad guys in a Volvo? So sorry, you put your points into Driving: Fiat, so you’re useless. Lost in the wilderness and trying to get some use out of your survival skills? Ah-ah-ah, you picked survival in lightly forested areas, and this is a densely forested one! Look, I get that this is Realistic, because the real world is demoralisingly complicated and we all suck at everything that’s half an inch out of our comfort zones, but that’s precisely why I play roleplaying games so I can experience what it’d be like to be functional!
Disciplines get outlined from level six to ten. I hate them. Players are never going to have this kind of power, so the only use these rules are going to get is for statting up uber-NPCs, and I hate uber-NPCs. And even if you’re going to insist on handing out ridiculous abilities to your pet NPCs, why do you need them carefully outlined? They’re plot devices, just treat them as plot devices.
Okay, fine, fine, I guess there is some value in seeing what the logical extension of each Discipline is… Top-level Animalism lets you become one with entire herds of animals. Auspex lets you see pretty much anything, anywhere, including the thoughts inside people’s heads. Dominate lets you empty out someone’s mind and fill it with yourself, so that you basically have a second body walking around. Obfuscate lets you go Spider-Man: No Way Home and cause the entire world to forget that you ever existed. Presence lets you go The Call of Cthulhu and give the entire world screaming nightmares at once. Protean lets you turn into living fire (and nicely immune to anything that would normally burn you, including sunlight). Keep in mind, by the rules as written, only the Antediluvians have these powers, because they’re the only ones who can raise a Discipline (or any other stat) to 10.
There are new paths for Thaumaturgy that are at least somewhat useful. Conjuration lets you create stuff. Neptune’s Might lets you control water. Spirit Thaumaturgy seems to be taken straight from The Succubus Club, it’s still about seeing and commanding spirits, as well as putting the evil eye on people and astral-projecting. Elemental Mastery is about commanding inanimate objects, summoning elementals, or even transforming into an object (so beware of sitting down in any strange chairs when there’s a thaumaturge around, I guess). Corruption lets you distort someone’s body or change their minds – it’s terribly creepy.
There are more thaumaturgical rituals, which I guess is handy since there weren’t that many of them in the core and only a few have trickled into the supplements until now. Of course, they go all the way up to level ten, which again I hate for the aforementioned reasons. So far the game has been about scrambling for survival and gain on the mean streets of Chicago, when am I going to need to know what sort of rituals Tremere and his personal childer can pull off?! (for the record, the one level ten ritual that exists makes you immune from fire and sunlight for a few years)
The next chapter is about Kindred society, and it starts by introducing the new Background of Status. Given that Status was given as a Background you can take in the core but was left out of the actual Background descriptions, I’ll grudgingly admit that this was needed. It also provides some guidelines for what happens if you diss a vampire with higher Status than yourself, which is definitely useful, because that is totally a thing that a lot of players will do plenty of. Also, we get informed that Kindred love doing each other favours and are in no hurry to call in their markers, because as long as someone owes you a favour they’re expected to be nice to you no matter how much they hate your guts, and that’s a lot more fun than just getting a one-time service. Heh. Okay, that’s suitably horrible and toxic.
It then introduces the concept of “Harpies,” though, which I hate. See, a Harpy is really just any Kindred who hangs around the power players and spread vicious gossip about them. So… that’s about any Kindred at all, then, because let’s face it, they’re all a bunch of gossipy hens. We didn’t need a special term for this! It just makes things more confusing by implying that there is some particular class of Kindred who’s tasked with passive-aggressively judging people! Gaaah!
We get a new Background called Clan Prestige, which is kind of like Status except it’s how well regarded you are within your clan, so it’s more specific in some ways but more wide-reaching in others (the idea being that Status is particular to a single city, while Prestige extends world-wide if it’s high enough). Fine, I guess. It’s noted that all clans have some concept of Prestige, and that it’s quite similar in that it’s mostly about the oldsters making sure the youngsters behave, but that they’d never in a million years admit as much – we lovingly discipline our young to make sure they become decent people, they just thoughtlessly abuse theirs as a twisted power trip, that sort of thing. Heh.
Then we get a breakdown of how each clan is organised, and things get dumb. It starts with the Tremere, who are ruled by seven Councilors, who each rule over seven Pontifex, who each rule over seven Lords, who each rule over at least seven Regents, who each rule over some number of apprentices, and we are now up to something like ten thousand Tremere in a setting where there is meant to be, in total, something like sixty thousand Kindred in the world. The Tremere, I might also point out, is meant to be one of the smaller of the thirteen clans. Aaaarrggghhhh, this is why artsy-fartsy goths shouldn’t try doing math!
Other than that, though, the Tremere section is okay. The Tremere have always been described as being an insular organisation as much as an extended family, so getting some details about just how it looks is useful. It’s also stressed that for all their observance of seniority and rank, they secretly fight like cats in a sack and breaking the rules is actively encouraged if you’re clever enough to get away with it.
Next is the Ventrue, who are supposedly organised like a corporation, with each city having a council known as a Board. No, it does not. Stop lying. Chicago has nothing like that. We’ll see later that Milwaukee and Hong Kong have nothing like that. In fact, up until now we have gotten zero sense that the Ventrue – unlike the Tremere – is anything but a large, sprawling family whose members only faintly acknowledge some connection to each other, and then only in the sense of at least being better than that other riffraff.
Further, all Ventrue in a city have a Board meeting the the first Tuesday of every month. What the ever-loving…? This is precisely what I’m talking about! This is what ruined the game in the end – this insistence that there were big, broad, setting-wide facts that had to be brute-forced into place everywhere! I do not believe, not for one second, that the Ventrue as described up to this point are capable of being this organised, and definitely I do not believe that this sort of mono-culture crap could possibly work across the whole setting! There will be cities where there are two or three Ventrue, and there will be cities where there are dozens of them – I’m supposed to believe that they have the exact same organisation everywhere, never mind practicalities, never mind local culture, never mind the oversized personalities that invariably seem to dominate?
This is dumb. This is ridiculous. This is poison to everything I’ve liked in the game up to this point.
All the Toreador in a city also meet once a month, on the full moon. Bite me. On the slightly brighter side, we are introduced to the concept of Artistes (Toreador who can actually create art) and Poseurs (Toreador who can’t, and instead try to pass themselves off as having impeccable taste in the finer things) and the bitter feud between the two. Okay, that I’ll buy as a thing that just organically happen whenever two or more Toreador find themselves living in close proximity.
The Nosferatu have regional organisations called Broods, and I still don’t believe you. These people hate socialising so much that they hang out in the sewers, no way do they go out of their way to keep in touch with each other. They are also described as being downright sickeningly nice, with Elders and Neonates interacting in mutual respect. Okay, Nosferatu always did have that “look more monstrous than other Kindred but are actually less monstrous on the inside, because that’s Ironic” thing going, but I feel like that’s laying it on a little thick.
The Brujah get divided into Iconoclasts (who just want to smash things up), Idealists (who try to be inspiring leaders for some political project) and Individualists (who also have some lofty goal, but who are pursuing it all on their lonesome). Again, that’s a general enough description that I can see how it might in fact be near-universally applicable.
Bla bla bla, the Malkavians and the Gangrel aren’t particularly prone to regular schedules, but somehow they still have regular meetings, yeah, whatever.
The four independent clans get introduced for the first time. The Assamites are peerless assassins who operate out of a mountain base somewhere in the Middle East. They are all about lowering their generation and used to be great diabolists because of it, but the Tremere got together and did a ritual that made them incapable of the act. Not sure why the Tremere can’t do the same thing for the other twelve clans, then, and give Elders a lot less to worry about? But anyway, they now take on assassination jobs and demand low-generation vitae as payment, and when they get a large enough store of it, they can use it as a substitute for diablerie and lower their generation one step. They have the unique Discipline of Quietus, which lets them muffle sound, poison their blades, weaken their opponents, and just generally be super-assassins.
The Followers of Set claim that they descend from a vampire in ancient Egypt, called Set or Sutekh, who was probably an Antediluvian. He fought another Kindred called Osiris who tried to conquer all of Egypt, but he was cast out and swore that if he was to be banished to the darkness, then darkness would rule supreme. Then he dedicated himself to corrupting every institution ever and getting people hooked on every imaginable, despicable vice that anyone could make up. He disappeared in 33 AD (that would be the date usually listed for the Crucifixion, which is probably not a coincidence) but his descendants are still running around dealing drugs and peddling prostitutes and funding terrorist organisations and just generally being bad for the sake of being bad. Honestly, I kind of love the Setites just for how much they’re a bunch of immature edgelords. Their unique Discipline is Serpentis, which lets them turn into giant snakes. Even though it never helps.
The Giovanni started out as a Venetian necromancer cult that got embraced by an unnamed vampire and thanked him by diablerising his ass, so now they’re crooked Italian necromancer merchant vampires. They still keep everything in the family, with some kids being raised to be embraced and some being able to earn the embrace through a lifetime of service, and it’s all very creepy and incestuous. Their unique Discipline is, unsurprisingly, Necromancy, which lets them summon and control ghosts or even raise zombie minions at the too-high-for-PCs levels.
The Ravnos are cheerful scoundrels who wander the world and steal from people. They’re pretty chummy and loyal to their mortal families, who are usually Romani. There isn’t terribly much more to them than that, to be honest. Their clan Discipline is Chimerstry, the power of illusion.
We also get a description of the Salubri, who used to be a clan but are now just a bloodline, since the Tremere wiped most of them out, along with their Antediluvian Saulot, as part of their turning themselves into Kindred. There are only ever seven Salubri in existence, because each one only sires a new Salubri after achieving Golconda, and then quietly offs herself. Also, they have a third eye in the middle of their forehead (though it is barely visible when closed and can be passed off as a scar or blemish), and they take damage when they drain blood from an unwilling victim. Their clan Discipline is Obeah, which gives them power to heal both bodies and souls. Okay, cool, I guess, but I’m not sure how much use you can get out of them given how few there are and how low a profile they apparently keep…
There’s an interminable section where each of the writers of the book waffle self-indulgently about The True Meaning of Roleplaying. Aaaarrggggghhhhh go away.
There is a chapter on equipment. Some games might benefit from a chapter filled with nothing but gear porn. Vampire… is not one of those games. There is no reasonably plausible situations in which I am going to need stats for an Apache attack helicopter in this game about gritty urban intrigue, yet stats for an Apache attack helicopter there are. I hate this book.
There are stats for different animals that you might conceivably ghoul. Fine, I guess that’s slightly more justifiable.
There are four sample Havens, which are kind of neat because – and I know I come back to this a lot – they anchor it in specifics and tell you about the particular Kindred who have these Havens. There’s a Gangrel who just sinks into the earth down in a park every night, a Ventrue couple who live in a mansion full of cutting-edge security systems, a group of Brujah who live out of their RV, and a Nosferatu who has made his lair in the sewers.
The book ends with a second in-character monologue as a bookend to the first one, this one from a vampire who tells you all about the practicalities of being a vampire. This is a little more useful, but it’s awfully dry and boring, and again, it’s dreadfully non-specific. Bleh.
Well, this was painful and I do not wish to go through it again. There were a few useful bits, and of course it was fun to see the origin of the independents, but for the most parts, it felt like a lot of stuff that got left out of the core rules for the very good reason that they weren’t particularly useful or interesting.
Next time I’ll do Awakening: Diablerie Mexico. It’s a great deal more entertaining, as I recall.
Last time in Torg, we had ourselves a rollickin’ adventure across the world, fighting corporate ninjas, Egyptian storm troopers, and something called a Cyberknight that I’m still not quite clear on what it is. This time, the story continues as the players follow the map they spent last time tracking down, and run into even more complications along the way.
So, the players have the Destiny Map, having possibly traded a nuke to a supervillain to get it. Which is still kind of insane if you ask me, but anyway. The map, it turns out, points to a location off the coast of Thailand, the area having been flooded since the Map was drawn. Ooops. There is a Kanawa oil derrick on the exact spot the temple is meant to be at. Ooops again.
We get a description of an unnamed Thai village on the coast that the players are assumed to be making their preparations in. It is mostly hostile to outsiders and several prominent villagers are on the Kanawa payroll and will report suspicious outsiders. There is also a temple of “Kra Buddhism” which, if the players visit it and ask some questions, will serve up a bunch of cryptic clues for overcoming the obstacles of the temple.
The derrick itself is fully automated and has zero actual human beings on it, but it does have a bunch of guard robots (big, clunky ones; picture the ED-209 from the first RoboCop movie, and you won’t be far off), and the players will likely have to show some tech know-how to figure out what the derrick is actually doing and how to make use of it. It turns out, it mainly serves as a launching point for more robots who are constructing a pressurised dome on the sea floor surrounding the temple. 3327 doesn’t actually know that it’s the site of the Possibility Chalice that he was chasing in the last adventure, but one of his survey teams tagged it as a place of mystical importance where one might conceivably find Eternity Shards, and he’s nothing if not thorough.
The players have to dive down somehow, dodging laser-firing robots along the way, and enter the temple. Here, they are meant to follow the clues from the Kra Buddhists and a) address a goddess statue to get a glowing orb, b) shine the light from the orb on the magical squiddy thingy guarding the way, c) move across a patch of floor in the dance shown to them at the shrine, d) approach another god statue on their knees and pick up a mask, and e) wear the mask to grant them sight in a magically darkened room. There are ways to brute-force it all, though, or even to bypass much of it by looking around for an alternate entrance (since they’re coming in from a different spot than the temple was laid out to allow for anyway – the temple being underwater, they can just swim in through an upper floor window).
Oh, and in the course of it all, they might get forcibly converted to Kra Buddhism, at least if they don’t have any existing faith (though atheism counts as a faith by Torg mechanics, incidentally). Also, they might learn a nifty new miracle for clear sight, so I guess that’s nice? Still, I’m not sure how I feel about the game being able to force a religious awakening on you…
Anyway, once they get to the resting place of the Possibility Chalice, it’s gone, because of course it is. Turns out, a pure and noble knight back in the middle ages managed to find the temple, passed all its tests, and made off with the Chalice under the belief that it was the Grail. He went home to England and the Chalice ended up in a museum. Well, crap.
Still, the game throws the players a bone. See, an English scholar named Babbidge has been converted to the Aylish axioms and made the most of it by learning magic. He’s also always been interested in the mysterious Chalice, so once he learned some mojo, he used it to send a spell to the Chalice’s place of origin inviting anyone who made it there to come to him and talk about it, since apparently they are geeks of similar interests.
So the players get back out of the drink and make their way around the world to England to look up Babbidge, and… he’s missing, presumed kidnapped. Well, crap again.
The players are met at Babbidge’s home by Lady Ardinay’s Home Guard, led of course by Tolwyn of Tancred. I swear this chick is the breakout act of the original novels, she turns up whenever we’re in Aysle and she’s the only one of the surviving protagonists who ever does. Don’t get me wrong, I like her fine, but I’m kind of curious what Dr. Hachi Mara-Two or Father Christopher Bryce are up to these days, you know?
Anyway, Tolwyn can tell the players that Babbidge had some serious wards protecting his place, so she can think of only two ways that someone got through them – either it was a demon, since the wards didn’t cover those, or it was someone who had a Core Earth talisman that could project a low-magic axiom under which the wards weren’t possible. It’s possible to look into the former possibility by letting her wizards send them off to the demon plane, or the latter by going to a dreary part of London called Chislethwaite and asking around for anyone who might have handled the snatch-and-grab.
If the players go for the former option, they’re transported to the demon plane. It gets a little complicated here, because a plane is a sort of parallel dimension, but of a somewhat lower order to a cosm; a cosm can have more than one plane in it. Anyway, the demon plane is this weird, chaotic realm of shifting realities, populated by demons that aren’t really described but who (from the artwork and the references in the text) seem to be your typical goat-footed, horn-headed, chubby little devils. The players can run into a particularly nerdy one who they can save from a bunch of demon bullies. Heh, I love it. Anyway, he can then assure them that no one from the plane has kidnapped any wizards.
Chislethwaite is where it’s at. It’s a Core Earth hardpoint, for some reason, and it’s also been quarantined from the rest of London to keep all the scum and lowlifes from running rampant. Okay, again I am noticing a certain high-handedness in the way Ardinary governs, and I’m still not sure whether it’s meant to be intentional or not. Regardless, going there the players have to deal with street gangs, Cockney goblins, and a big rat that snatches a scrap of their clothing – the last of which Will Be Relevant Later. They eventually learn that Babbidge was indeed snatched by some hoodlums from Chislethwaite under cover of a Core Earth talisman, and that it was on the orders of a dark wizard called Amethyst who operates out of an abandoned missile base in York. They also handed over a weird magic chalice along with him.
So off to York it is, where they find the missile base partly transformed to match Ayslish reality – it’s part wooden buildings and stockades, part concrete and electric fences. It also contains Lance the metal golem, who is actually a transformed Lance missile. He fights for Amethyst, but he can be disposed of by pushing a button in his lair – that “launches” him, and he stomps off in the direction of Leningrad. Heh. Amethyst also has some trolls, a pack of mastiffs, and a whole bunch of human warriors, some of them with modern weapons that they’ll use until they trigger a contradiction. In the end, the players find him to have fled with the Possibility Chalice but to have left Babbidge behind to be rescued.
The players chase Amethyst to the coast, where he sets off to sea in a Viking longship, hoping to reach Norway and give the Possibility Chalice to Uthorion there. The players can commandeer a boat of their own, and the race is on. I feel that a race by sailing ships is a little less high-octane than the multi-participant car chase we got last time, the fact that Amethyst is cheating with magical winds and throwing fireballs at the pursuers notwithstanding…
Anyway, the players quickly attract some help in the form of Uvwe seal-shifters. It says to find more information about them in the Aysle sourcebook, but I can still swear that there is not a word about them there! They’ve got green skin and webbed fingers, apparently, and their spokesperson is a hot nekkid chick, because this was the early 90s and game designers didn’t even try to hide that they were horny.
Amethyst summons a water dragon to attack the players. The players can fight it alongside the Uvwe, at the cost of letting Amethyst flee into a hastily conjured mist, or they can be Hard Men Making Hard Decisions and let the Uvwe sacrifice themselves against the dragon so they can push on. If they do the former, they’ll need to find the longship in the fog somehow, but once they do the Uvwe can sneak them onboard pretty easily. If they do the latter, Amethyst rolls multiple 20s (the book freely admits how unlikely that is, but Torg never shrinks from railroading, and I think the writers really wanted to punish players who tried to be Hard Men Making Hard Decisions) and manages to throw a fireball that sinks the players’ boat, forcing them to swim to the longship and get on board.
So then it’s fight-fight-fight until the players manage to bring down Amethyst and nab the Possibility Chalice. Amethyst doesn’t really want to fight them but will try to cast an illusion to appear as a run-of-the-mill Viking warrior, then cast a flight spell to escape when no one is watching. Still, presumably the players can outsmart him and get their hands on the goodies. Whew.
Got to admit, this one was a step down from the last one. It’s not terrible, but it feels kind of drab in comparison. The first act is mostly about fighting Nippon Tech, which we’ve already spent a lot of time doing, and after that it’s all Aysle, all the time – and it doesn’t even use Aysle to particular advantage, mostly just sending a lot of big guys with swords at the players instead of utilising the rich selection of critters that Aysle has to offer. I think I’d rather have had the temple be located inside the Orrorsh realm, so we could get that flavour in, and then have Amethyst flee towards the Cyberpapacy and run into whatever Malraux has for a coast guard. Spice it up a bit – one of the cardinal rules of Torg is that nothing should ever be simple, and most of this adventure felt pretty simple.
But oh well. We’ll see what happens next time, when the story concludes in The Hidden City.
Moving along through the first edition of Paranoia, we reach the point where Alpha Complex was officially not large enough (or at least, not diverse enough) anymore, and the game felt the need to explore brave new horizons. Specifically, it ventured into Earth orbit. Funny thing, that was the first place Cyberpunk went off to, too, when it came around a few years later… Anyway, there will, naturally, be bug-eyed monsters and evil computers (well, more evil than usual). And explosive decompression. A lot of that.
The adventure proper starts with the players needing to escort a traitor to his execution while he spouts cryptic-yet-ominous phrases. The book cheerfully tells you that this has nothing to do with anything that will follow, but it’ll drive the players crazy trying to figure out how it all factored in. Heh.
The players then get sent after traitorous High Programmer Bette-U-LYF, who is actually a recurring character – she was one of the shadowy figures screwing with the players back in The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, though none of that has any relevance here (especially since that one likely ended with Alpha Complex blowing up, and is thus even less canon than anything else in Paranoia). She’s escaped to orbit, where a bunch of old space stations are still floating around.
Since the players won’t have access to the CRUD system introduced in Send in the Clonesup there, they get their full clone families sent along with them, which is kind of like trying to herd along a class of hyperactive children. The GM is instructed to act out each player’s most annoying habits, though that sounds to me like it might breed genuine and non-fun ill-will… Still, it’s an interesting variation, and like the game points out, it does put the players to the choice of whether to execute some of their clones to restore order when needed, even though that uses up their “extra lives.”
So up the players go, into the first space station. It’s a relatively harmless one, where most of the dangers are in the form of schmuck bait – the players, after all, don’t even know that the Earth revolves around the sun, or indeed that the sun exists, so they have approximately zero knowledge of how to safely navigate a space station without accidentally blowing themselves out an airlock. In the course of their explorations, they’ll encounter a hatched alien egg and accidentally trigger a very life-like (as in: they will have no way of knowing that it’s not real until it ends and they realise that they’re not dead) simulation of the station crashing to the ground.
They eventually manage to catch a shuttle to the next station. There are two unhatched alien eggs in the shuttle. They actually won’t hatch while on route, but they’re located in the dark behind the passenger seats, and they keep pulsating and making creepy noises. Muahahaha.
The second station is a bit more dangerous. It’s populated by bots who have set up their own society, complete with different backbiting factions – one who wants to bring their broken-down controlling Computer back online, one that wants to prevent that from happening, and one that just hates humans on general principle. The latter isn’t quite as much of a problem as it seems, since the bots are under the impression that the players are “androids,” but of course that means that they might try to perform “maintenance” on them, which will include replacing some of those highly obsolete arms and legs with the latest model…
Also, the Computer-loyal bots have gotten it into their heads that the players are the Chosen Ones who will awaken their master from its “slumber” (it’s in pieces all over the floor, so that’s unlikely to happen, but that’s why you call it faith). Which, as it turns out, is less of a cushy job than it sounds, since they’re meant to awaken it by being ritually sacrificed before it. And then the other factions attack. And the alien who hatched from the egg back at the first station. So mayhem, basically.
The players hopefully manage to limp along to a third station, which is run by a functioning Computer that is even more of a hardass than the Alpha Complex Computer. It’s got a problem, though it won’t admit to it – it keeps getting boarded by these annoyingly bulletproof aliens called the Shmegegi. Those eggs that keep turning up aren’t theirs, incidentally, but they are laid by a species they use as servants and attack dogs. Anyway, the station Computer decide that the players can probably fix the whole thing somehow and throws them at the alien ship.
The players stumble through a weird alien menagerie of bizarre creatures (galactic travelers who have bought passage on the Shmegegi ship) before finally encountering the Shmegegi themselves. Who are stuffy British stereotypes, only with lots of tentacles. They are here to steal Earth’s women, their own having gone extinct, but they are too uptight and proper to do anything as uncouth as force themselves on them, so their plan is more about awkwardly courting them in old-fashioned ways. They’re keeping Bette-U-LYF captive for this purpose (she originally hoped to broker some sort of deal with them to get back in the Computer’s good graces, but it hasn’t worked out).
The Shmegegi “torture” the players by subjecting them to tacky and low-brow subjects, which the Shmegegi consider the most painful thing imaginable. When that doesn’t work, they are brought before their leader, the McShmegegus, who rants at them about how they will take over the world and how the players have a chance to be first among their servants. The players can accept, but then they’re fitted with brain implants that blow up their skulls if they so much as think about being disloyal to the Shmegegi, and sent back to Alpha Complex, where they’ll somehow need to convince the Computer that they’re still its loyal citizens. It probably won’t work, is the uptake.
The alternative is to follow Bette-U-LYF’s lead and escape to commandeer some “pie fighters” from the last platform, in which they can engage the alien ship in battle and eventually drive it off. Having done that, they have saved the Earth, at least until the aliens invariably return… but of course, they have no way to get back down there, and will inevitably starve to death unless they think of something really brilliant. If they do think of something really brilliant and get back to Alpha Complex, of course, the Computer rewards them with an even more fatally dangerous mission.
I got to admit, I love this one. It really manages to hit every single space-adventure cliche in the book while still being fun and surprising. It probably does herald the game’s drift away from Alpha Complex in the later half of the second edition, but honestly, I’m not sure I care enough about Alpha Complex to be overly bothered by that. We’ll see if I end up eating my words.
The next one is Orcbusters, where… the players are magically transported to a fantasy dungeon crawl. Okay, wasting no time there, I see…
Having read through the impressively detailed if somewhat intimidating core rulebook of Deadlands: the Weird West, today we delve into the first published adventures. Strap on your six shooters and fix your grim gunslinger scowl on your face, because it’s off to the frontier to gun down some varmints!
I am sorry to say that nothing as cool as the cover art is going to happen… Anyway, the book is divided into two stand-alone adventures, This Harrowed Ground and Ghostriders in the Sky.
In This Harrowed Ground the party… sorry, posse (yes, still a bit exasperated by Deadlands’ insistence of having cutesy Wild West names for everything) are working as guards for a gold-and-silver collection for a major bank, and find themselves in the town of Pawnee Rock that’s gearing up for a celebration. Some years ago, the townsfolk, led by five heroic citizens and with the aid of a Union cavalry troop led by one Captain Linkous, fought off an attack by a Confederate defector named Slate, and the anniversary is coming up. The town has since made good from silver found in the hills, and the heroes of the past battle have also had the fortune of finding gold, though it’s a little strange that their gold vein is seemingly the only one to be found.
Then those five worthies start dying under mysterious circumstances, killed by what seems to be some kind of spectral figure. The players are expected to start investigating on their own accord – there isn’t anything really pulling them in, which I think might be a problem. Still, more and more of the five die, and Slate also arrives in town, apparently to settle the score.
However, all is not what it seems! Captain Linkous and his men were carrying a fortune in gold meant to fund rebels against the Confederacy, and the five “heroes” actually tipped Slate off to their presence so he and his men would attack and kill them, leaving them to steal all the gold. They’ve been living off the proceeds ever since, pretending that it’s mined from the hills (if the players examine the “nuggets” from the mine, they can discover that they are all suspiciously uniform in shape). Captain Linkous restless ghost has gotten so pissed off by the idea of his betrayers being celebrated that he’s risen from the grave and started killing them. Slate has nothing to do with anything and is really just a red herring and a possible source of information, but Linkous will take the opportunity to kill him too since he happens to be around (he gets a very badass death scene where he swears that if that wuss Linkous can come back from the dead, then the players have certainly not seen the last of him, either!).
If Linkous reaches the end of his list, he’ll raise the ghosts of his dead soldiers and storm the town to kill every living thing there. He can only be killed with his own weapons, which he will retrieve from the five traitors one by one.
In Ghostriders in the Sky, the posse arrives in a Mormon community called Planterstown. Here they might actually have a reason for getting involved, because there’s been a bounty posted for a gang called the Ghostriders who keep robbing banks and then disappearing, their tracks just ending some distance away when people try to follow them.
The Ghostriders actually used to be a traveling freak show under the patronage of a mad scientist named Higgabottom. They tried to settle in Planterstown but were driven out for being creepy and weird, so instead they created a hidden sanctuary for themselves in the mountains called Tomorrie Town, trading with some of the more pragmatic Planterstown folk on the sly. Higgabottom died in the course of an experiment and came back as a Harrowed, now looking to do as much damage as possible, and he’s been developing a horrific superweapon that will let him rain acid over entire towns. He needs funds, so he’s got his still-faithful people to rob banks for him. They “disappear” because they have a high-tech balloon kitted out to lift entire groups of horses, and they use that to make their escape as soon as night falls after a heist.
The Ghostriders will hit the bank in Planterstown in short order, making use of a dwarf named Petunia who used to be one of them but who stayed in Planterstown, which she has now come to regret. The players can run into her getting hassled by the townsfolk before the heist, and they may find one of her shoes on the scene if the Ghostriders’ disappearing tracks later. Likewise, they can run into another member of the crew buying some supplies at the general store, giving them another hint of who might know something of where Tomorrie Town is located.
How they end up resolving the situation is left undecided. The Ghostriders aren’t evil per se – they are bitter from their mistreatment and loyal to Higgabottom, since he’s always played fair with them in a world where few people do, but left to their own devices they’d have no inclination to harm anyone. All the same, Higgabottom is firmly under the control of his manitou and needs to be stopped, or he’ll start committing mass murder once his acid weapon is perfected. There is room for both deft negotiation skills resulting in a happy ending, or a grim outcome where innocents die for the crimes of the guilty.
All in all, the adventures aren’t bad. The NPCs (I forget if they’re called something special in Deadlands and frankly I can’t be bothered to check!) get sketched out quickly and efficiently, in a way that makes them feel human and nuanced without being overly complicated to portray. The towns are lovingly detailed and there’s plenty of corners for the players to look into and people who know varying amount of information about the situation, and might reveal it under certain conditions.
Still… I must admit to being a little disappointed. I was kind of hoping for a little more splatter and a little less Western, if you see what I mean? I thought there’d be more hunting down some of the colourful monsters in the book, but this is all about gritty detective work in a realistic frontier setting, with just a slight supernatural element to give it some taste. Again, I am not that into cowboy stuff. I wanted giant sand worms! And I don’t see how I was wrong to expect it, given that the cover picture is of some dude firing at a giant mutant gargoyle thing with a gatling pistol!
Still, it’s decent for what it is. Next up is a more thorough look at the setting in The Quick and the Dead.
