Category Archives: What’s he playing?

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Game Packing

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Full disclosure: I’ve got a bit of an obsession ((My friends have referred to it as a fetish, but there’s no sexual component, so nyaaaah. You’re wrong.)) with luggage. Specifically, backpacks, messenger bags, and the like. So, this post is sort of feeding that obsession. If you’re not interested in my thoughts on hauling around a bunch of RPGs and boardgames, you may want to skip this one.

As you may have gathered from reading my blog, I play in and run a lot of games, either with my gaming group or as demos at stores and conventions. That means that I wind up hauling a lot of game stuff from place to place, and sometimes that gets heavy and awkward. So, the past few years, I’ve been looking around for good bags that serve as sensible, well-designed game totes.

What I’ve found is that RPG players are not a market that gets catered to by luggage designers. Fair enough; after all, we’re a small market, and we generally haul around stuff like books and dice and pencils. This kind of load doesn’t require the specialized design and engineering you usually see in bags designed for miniatures gamers, with the padding allowing you to carry your army around.

But I have found some good products for hauling around my stuff, and I’m gonna talk about them below. I own, or have owned, each of the bags listed below. Now, none of them are inexpensive, but they are all top quality, so you get exceptional value for your money.

The Gamer Bag

Years ago – almost ten years ago, now, I guess, I did find a bag that was specifically designed for RPG gamers. It was called the Gamer Bag, and it was a messenger bag that came with a zippered, foam-lined insert that let you carry about a dozen miniatures in the bag. I no longer have the bag ((Though I still have the foam insert.)), and can’t find it anywhere online ((If you happen to find it somewhere, let me know. It was made by a dance bag company in BC, as I recall.)), so I can’t show you what it looked like.

It was a good compromise bag. It held a few rulebooks, some paper and pens, and the aforementioned insert. Not quite big enough to be a single-bag solution for a GM of a game that requires a lot of books or minis, and the insert was a bit of wasted space for a player who had only one figure to bring to the game, but it was well-constructed and worked great for squad-based minis games. It was my go-to bag for a long time.

Paladin Mission Go-Bag ((For the Paladin stuff, I’m linking to Darkthreads.com, because that’s where I bought mine. Their customer service is top-notch. If the bags wore out at all, I’d buy more stuff from them, but they last forever.))

The Paladin Mission Go-Bag is, I am told, designed for US Special Forces use. It is strong, durable, and holds a surprising amount given its size ((You’re gonna see that this is a recurring theme with pretty much all the high-end bags on this list.)). It’s a messenger-style bag, with one exterior zippered pocket and a larger main zippered compartment. Inside the main compartment are four tubular pockets – almost pouches, really – attached two to the front and two to the back. These pockets have drawstrings allowing you to cinch them closed.

At first glance, it doesn’t really seem like the bag can hold all that much, and that the internal pockets would get in the way. In practice, it can hold an amazing amount – but there’s a learning curve to using it ((I know! A learning curve to using a messenger bag! But it’s something that I’ve found is true of a lot of very intelligently designed bags. You need to learn how to use them to best effect.)). I can easily carry my iPad, several hardcover rulebooks, a notebook, a pad of graph paper, my dice pouch, a few miniatures, and a bunch of pens and pencils in it.

I don’t use it that much for RPGs anymore, though, because I’ve found some solutions I like better, which I’m going to talk about below. These days, I mainly use it for carrying a variety of smaller board and card games. The interior pouches are great for holding small game packs, like Zombie Dice or Cthulhu dice, or card decks for Magic or the Z-Man B-Movie card games. I can slip in my Fiasco kit in between the pouches, or a small boardgame like Carcassonne or Escape From the Aliens in Outer Space.

And it comes in both black and desert tan.

Paladin Mission Pack

This is the grown-up version of the Mission G0-Bag above. It’s a full backpack, with all the MOLLE features, and can hold a lot of stuff. If you were to fill it with hardcover rulebooks, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be able to lift it ((Well, I know I wouldn’t be able to lift it.)). With that in mind, I generally use it to haul around boardgames. Boardgames can be a problem because the boxes are generally not a very convenient size, but they’re generally lighter than the equivalent volume of books. This huge backpack is my solution to carrying around more then one or two without dropping everything everywhere.

The large internal pocket will handle my copy of Conquest of Nerath without a problem. I can even slide in two of Fantasy Flight’s square boardgame boxes as well, and fill the little bit of room at the top with smaller games like Zombie Dice or some card boxes. The exterior has a large pocket near the bottom that’s big enough to hold the Mission Go-Bag ((Almost like they planned it that way, huh?)), and so will hold my Fiasco kit, or a couple small boardgame, along with a few other odds and ends. Above that is a slightly smaller pocket that’s big enough for one small boardgame or a few card games. And the bottom of the pack unzips to create a third external pocket that can just fit one of the square Fantasy Flight game boxes on a sort of diagonal, with empty space to fill up with dice bags, pencils and pens, token bags, and other stuff like that.

All in all, I can fit about ten board and card games into this pack. It makes it kinda heavy, but it’s got good shoulder straps and a belly band, so it’s surprisingly easy to carry once you’ve got it on. You just need to stay aware that you’ve got the equivalent volume of a ten-year-old strapped to your back as you maneuver through crowds.

Red Oxx Gator Carry-On Bag

This bag is an interesting one. It splits the difference between something like the Cafe Bag below and the Mission Go-Bag above. It’s about the right size to haul a stack of rulebooks around, and the main pocket doesn’t have any internal pouches to get in the way. Instead, there are two gusseted pockets on the outside, very similar to the Mission Go-Bag’s internal pouches, except these close with snaps. It’s also got a couple of flat slip pockets on the outside, a larger zippered flat pocket, and two elastic water bottle pockets, one on each end.

This is the bag I tend to use if I’m running a game that requires a few rulebooks. The rulebooks, a pad of paper, clipboard, iPad, etc. go in the main pocket, and my dice and pens and tokens and such go in the external pouches. And I can load it up pretty heavy, because it’s go this great rubberized grip on the shoulder strap that flexes and holds on to your shoulder, keeping the bag from shifting around.

Tom Bihn Organizer Pouches ((You may notice that Tom Bihn stuff dominates this list. The reason for that is their wide array of high-quality products and superb customer service. They have become my favourite luggage manufacturers. This is not to slight anyone else on the list. Everyone’s gotta have a favourite, right?))

When I first ordered these from Tom Bihn, I kinda looked at them and said, “What the hell am I gonna use these for? ((So, the question then arises, if I had no use for them, why did I order them, right? Did I mention I’ve got a bit of an obsession? There ya go.))” Now, I use them for everything and I’m thinking that I need a few more. They’re just incredibly useful for keeping things, y’know, organized.

They come in a lot of styles- clear, padded, cordura, cork, dyneema, ballistic nylon – several sizes – mini, small, medium, pen and pencil, and large – and a slew of colours that I’m not going to try and list. Not every size is available in every style, not every style is available in every colour, and so on. But you can mix and match to a pretty impressive extent.

At this point, I’m mainly using the small, medium, and large sizes.

  • Small pouches are good for a few plastic minis, a set of dice or two, or a deck of cards.
  • Medium pouches are good for a whole bunch of plastic minis, a bunch of dice, several decks of cards, digest-sized books, or a whole bunch of pens, pencils, markers, and sticky notes – perfect for running a game like Leverage RPG.
  • Large pouches are what I’m using to organize my game stuff. I’ve taken my Fiasco kit out of the plastic case it was in and put it in a large pouch. I use one to hold everything I need to demo Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and D&D Next. I’m keeping my character sheets and reference material for each game I play in separate large pouches. I’m thinking that I may drop the correct dice, a pencil, and pad of paper into each character pouch, so that I only need to grab one thing when I head out to play.

Tom Bihn Travel Tray

This is a funky little thing that is very useful if I’m running or demoing a game that requires a lot of dice – you can’t always count on the players to have sufficient ((Or, in some situations, any.)) dice, so I just toss a whole bunch of dice loose in the tray, throw in my personal dice bag, any other little things I’ll need – tokens, minis, whatever – and snug the whole thing up with the drawstring. Once I get to the venue, I haul out everything but the communal dice, and set the tray up open in the middle of the table where everyone can reach the dice they need. And at the end of the session, everything goes back in the tray, I cinch it up, and it goes back in my bag. Easy-peasey.

Tom Bihn Empire Builder

The Empire Builder is my new big RPG bag. When I haul my D&D 4E stuff around for the Storm Point game, this is what I use. It’s got a nice, big interior pocket, as well as a roomy flap pocket on the front, and an open-top pocket on the back. The front pocket has a number of zipper pockets and little gusseted pockets for pens, books, etc. The interior pocket has clips to attach one of the Tom Bihn Brain Cell laptop bags, and comes with some plastic file dividers. You can also add a Freudian Slip to hold more pens, paper, and other little things.

The bag is pretty spacious. I can fit my laptop, a folder for each of the players’ character sheets, a couple of reference books, my dice bag, screen, dungeon tiles, pens, paper, minis, the adventure, and my iPad. It gets a bit heavy when I really load it up – books are pretty heavy for their size. Fortunately, you can get the Absolute Shoulder Strap, which is nicely padded and comfortable when you’re carrying a ton of crap in your bag. Which I always seem to do.

Tom Bihn Cafe Bag

The cafe bags from Tom Bihn are very simple – a big interior pocket, a zip pocket on the front, and an open-top pocket on the back.  My large cafe bag has become my go-to player bag. It’s not too big, and will hold my character sheets, a rulebook or two, pens, paper, dice, my iPad, and a mini or two. I don’t need a lot of organization for the character stuff for any game I play in, so the smaller, simpler bag is perfect.

Tom Bihn Super Ego

The Super Ego is an awesome messenger bag. It’s the largest of the series that also includes the Imago, the Id, and the Ego. A more casual style of messenger bag than the Empire Builder, it holds a little bit more, but doesn’t have some of the organizational options that the Empire Builder does. That makes it a good choice for when you want to carry around only a couple of games, for small demo situations or a casual evening. You can toss a Fantasy Flight square box in the main pocket, along with a large organizer pouch with, say, your Fiasco or Leverage kit, a medium organizer pouch with pens, pencils, index cards, and post-its, and the travel tray with a bunch of dice.

The front pocket can still hold a bunch of small-box games, like card games, or another couple of organizer pouches with more games or accessories or minis. It’s got some organizer pockets for things like pens and pencils, too.

Like the Empire Builder, it’s easy to overload this bag, especially if you’re using it to haul around RPGs with their heavy, hardcover rulebooks. I strongly recommend getting the Absolute Shoulder Strap; it just makes everything better when you’re carrying more than you should.

Tom Bihn Smart Alec

The Smart Alec is a great big backpack. It’s got minimal organizational options – well, mine does, anyway. They’ve released a new version in the last little while that features a modular system that allows you to add extra modular pockets on the top and back, which increases your organizational options. But the baseline model is a big, empty bag, with connection points for adding a laptop shell inside, a couple of zippered side pockets on the outside, and a zippered pocket in the interior top.

It’s great for carrying a couple of boardgames or small RPGs in organizers – basically, it can haul everything that you could haul in the Super Ego, but in a backpack configuration. This is great if you need to be carrying things from place to place, like at a convention, because the backpack carry is just so much easier than the messenger bag carry for heavy stuff.

One of the nice features about the Smart Alec is that it’s got a bungee cord strap on the exterior that lets you strap something on the back of the pack. It works great for attaching a battle mat, for example.

Tom Bihn Synapse

I personally think that the Synapse is the best backpack in the world. It’s got a wealth organizational pockets – zippered pockets on the inside and outside, and a gusseted pocket on the inside. One of the outside pockets holds a one-litre water bottle ((True story. I had a bottle of water in that pocket. It leaked – about half the water ran out into the interior of the bag. I had a brand new hardcover book in the main compartment of the bag. One corner got slightly damp. The rest of the water was caught in the gusseted interior pocket, and kept well away from the book, my iPad, and my lunch. Smart, effective design. Well, of the bag. Not of the water bottle. That got replaced.)), there are nice big side zipper pockets, and large zipper pocket at the bottom, and a small one just beside the water bottle pocket. You can load several small games or everything you need to run an RPG, including dice and minis, into it very easily.

And then you carry it on your back. It’s not as big as the Smart Alec, but the organizational set-up makes it a little more versatile in how you load things, so you may be astonished to see that, if you’re smart about how you pack it, it holds almost as much. They’ve also recently released a new version, the Synapse 25, which is essentially the same bag, but a little bit bigger. It’s got almost the same volume as the Smart Alec, but I’m betting the organizational set-up lets you pack even more game material into it ((I can’t say for certain. I don’t own one of the new ones. Yet.)).

Tom Bihn Aeronaut

The Aeronaut is probably the bag on this list that’s least useful for carrying gaming stuff around. That still means it’s plenty useful, though; I mainly use it as a small version of the Paladin Mission Pack. Indeed, when I’m doing the big game demos at C4, I usually carry both bags to make sure I get as many games as possible to the show.

That said, the bag has a few constraints imposed by the design goal of making it the largest size carry-on bag allowed by airlines. The dimensions of the bag are determined by that goal, and so you get a few restrictions on fitting in some games. Still, the big centre pocket will hold a Fantasy Flight square box, a couple of large organizer pouches, and a small game or several decks of cards tossed in around the edges. The end pocket is just a bit too small to fit in a large organizer, but it holds Carcassonne pretty much perfectly, and is a good place for some medium organizer pouches with accessories.

The thing that really makes this bag for hauling games around, though, is the fact that it’s got three carry methods. You can carry it like a suitcase, like a messenger bag ((Again, I recommend the Absolute Shoulder Strap.)), or pull out the hidden backpack straps and sling it on your back. I usually carry it on my back unless I’m also carrying the Paladin Mission Pack, in which case I use the shoulder strap. Yeah, I’m loaded down like a mule at that point, but it means that I get all my games ((Nineteen different ones, last C4.)) to the con site in one trip.

 

So, there are some thoughts about carrying games around, and the tools I use for it. Hopefully, you’ll find something useful there. And if you have any suggestions – a favourite bag or game-moving tool – please let me know.

Like I said, kinda obsessed.

Civil War: Taking AIM

By | | Civil War, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, What's he playing?
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***Spoiler Warning***

My group and I are playing through the Civil War event book for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, from Margaret Weis Productions. While the course of play may not follow the event book – or the comic books – precisely, there’s going to be a certain amount of stuff that does conform to the adventures and comic series.

In short, if you don’t want to know what happens in Civil War, don’t read these posts. Or the comic books.

***You Have Been Warned***

This session almost didn’t happen on Friday night. That is to say that, instead of Civil War, I had scheduled a one-shot AD&D 1st Edition adventure for a group that consisted mostly of the Civil War game, with one additional player. That additional player wasn’t able to make it, so we decided to play Civil War instead ((Why am I bothering to tell you guys this? Well, mainly so that I can assure Chris and the rest of the guys that the AD&D one-shot will still happen.)). What this mainly meant was that, not having planned on another Civil War session before my upcoming vacation ((I’m going to Ireland on Friday for three weeks.)), I had a bit of a scrabble to get my prep work done for the game.

We had ended the last game with the Guardians in the secret AIM base below Ground Zero in Manhattan. Our heroes had just dealt with a couple of squads of troopers and a few scientists, and the emergency lights and klaxons had started, with a PA announcing that the destruct sequence had begun. That’s where we picked things up.

The Guardians decided they had three main objectives at this point: clear the people from the complex ((And preferably confine them for later prosecution.)); shut down the dangerous, overloading, high-energy experiments; and stop the destruct sequence to keep it from reducing lower Manhattan to rubble. Two of these issues were represented by the situational distinctions Overloading Experiments and Panicky Scientists Everywhere!, while the destruct sequence was represented by a countdown die ((Among the many things that make me sad about the end of the MHR license is the fact that the Annihilation event book, with all it’s cool new tricks, won’t be printed. Still, the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide is coming, so that’s good.)). To take care of these, the gang split up.

Jumpstart, with the help of a lightning sprite summoned by The Doctor, went looking for the main computers to shut down the destruct sequence. They found the sealed main computer room, but it was guarded by Bushwacker.

Now, to make the whole AIM complex scene more interesting, I went looking through the published MHR books looking for tech-based villains that weren’t already serving some purpose ((Or serving some time.)) in the event. I grabbed a few of these, and beefed them up a bit. I did this by giving them some AIM-provided assets and, to avoid the problem I ran into previously, I wrote these down on post-its and stuck them to the cards representing the villains in the turn order. So, Bushwacker had the assets Sniper’s Perch d10 and AIM-Tech Camouflage Field d10, and Living Laser had AIM-Tech Photonic Capacitor Harness d12 ((“How does he wear…” “It’s unstable molecules. Go with it.” “Is it just pots of glow-in-the-dark paint?” “I SAID GO WITH IT!”)) when he pounced on Megajoule.

So, The Doctor and Jumpstart managed to get into the computer room and shut down the destruct sequence, though they took some roughing up from Bushwacker ((Who managed to escape custody at the end of the session, thanks to his AIM-Tech Camouflage Field d10.)) in the process.

Meanwhile, Volcanic and Mega Joule concentrated on shutting down the overloading experiments – Volcanic using his scientific and technological expertise, and Mega Joule using his Universal Off Switch (aka Kinetic Blast). Volcanic did a good job on that, but Mega Joule was distracted by Living Laser trying to mess with him. That didn’t last too long, though; Mega Joule took him out with a single counterattack followed by his own attack. Then he moved on to helping delay the destruct countdown, because Volcanic had managed to cut the power to the labs and shut down the Overloading Experiments distinction.

Volcanic moved on to clearing out the scientists, herding them into a big rock cage adjacent to one of the subway tunnels a few levels up above the base for later disposal. One of the scientists he was shoveling away like this screamed, “No! It will get out!” as he was swept up, which made Volcanic pause beside a large, sealed metal door.

And that’s when the tentacled horror ((From Civil War: Fifty Stat Initiative event supplement, pFS73. I bumped up the die types on all its ratings by one step, because I’ve found that the PC heroes are pretty damned tough.)) came bursting out and tried to eat him. Volcanic made himself a big lava sword and hacked at it until it swallowed him, then he cooked it from the inside.

At that point, the AIM base was empty and stable, and we called it a night ((We had started somewhat late, and I had to work the next morning, so it wasn’t as long a session as I might have otherwise run.)). As people were packing up, we did a little talking about the aftermath of the raid: how it would definitely boost their credibility when it came to attracting more anti-registration folks to their cause, how it would – once again – show up S.H.I.E.L.D., and how they had some limited access to the AIM computers for a little while before S.H.I.E.L.D. swooped in.

To simulate this last point, rather than roll out hacking attempts or spend plot points for assets based on it, I told the group that they could ask me three questions about AIM and I would answer them, and that would represent the datalooting of the AIM base mainframe. They’re going to discuss it via e-mail and put together their three questions for me before the next session. If they get them in early enough, I may even do up some handouts or other in-game props to represent what they find.

And then, to lay some pipe for the next few sessions, I told them they saw a news announcement of Captain America telling all unregistered heroes that, unless they stepped forward in the next twenty-four hours and registered, S.H.I.E.L.D. would ((In a spectacular dick move.)) begin releasing their secret identity information to the public. That got everyone all riled up again, just in time to close down for the evening.

I’m looking forward to seeing where things go from here.

On a Related Note

Margaret Weis Productions has recently announced that their license for producing MHR has been terminated. That means no new MHR products will be released.

I want to say thank-you to the crew at MWP who worked on the game. I think the system is a triumph of design, that the way you built the event books was inspirational, and that the products you put out to the public are beautiful and useful. You should all be very proud of what you’ve done.

I’ve enjoyed playing and running the game immensely. It has got me reading Marvel comics again – I’m still a DC guy at heart, but now there are some Marvel titles ((Outside the Ultimate continuity; I always liked the Ultimate continuity.)) that I follow faithfully. The game books got me interested in picking up The Siege and Annihilation back issues, as well. So, for at least one gamer, the cross-marketing plans for Marvel have been fulfilled.

I want to say a special thank-you to Cam Banks, who has been a great ambassador and advocate for the game. He’s been friendly and approachable, both in person and via e-mail. He’s over at Atlas Games now ((Where, in the before times, some of my own writings were published.)), but still keeps his hand in on Cortex Plus – I hear he’s just finished the system design work on the new Firefly RPG, for example.

So, thanks for everything, folks. The game’s not dead – I’m still running it. And I plan to running it ((And even hopefully playing it.)) for years to come.

Fast Fate

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In case you missed it, I wrote a moderately long post about Fate Core. To be totally honest, I hadn’t intended to write that post, but as I was writing this post, I realized that it would make a whole lot more sense if I gave folks a look at Fate Core before tackling Fate Accelerated Edition.

So, what’s Fate Accelerated Edition? Here’s how they pitched it during the Fate Core Kickstarter. Basically, it’s the quick-start rules for Fate Core, pared down to a 32-page ((Though I should note here that the .pdf pre-release candidate I received as a Kickstarter backer is currently 48 pages. Some of that is index, cheat sheets, and art.)) book. Describing it that way doesn’t really do justice to what Clark Valentine and the rest of the Evil Hat team has accomplished here.

FAE is not just an introductory game, or a set of quick-start rules. It is a fully functional implementation of Fate, tweaked for getting people playing fast even if they’ve never gamed before. It’s not just the kids’ version of Fate ((Though it slants towards that sort of feel with the wonderful, cartoony art that Fred has been previewing.)) – it’s certainly as welcoming to younger gamers as it is to beginners, but there is an elegance and refinement to the system that will, I think, appeal a lot to older, more experienced players looking for something light and flexible.

I haven’t played FAE yet, but it may be my favourite implementation of the Fate rules yet.

Now, that statement is not intended to denigrate any of the other Fate games I love. I’ve just found that, as I’ve gotten older, I look for different things in game systems. There was a time I was deeply enamoured of complex, simulationist games and of rich, detailed rulesets, and elaborate sub-systems, but that time has passed. Now, I look for simple systems that will make it easy for the GM to improvise and supports player creativity without imposing too many mechanical constraints on their choices. Fate games fit that requirement, but FAE fits it best of all.

FAE runs on the Fate Core engine, but they’ve made a number of changes to simplify things, and to focus the play style in certain ways. If I don’t comment on something below, you can assume that it works just like in Fate Core.

No Skills

One of the biggest differences in the game is that there are no skills. The things your character can do are decided by the type of game you’re playing and the aspects your character has. So, in a game about mystical martial artists with control over the elements ((Just for instance.)), it’s reasonable to expect characters to be able to do fun, cinematic wuxia moves, like leaping up on to an enemy’s sword and kicking him in the face. And, if you have the aspect Wizardly Honour Student, you should be able to cast some basic spells ((Hell, even some advanced spells; you’re an honour student, after all!)) and tell people all about the history of your magical school.

This covers the kinds of things you can do, but it doesn’t cover how well you can do it. That part is covered by approaches.

Approaches

Approaches replace skill ranks in determining how good your character is at any given thing. They don’t talk about what you’re doing, but about how you’re doing it. There are six different approaches: Careful, Clever, Flashy, Forceful, Quick, and Sneaky ((Shadows of Esteren uses something kind of like this, but the how is paired with a skill in a more traditional way.)). Characters get one at Good (+3), two at Fair (+2), two at Average (+1), and one at Mediocre (+0). So, when you’re trying to do something that you may or may not be able to do, you decide what approach you’re using, and make your roll using that.

I love this approach ((Though I can certainly see why others might not; I’ll be talking about that, too.)) because of the way it makes you think about your character’s actions in play. If my highest approach is Careful, I’m probably going to be doing things in the game that reflect that – planning, finding things out, fighting defensively rather than charging blithely in, etc. On the other hand, if my highest approach is Forceful, not only am I going to be front and centre in any fight, I’m going to resort to intimidation or stubbornness before persuasion and compromise.

Example? Sure! Let’s say we’re playing a pirate game, and three characters are fighting off some boarders. Anna has Forceful as her highest approach, Beaumonde has Clever, and Clement has Flashy. Anna’s best bet is to dive in, pressing the enemy hard, and trying to drive them back. Beaumonde is probably going to look around for ways to trick his opponents without actually engaging them – gaining advantage rather than attacking. And Clement is probably going to be swinging from ropes, rallying the defenders, and maybe dueling the enemy captain one-on-one. Three different characters, three different styles – all supported and reinforced by the mechanics of the game.

Quick Game and Character Creation

The process outlined in Fate Core for creating the game setting and characters is streamlined in FAE, with the goal of getting people up and playing in half an hour. Game creation especially is pared down – basically, it comes down to having a quick conversation to decide some very basic parameters of the game world. Things like, “We’re playing kids attending a school for wizards,” or, “This is a game set in a 19th-century steampunk world with zombies.” Just enough to give everyone a starting point for thinking about the game world.

The biggest change to character creation ((Other than use of approaches rather than skills.)) is the removal of the story phases . Players pick a High Concept aspect, a Trouble aspect, and between one and three other aspects, depending on how many good ideas they have for aspects at this stage. If you leave an aspect blank, you can fill it in during play. Character aspects in FAE take on even more of the duty of filling in details of the world, thanks to the pared-down version of game creation, which helps put the characters even more solidly at the centre of the game.

After the aspects are chosen, everyone gets to pick their approaches, as described above. One of the nice touches is that the book provides six archetypal distributions of the approaches, so you can quickly grab the approaches for, say, the Brute or the Trickster or the Swashbuckler. Then everyone picks between zero and three stunts – again, stunts you don’t choose can be filled in during play.

Simple Stunts

Stunt creation is simplified in FAE, boiling it down to a very clean way of coming up with your stunts. It uses the fill-in-the-blank approach that clarified compels in Fate Core, and I think it’s just brilliant. There are two categories of stunt, the first using the following sentence:

Because I [describe some way that you are exceptional, have a cool bit of gear, or are otherwise awesome], I get a +2 when I [pick one: Carefully, Cleverly, Flashily, Forcefully, Quickly, Sneakily][pick one: attack, defend, create advantages, overcome] when [describe circumstance].

Now, this leads to stunts like:

Swashbuckling Swordswoman: Because I am a swashbuckling swordswoman, I gain a +2 to Flashy attacks when crossing blades with a single opponent.

The other stunt type uses the following template:

Because I [describe some way that you are exceptional, have a cool bit of gear, or are otherwise awesome], once per game session I can [describe something cool you can do].

This gives you stunts like:

Gadgeteer: Because I am a gadgeteer, once per session I may declare that I have an especially useful device that lets me eliminate one situation aspect.

You can have up to three stunts for free. Each stunt after that costs a point of refresh.

No Extras

In Fate Core, extras are the special powers, magical gear, and other things that make your character different from the rest of the world. There are no extras in FAE – that role is filled by character aspects. So, if you have an aspect like Weather Witch, you don’t need an extra like Meteorological Magic to be able to whistle up the wind. You have the Weather Witch aspect, so you can try to do that. The GM will ask you how you do that – i.e., what approach you use – and tells you to roll.

Potential Issues

Okay, I really love this iteration of Fate, but I can see some things that might be problematic for some people, so I’m going to call them out here. These are not problems with FAE ((Really, I see most of them as features rather than bugs.)), but they are points to consider as you try and decide if this game is for you. You need to think about these things.

  • It may not provide the level of mechanical detail you want. Using approaches instead of skills means that carving out a niche for your character based on what he or she is good at doing ((Rather than how he or she is good at doing things.)) doesn’t work too well. You can use aspects for this, but for some people, that may not be satisfying. And you may find approaches just too broad in what they cover.
  • Unless you’re trying to emulate a specific world – The Legend of Korra, or Harry Potter, for example – you may find yourselves having to do a lot of improvisation to fill in details of the world you decide to play in. If you’re good at that sort of thing, that’s not a problem, but if you’re not, it may demand a bit more prep time to create those details between game sessions.
  • The removal of the story phases from character creation means you lose that handy tool for tying the characters together from the outset. Maybe they’ll do it anyway, but you may have to spend the first part of play getting the characters together and pointed in the same direction.
  • The lack of extras, and the reliance on aspects, makes it very easy to play like a munchkin. As with all rules-light systems ((I don’t think Fate in general is rules-light, but FAE certainly is.)), communication and trust between GM and players is vitally necessary to prevent one character stealing the spotlight from everyone else by taking advantage of the openness of the rule set and ignoring the implied understanding of co-operative play between the players.

So, think about those points when you’re deciding about this game. I think FAE is a great game, but it is not the perfect tool for every game or every group. Understand what it does well, and what it doesn’t do well, and you’ll have a better chance of getting a good play experience out of using it ((This advice, of course, applies to every game system. I want to mention it explicitly here because of how much I’m gushing. Gotta be balanced.)).

Mix and Match

I’ve been talking about FAE and Fate Core as if they’re two different games, and they’re not, really. One of the things that make me so excited by FAE is the way it shows how you can hack Fate Core, to tweak the play experience in very specific ways ((The Fate Toolkit and Fate Worlds books coming from the Kickstarter will help with that, too.)).

It also gives you a number of modular pieces that you can pull out and add to Fate Core, or vice-versa. Want an FAE game that has more developed original setting? Use the game creation rules from Fate Core. Folks in your Fate Core game having trouble coming up with stunts? Give them the two-page stunts section from FAE. Tack the extras system onto FAE to standardize weird powers. Use the approaches in Fate Core to simplify the skill system. Mix and match and blend until you have the mixture you like best.

So?

I think that FAE is my favourite implementation of Fate. I like Fate Core hugely, but the simplification of FAE appeals to my aesthetic sense a little bit more. It is a beautiful, elegant, clean system that makes it easy for folks to get into Fate games, and has me wanting to launch a new campaign – any new campaign – with a group of players to try it out.

Oh, and it’s only gonna cost you five bucks when it comes out. Did I mention that? Thus you have no excuse not to buy it and try it. But don’t do it just because it’s cheap.

Do it because it’s awesome.

Changing Fate

By | | What's he playing?
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This post is kind of long, so I’m starting it off with:

TL;DR

Fate Core is smoother, clearer, and better put together than any previous iteration of the Fate systems, including my beloved DFRPG. Important clarifications and simplifications have made it more accessible to newcomers and easier to understand and run for veterans.

So, the folks at Evil Hat have recently ((Well, kinda recently. It wrapped up a few months ago.)) completed a Kickstarter to publish the latest version of their Fate game system: Fate Core. As part of the Kickstarter, Evil Hat has shared preview .pdfs of the new book with backers – that’s what I’m using for this little article.

Fate has gone through several iterations since its inception, but these have mainly been subsumed in specific game systems, such as Spirit of the Century and Dresden Files Roleplaying Game. This is, as I understand things ((Which is imperfectly at the best of times.)), the first setting-free publication of Fate since Fate 2.0, about 10 years ago.

I say “setting-free” rather than “generic,” because the game makes it pretty clear that it is not really a generic game ((An argument can be made that there are no really generic game systems; most promote a pretty specific play style and experience.)). A quote from the book to illustrate:

Fate doesn’t come with a default setting, but it works best with any premise where the characters are proactive, capable people leading dramatic lives. We give more advice on how to bring that flavor to your games in the next chapter.

The upshot of this is that, while the system will work with pretty much any setting you can envisage – fantasy, modern, science fiction, horror, urban fantasy, spy thrillers, whatever – the rules are constructed and tuned to reward a specific style of play, with competent characters taking risks to control their own destinies. I’ll talk a little bit more about what all that means in the sections below.

So, while you may wind up playing a cyber-soldier in a dystopian future or a talking rabbit in a mostly idyllic meadow or a lost soul trying to find redemption after death, the play experience will recognizably be a Fate play experience. The basic system, the characters as the centre of the game, and the types of actions that are encouraged or rewarded will be similar if not identical. You’ll know you’re playing a Fate game.

Let’s look at some particulars.

Game Creation

The assumption of Fate games is that players and GM alike spend some time constructing the setting, creating a shared understanding of the world and what type of game you’re going to be playing. This sort of collaborative world-building has been floating around the various Internet forums and pages for several years, and entered official Fate games with DFRPG.

The city-building chapter in DFPRG is wonderful, giving guidelines and advice for creating a setting that offers a lot in the way of adventuring opportunities and ties the characters strongly to the world and to each other. The advice in the Fate Core book has been smoothed and streamlined, obviously tuned from the feedback from DFRPG players over the years. It is focused, providing concrete steps to create the type of game that everyone wants to play, with all the necessary hooks to make for a playable world to fit the characters into.

This chapter pretty much single-handedly transforms Fate Core from a standard setting-free system book into a toolkit for building games. Reading through the section, I had many different ideas for games, and the example they give of a sword-and-sorcery game being designed and constructed clarifies all the high-level concepts with solid, workable examples.

In addition to the advice in this chapter, Evil Hat will be publishing a Fate Worlds book, with twelve fleshed out settings, from Arthurian mecha adventures, through small-town supernatural drama, to WWII mad science airship combat. Drafts of these various settings have been provided to Kickstarter backers, as well, and they all look pretty good ((Of course, some will appeal to you more than others. That’s the nature of things. But there’s something in the mix for pretty much everyone.)).

Character Creation

Characters are the core of any RPG, but Fate games, especially those built using the game building advice, there is such a strong interaction between the characters and the setting that character creation has a very definite effect on shaping the game. The character creation in Fate Core is similar to every other Fate game, but most like DFRPG. It has been simplified and streamlined in a couple of different ways, especially by reducing the number of aspects and phases.

The process is pretty simple, and again encourages a collaborative effort. You come up with the High Concept and Trouble ((I talk about what this means in this post for DFRPG. Note that there are no templates by default in Fate Core.)) aspects for your characters, writing up the necessary background info. Then, you get one adventure and two guest-starring roles in other people’s adventures, with an aspect for each, giving you a total of five aspects.

This is fewer than in any of the previous Fate games: SotC had ten aspects for each character, and DFRPG had seven. Reducing the number of aspects speeds up character creation and helps focus the characters a lot more. It also means that you need to make sure that every aspect you have pulls its weight, generating fate points and letting you spend them. From the GM point of view, fewer aspects means there’s a little bit less for you to keep track of, making your job a little bit easier. As for downside, well, I don’t really see one. There were always a couple of aspects on character sheets with the larger numbers that just never got used very much. As I said, this focuses things.

The skill selection process uses the skill pyramid idea from SotC, with the pyramid topping out at Great (+4). This is something that’s easy to adjust, either by raising or lowering the cap, or by going to a skill column idea with skill points, as seen in DFRPG. The upshot of this choice, though, is that picking skills is a little faster without having to fiddle with the columns and skill points – just choose and rank the ten skills you want, and you’re done.

This builds characters with real skills and abilities – characters who are good at things right from the start. While there is the ability to advance and get better at things, you don’t start as a green rookie with the life expectancy of a mayfly, and a need to be wary around house cats. That said, there are ways to change this aspect – essentially, you can dial things up and down the level of competence pretty easily, especially if you take some cues from the Power Level setting in DFRPG.

Stunts

I’m talking about stunts separately, though picking three stunts is part of character creation. Yeah, everyone gets three stunts, which the characters design in collaboration with the GM. So, stunts work just the way they do in DFRPG, though you get three for free and can buy up to two more, for a total of five. Each extra stunt, however, costs a point of refresh.

The explanation of building stunts is more clear and precise than in DFRPG – the changes they made to the text aren’t huge, but they make a big difference in how easy it is for players ((And, of course, GMs.)) to design their own stunts. As examples, you get a few listed stunts illustrating each of the different kinds of things you can do with stunts.

Refresh

Refresh is still an important part of characters, but it’s not the central issue for characters that it was in DFRPG. Everyone gets three refresh by default, and you can spend up to two points on stunts or extras during character creation. Refresh still determines how many fate points your character starts with each session.

This is another setting that can be easily dialled up and down, increasing or decreasing the general power level of characters. If you build a game with lots of wacky powers for the characters, you probably want a larger pool of refresh to allow players to spend it on the extras you develop.

Extras

Extras are the special abilities and powers that some games require. These can range from magical powers, to specialized tech and vehicles, to organizations and locations that the characters have access to.

Extras are one of the ways to tune the setting developed by the players in the game-building phase. They show what unusual resources the characters may possess, showing what’s possible in the game world. The chapter on extras talks about how to create and define them, and offers a short list of different types of extras to use either as-is or as examples.

One of the more important parts of this chapter is the discussion on determining whether an extra costs refresh and, if so, how many points. It spells out the major concerns and considerations, and walks you through the determination process, supported by a few insightful sidebars in strategic locations. It’s all good, useful advice for building your own game.

While extras do a good job of adding flavour and depth to your game, it’s pretty obvious that they are not required for any game. Indeed, the building of extras in the chapter leverages all the ideas of aspects, skills, and stunts from previous chapters to show how to put extras together – canny GMs might choose to bypass extras and just deal with what they mean via aspects, skills, and stunts ((The one place that might not work is in calculating cost for the extra if the GM decides that what the player wants is good enough to be worth charging a point or two of refresh.)). This approach works very well for games with a low weirdness factor, but other game types may have you wanting more powerful ((Or more codified.)) possibilities, represented by a list of available extras.

Aspects

This is a Fate game, so aspects are the beating heart. Every iteration of Fate has a new discussion about what they are, why they’re important, and how to pick good ones, and Fate Core is no different. Every iteration of this discussion gets clearer and more helpful, and the one in this book is the best so far.

Some of the terminology in this section has been overhauled to minimize confusion – removing the “tagged” term, for example, and just sticking with “invoke.” The use of compels gets a very welcome clarification, taking a bit of a cue from the plot point economy in the Cortex Plus games, I think, to solidify the fate point economy in a very useful way.

There is also a good explanation of situational aspects, which helps to emphasize the cinematic, collaborative, free-wheeling way that aspects can feed into play. The idea of assessing and declaring situational ((Or character aspects.)) aspects have been cleaned up and simplified, again taking a bit of a burden off the GM.

Probably the best thing about aspects in Fate Core is the detailed and clarified description of compels. They’ve been broken into two types: event compels and decision compels, with clear examples structured around fill-in-the-blank sentences ((Lenny Balsera, in an interview, chortled about how he put Mad Libs into Fate Core.)):

You have _____ aspect and are in _____ situation, so it makes sense that, unfortunately, _____ would happen to you. Damn your luck.

You have _____ aspect in _____ situation, so it makes sense that you’d decide to _____. This goes wrong when _____ happens.

There’s also a good discussion about compelling your own character, and compelling other characters. All in all it makes the use of compels in play much simpler and clearer.

One other thing about the aspects chapter that I want to call out for special comment is the Using Aspects for Roleplaying section. I’ve been playing games with aspects ((Or similar things, like Cortex Plus‘s distinctions.)) long enough that I’ve sort of intuitively internalized the advice offered here on using your aspects to guide roleplaying, but it’s wonderful to see the idea explicitly called out and discussed in the rulebook.

In all, aspects haven’t changed much, but the explanations surrounding how they work have been clarified.

Actions

One of the places where Fate really became complex was in the skills section. First in SotC and then in DFRPG, the skills chapter was a big list of every skill and every way you could use a skill. It was wonderful for completeness, but it added a bit too much complication to the available actions. Now, there’s nothing wrong with this sort of thing, but I found that, while it gave a lot of guidance to GMs for handling skills, it added what amounted to a bunch of mini-systems for each skill.

Fate Core addresses this in a really useful way. The designers took a look at the way all the subsystems worked and pared it down to the essentials. They found that each of the skills basically does some combination of four basic things:

  • Attack: This is how you hurt someone with the skill. A successful roll deals stress ((And potentially consequences.)) to the target. Not every skill gets this ability, but creative play may allow a character to use a non-attack skill for a special attack ((Especially if you’re using the conflict structure and set-up to model something else, like a mystery or a chase.)).
  • Defend: This is how you stop an attack from hurting you. As with an attack, not every skill gets this ability ((Though more skills get the defend action by default than get the attack action.)), but special circumstances and good creative description may earn you some leeway from your GM.
  • Gain Advantage: This is essentially the new version of performing a maneuver from previous editions. Every skill gets this action by default. It establishes a new aspect on the situation or on a character that the character can then use for a bonus, or allows a character to take get a free invocation on an exiting aspect.
  • Overcome: Overcome is the action you use when you want to… well, overcome some obstacle or difficulty. So, that’s what you’re doing if you try and pick a lock, but it’s also what you do if you’re trying to remove the On Fire aspect from a room you’re currently standing in. It gets you past obstacles and removes situational aspects. In a lot of ways, it’s like the opposite of gain advantage and, like gain advantage, it’s a default option fro every skill.

The detailed descriptions and examples of each of these four actions in the book make their use rather intuitive. They also focus on opening up the possibilities for the skills rather than restricting them ((Which is, counterintuitively, the opposite of what the lengthier descriptions in previous iterations did.)), giving guidelines for how to tell which category of action a player’s intended use of a skill falls into, and offering suggestions for how to adjudicate it.

Following up the explanations for what you can do with skills, there’s a section on outcomes – the four different levels of success you can achieve – fail, tie, succeed, and succeed with style. This last one, succeed with style, was called spin in earlier iterations, and applied only to defence rolls. Now, it’s essentially a critical success that gives you a little bonus, depending on the type of action you’re attempting.

The next chapter spells out the structure of using skills in more complicated situations than just rolling to beat a given threshold. There are three of these structures:

  • Challenges deal with multiple overcome actions to defeat a given obstacle. Really, it’s a way to get more characters involved in a task – fighters holding off hordes of zombies while the thief tries to pick the lock and the wizard unravels the magical wards on the door, for example.
  • Contests represent two (or more) characters striving against each other for a goal, but not trying to harm each other directly. So, arm-wrestling, races, stuff like that.
  • Conflicts are fights, whether physical or not. This is two or more characters actively trying to harm each other.

I think it’s important to note that the different structures here are identified and examined, not to force you to use them, but to demonstrate the different ways that skill use by different characters can interact in dynamic, interesting ways. In this way, like the rest of the rules in the book, it’s a collection of suggestions for how to use the bits of the game mechanics to create exciting, fun stories. What I’m trying to say is that, as with the other Fate Core rules, you shouldn’t let yourself be restricted, but inspired by the suggestions and examples.

Mechanically speaking, actions are the engine of Fate Core, and they have been cleaned up, clarified, and polished from previous iterations. Like most of the rest of the rules, they have benefitted from the careful consideration of the designers and the years of play by a large, dedicated community.

GM Advice

The Fate Core book is chock full of GM advice, spread through every chapter, in the main text and in the numerous sidebars and examples. There are three chapters, though, that deal specifically with how to be a GM in a Fate game:

  • Running the Game talks about the gritty details of what to do when you’re sitting in the GM chair during a Fate session.
  • Scenes, Sessions, and Scenarios gives practical advice about how to put together the story for a Fate adventure.
  • The Long Game explains how to string the individual adventures into a longer campaign.

These chapters do a great job of bringing together the entire toobox of Fate Core, making the thinking behind the mechanics clear, and showing the utility of the more abstract concepts presented in the book. More than anything, though, they work to transfer the designers’ understanding of the system to the GM, teaching what questions a GM should ask, and how to judge the answers to those questions.

All the GM advice is aimed at giving the GM the tools to run a Fate-style game, a game where the coolness of the characters is paramount and blends seamlessly with coolness of the story to generate a play experience that transcends both ((Pretty pompous phrasing, I know. But it’s true.)).

Art

I’m not much of an art guy. I like nice pictures, but I can’t really discuss them in an intelligent, insightful way ((“Dude, that picture’s cool!” is pretty much the extent of art critique vocabulary.)). So, I’m not going to try and do that.

What I will do is tell you that I really like the art in the book. It’s all grey-scale, but it’s very well done grey-scale art. What I like most about it is that pretty much every picture gives me an idea for a game setting for Fate Core – kung-fu gorilla with a cybernetic brain, mystical police detective, biplane pilot with flying saucer silhouettes painted on her plane, sword-and-sorcery adventurers, dead guy in a mystic circle… I could base a game world on pretty much any single one of these.

To add to this coolness, there are three or four series of pictures, each of them fleshing out a given game world. So, there are several pictures of the kung-fu cyber gorilla, for example, each showing him ((I’m assuming it’s a him. He’s wearing traditionally male kung-fu silks.)) in different situations, each of which adds a little more to the character and his implied world.

Summary

If there’s a single word I’d use to describe Fate Core, it’s “polished.” Every iteration of the system, its obvious that the designers have taken the opportunity to look at the game, see what’s working and what’s not, and shape it more and more towards their ideal game. Systems get smoothed out and clarified, explanations get better, and stuff that doesn’t work gets changed or removed.

There was nothing wrong with Fate ((In my opinion, anyway.)) in any of the previous iterations, but it’s obvious that the designers have been getting better at what they do and clearer in their vision of what the game should be. They see how the game works, what it does best, and tweak it to emphasize and focus on its strengths.

It’s a setting-less system, though, designed to be adapted to your chosen setting. That said, most of the specialized sub-systems from other Fate games, such as the magic system from DFRPG, could be adapted to the Fate Core system with trivial effort.

In short ((Yeah. Waaaaaaaaay too late for that, huh?)), this game is awesome. If you like Fate games, you need to get it. If you’re not familiar with Fate games, this is a good way to start.

And if you don’t like Fate games, well, then there’s no helping you.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign – indeed, for the rest of the campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.

***SPOILER ALERT***

This past session of the Storm Point game, we started on the penultimate adventure in the Tomb of Horrors series. The plan is to use this series to wrap up the Storm Point campaign – the series finishes with the characters in the early Epic tier, and at that point the whole group thinks they’ll have had enough ((About three or four years’ worth of 4E, and about five years of 3E before that.)) of D&D for a while. We’ll take a look at other games at that point, and decide what we want to do next ((Some of the ideas on the table include Ashen Stars, Night’s Black Agents, Dungeon World, 13th Age, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, and some sort of Fate game.)).

In the downtime between sessions, I had the players level their characters up to 18th level, the recommended level for this adventure. This is my way of speeding us along to the conclusion of the adventure and the campaign; by just levelling up to the appropriate level at the start of the new adventure, we get to focus more on the adventure, and have a fighting chance of wrapping things up in the next year or so. I think I was a little too generous with the way I let them pick new magic items, but what the hell.

We started the session with a recap, focusing on the big picture of the previous adventures: someone was using strange necromantic devices to steal the energy of death that rightly belonged to the Raven Queen. This energy was being collected and used to power Acererak’s bid for godhood, and our heroes had messed up two of his devices, so he was going to start gunning for them soon enough. The only chance the party had was to take the fight to him, and put him down before he put them down.

To that end, I started things with skill challenge, letting them try and figure out how to get at Acererak. It was also a way for the players to flesh out what the characters had done during the downtime – each character got to tell a little story about how they had tracked down information. I decided that, when they got to Skull City and the abandoned tomb, they would have to face one encounter before getting to the tomb, plus one more encounter for each failure on the skill challenge, as the various gangs in the city got word from their contacts that the group was coming.

There were no failures in the initial skill challenge, nor in the follow-up to actually get through the city safely, so they only ran into the Brothers of the Black Academy right at the entry to the abandoned tomb. Our heroes, in their own inimitable fashion ((That is, as bullying dicks.)) decided not to talk to the folks whose home they were invading, but instead threatened them and tried to scare them off. The Black Academy mages and their wrath spirits were having none of that ((After all, they dealt with bullying dicks all the time.)) and attacked.

We didn’t make it all through the combat before we had to quit for the evening. Part of that is the fact that it’s a pretty tough fight, and part of it is that the players aren’t completely familiar with their new powers yet, and part of it is that higher level fights tend to be a bit more of a grind. But I was able to dish out a gratifying amount of damage, almost dropping a couple of the characters, and only having one of the monsters drop.

But we were getting tired, so I took a picture of the positions of everyone, and we retired until the next session.

Apocalypse World: Hunting

By | | Apocalypse World, What's he playing?
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Last Friday night we came back to Apocalypse World. I’d decided to jump the calendar forward a couple of months between sessions, mainly because most of the characters were in pretty rough shape ((Two or three of the four characters were at 9 o’clock or so on their harm clocks.)) after the expedition into the Ruins the last couple of sessions.

I thought long and hard about this. One of the principles of MCing Apocalypse World is to look at everything through cross-hairs. I didn’t want the characters to get off too easy, but I also didn’t want to put the players in the position of choosing between safe and interesting. They’re starting to get into the characters, and getting a handle on setting their own agendas, and the tendency ((At least, for a lot of my players.)) when the characters are hurt as badly as they were is to go to mattresses until healed ((Which is neither heroic nor interesting. It’s boooooooring!)). Now, the way things are constructed in AW, interesting things will find you even if you don’t go looking for them, but I much prefer active characters over passive ones.

That said ((And my players should take note here.)), I’m not always going to do things this way. At some point, I’m going to make sure that at least some of the characters have to make a hard choice to take action when they’re badly injured. That’s heroism, right? Doing the hard thing with your life at risk? But we’re only at the fifth session, and I plan to run a total of twelve sessions, so I didn’t want to push this too hard just now.

Besides, the game may throw that kind of nasty choice at the characters whether I’ve planned it or not.

Anyway. I started off talking about how spring had finally arrived after a long, hungry winter. Food and other supplies had been very tight the past few weeks, and everyone was living on boiled grass and old boots, essentially. I also hit everyone up for one barter to reflect their upkeep over the downtime.

I ran into a bit of resistance with this plan, though. Nils, the Savvyhead, started asking how much barter he’d made in the downtime with his job of helping out Boss T and Calico with repairs and other tech work. I said none, because although he’d made that bit of backstory up and I approved ((Hell, I enthusiastically approved, because ties to NPCs are always good.)), he didn’t have one of the gig moves, like a Fixer or a Hardholder. Needless to say, the player wasn’t all that happy about that, because I had neglected to explain that sort of thing at the start of play. Fair enough – he’s right. I should have explained it, but I didn’t think of it. And thus he had an expectation of that bit of his character’s story that I didn’t.

I waffled around with explanations, talking mechanics ((You don’t have a gig move, I have an MC move called Make them buy, stuff like that.)) and such, which didn’t really satisfy either of us – him because he wasn’t getting what he wanted, me because the answers all seemed metagamish.  In retrospect, I realize that I was taking the wrong approach to explaining. What I should have done is tie it in to the game fiction rather than the game mechanics. It’s a little late now, but here’s the explanation I should have given when the question came up.

Yeah, you’ve been doing the work, and getting the barter, but things have  been pretty tight. The stuff you’ve been getting from Boss T and Calico has been getting slimmer and slimmer as they run short of resources, and you’ve been spending more and more as the cost of food and other supplies keeps going up. You’ve spent most most of what you’ve earned on keeping fed, and the rest – plus your savings – on keeping your Savvyhead shop stocked so you can keep eating.

I think that explanation would have gone over better, because it’s tied to the game fiction. It makes sense in the story, and therefor doesn’t seem quite as arbitrary. It could still have come across as a bit of a dick move, but no more so than the rest of the badness that the game inflicts on the characters. By resorting to the mechanical explanations, I highlighted the fact that I was using a game mechanism to do something mean to the characters, rather than it being a product of the game world. This is something I need to keep in mind for next time something like this comes up – focus on the fiction ((This is the secret of Make a move, but never speak its name. I get that, now.)).

We got past that little hiccup in far less time than it took me to write about it, though, and I picked a character pretty much at random ((I was going to pick either JB or Snow for this, because their characters have had less chance to be proactive the past session or two, and Snow’s player was in the kitchen grabbing a drink when I looked up to pick someone.)) and asked JB, “So. What are you doing? Have you mended fences with Calico, and back on watch, or are you doing something else?” And just like that, we were back in the middle of things.

JB had made peace with Calico ((“Have you made up with Calico?” “Who can tell? She hasn’t shot me, and is letting me take a watch at the gate and eat in the mess, so I’ll take that.”)), and was back in the watchtower overlooking the gate with a trusty sniper rifle. And so, when the first food shipment of the season from New Ogden came down the trail, JB was first to spot it, and first to recognize that it was too small and too slow. As the caravan got closer, it became obvious that it had been attacked – there were only two trucks, both of them limping along, with a few scrawny and shot-up oxen trailing behind, and ragged men and women limping along beside it.

After the initial shock wore off ((And Calico had been sent back to her office by Boss T so that the crazy yelling would stop.)), the story that came out was that the caravan had been attacked in the middle of the night by a heavily armed force of slavers. The slavers had hit the caravan with total surprise, captured most of the people, hauled off most of the goods, and vanished, leaving only the injured people and animals and four shot-up trucks behind. The survivors managed to get two of the trucks working well enough to make it Roosevelt, though they were in pretty bad shape. About the only real valuable information they were able to provide was that the slavers were wearing the markings of Sway’s Boys, one of the bigger slaver gangs that Roosevelt has heard rumblings about.

Yodel ((Or maybe it was Yoho. I’ve got two NPCs in the game, one named Yodel and one named Yoho, and I can’t keep them straight without looking it up.)) – Calico’s second – told JB that, probably in the next day or so, Calico would be putting together a posse to go hunt down the slavers. The main goals are, of course, to get the supplies back, but freeing the New Ogden citizens would be good, too. And, of course, it’s not a good thing to let a band of organized, well-supplied slavers wander around in your neighbourhood. Of course, JB hates slavers with a passion, and volunteered to assemble some friends to go see if they can locate the slavers ahead of the posse – the bully boys in Calico’s guard aren’t renowned for their scouting/stalking/stealth.

And so our heroes took to the road riding bicycles. The followed the caravan route, passing a couple of bodies, then a low cairn, then a larger cairn, and then a few new graves ((See, the survivors had the strength to bury the first few who died on the road, then resorted to cairns, and… You get it.)), before finally reaching the site of the attack. There, they found some more graves for the caravan folks and a pile of burned bodies – presumably the slavers. JB and Snow surveyed the area, and quickly determined that the attack had to be very well-coordinated and overwhelming, and that the slavers had headed off to the southeast, towards the quarries.

Off they went, overland, trying to track the slavers. Nils had repaired an old motion/heat sensor thing ((Think of the sensor thingy they used in the Alien movies.)) that Magpie had got from her hoard, and they used that to see if there was anything moving in their immediate area. Using that, they spotted a larger shape ((As opposed to the rabbit-sized shapes that were plentiful.)) moving off in one quadrant. They dropped the bikes, and crept through the tall, brown grass to where they could spot a bear lumbering through the field.

There was some debate at that point about whether they should ignore the bear (which had patchy fur and some scaly patches, and really nasty-looking teeth) or kill it before it spotted them and became a problem. At which point, the bear started swatting at something in the grass. And roaring. And flailing, with smaller furry things crawling over it.

That’s when JB, who had stayed to keep watch on the bikes, spotted a small, weasel-like head pop up nearby. In a few seconds, everyone was running from the razor weasels ((In my notes, I called them knife weasels, but the players called them razor weasels, and that’s really a better name.)), and the bear was forgotten.

They all made it to a copse of trees nearby, and up into the trees, but the razor weasels were clustered around the base in large numbers. Finally, Nils managed to chase them away with his shotgun ((I figured Going Aggro was the best way to represent that.)), but the shots meant that, as they dawdled near the trees looking at the freakish weasels with the bone blades sprouting out of them, they heard the heavy trucks approaching.

The battle with Sway’s Boys was nasty, with JB using his grenades on their trucks, Snow creeping around to deal with the slaver scouts and snipers, and Nils holding off the razor weasels. And what about Magpie, you ask? Well, I’m going to answer that with a couple quotes from the game that I tweeted at the time:

#ApocalypseWorld quote: “We should either take cover, or run for it. But we got Magpie running around waving a weasel on a stick, so…”

#ApocalypseWorld quote: “So you’re going to try and Pied Piper the razor weasels to make them follow you swarming over the sniper?” “…yeah?”

Yes.

In the midst of the firefight, Magpie became the Weasel Queen, sticking a dead weasel on a pointed stick, riling up the live weasels, and making them chase her over the slaver snipers. I figured, why not let her try it? If she blew any of her rolls, well, it would only be fair that the razor weasels swarmed over her, tearing her to ribbons. But she rolled well ((Really, she rolled scary well, considering that it was Sandy holding the dice. Though they may have actually been Michael’s dice. But Sandy rolled them.)), and thus the plan worked, without any catches at all.

It was a psi grenade ((Another fun toy from Magpie’s hoard.)) that finally did for the slavers and chased the razor weasels away. Two of the slavers’ four trucks had survived, and several of the slavers did, as well. Until the gang went to work cutting throats. There was some talk of mutilating the corpses as a warning, but I think in the end they settled on collecting the heads. Then they got in the trucks and headed back towards Roosevelt, meeting the posse on the road. They’ve got one or two living slavers ((“We can take a couple with us. After all, they’ve brought their own manacles.”)) for interrogation, and a much fresher trail to follow to the main camp of Sway’s Boys. I figured that was a good place to stop for the night, so we did.

This is the last session of Apocalypse World for a while. May is a pretty busy month for my players, and then I fly to Ireland until the middle of June, so it’s going to be seven weeks at least until our next game. But I think I’ve got folks looking forward to it.

I’m very curious to see what happens.

Cards! Cards EVERYWHERE!

By | | What's he playing?
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I’ve had a few new games for a while that I’ve been wanting to try. They’re card games – well, mainly card games. Race to Adventure is more of a board game that just uses cards to build the board, but if I call that a board game, then how about Infiltration? You build the board in that game with cards, too, but cards feature more prominently as things you play, so is that a card game or not? At least Sentinels of the Multiverse is very clearly a card game. To keep things simple ((Well, that ship’s pretty much sailed, huh? Yeah, I get that I’m being obsessive and pointlessly pedantic. Deal with it.)), I’m calling them all card games, mainly because the main thing you do in setting up each game is shuffling and dealing, whether it’s a nine-card deck or something larger.

Anyway. Onward to a point.

I wanted to try these games, but was having trouble getting folks to play – at the Tabletop Day thing, everyone was into the stuff they’d seen on Tabletop, and my regular gaming schedule meant that getting my friends to commit was problematic at best. So, I finally bit the bullet and invited a bunch of people over, bribing them with dinner and dessert ((Pulled pork sandwiches, coleslaw, and potato chips, with home-made blueberry dumplings and home-made vanilla ice cream for dessert. Not a bad bribe, if I do say so myself.)), on the condition that we play through all three games.

And so, this past Saturday, we did that. Here are some shortish thoughts on each of the games.

Race to Adventure

Race to Adventure

Race to Adventure

I got in on the Kickstarter for this game, and it showed up in my mail several weeks back ((Yesterday, I got the rest of my Kickstarter goodies, including the very nice messenger bag.)). Once I got my friends to commit to the evening, I laid the game out to make sure that I could teach it to folks quickly, and walked through a game. Even playing solo ((And not even using the solo rules included in one of the Kickstarter stretch goals, just playing three characters by myself.)), it was quite a bit of fun.

The idea behind the game is that each player takes one of the iconic members of the Century Club, the centerpiece of the Spirit of the Century RPG from Evil Hat. Your goal is to travel to nine more-or-less remote places, complete missions, and return to the Empire State Building with all nine of your passport stamps filled in. The main mechanic in the game choosing which of the six items – zeppelin, biplane, magnifying glass, jet pack, map, and lightning gun – your character gets for your turn. Three of the items ((Zeppelin, biplane, and jet pack, of course.)) let you move in different ways, while the map and lightning gun let you complete missions at your destination to earn your passport stamps, and the magnifying glass lets you earn clues, which are also needed to complete your missions. The strategy part of the game is about getting the item you need at the right time – you pick your item in turn, and you may find one or more other players hogging an item you badly need.

There are a couple of other little quirks, likes a time limit on getting your rescued Atlantean prisoner to safety or removing the curse you pick up in Egypt, but that’s the game in a nutshell.

The game is pretty simple to learn and play. It took me maybe ten minutes to explain the rules and lay everything out, and we jumped right in. Overall, the game took about a half-hour to play, though I can see it going much more quickly once folks get into the flow of things. The default play method is for everyone to choose their items and then take their moves and actions simultaneously. We took turns, mainly to make sure we understood properly what was going on. In later games, I expect things to move more towards the simultaneous action, which would speed play up.

There are some nice nods to replay value, as well. First, the locations are laid out randomly in an three-by-three grid next to the Empire State Building starting tiles. The different placement of the tiles – especially Atlantis, the United States, and Schweiz – will change your strategy and the flow of the game. Secondly, you can flip the locations over to reveal the shadow locations, which are more difficult versions of the standard locations. By varying the number of shadow locations, and which cards you change to shadow cards, the game difficulty can be scaled up. Thirdly, there are three expansions for the game: Dinocalypse and Hollow Earth expansions, based on the Dinocalypse Now! novel by Chuck Wendig, and Strange Travels, which provides rules for a sixth player, solo play, and alternate board layouts. Between these three expansions, there’s a lot of new stuff to keep the game interesting and exciting for some time.

We had a lot of fun playing this game. It was light and fast, with some interesting strategic choices to be made. I think it was the hit of the evening. And, for those who care, Benjamin Hu was the first to return to headquarters and shout, “I have returned!”

Sentinels of the Multiverse

Sentinels of the Multiverse

Sentinels of the Multiverse

The second game of the evening was Sentinels of the Multiverse, a fixed-deck comic book card game. Each player chooses one of the heroes to play and gets the 45-card deck that represents that hero’s powers and abilities. The players co-operate against a supervillain with a 25-card deck , in a location represented by a 15-card deck. All the decks are predetermined – there is no deck-building aspect to the game ((And I, for one, am immensely grateful. I never got the hang of the deck-building parts of other card games, and never enjoyed it.)), you just get your deck, shuffle it, and do your best to play it.

We played with five heroes: Ra, Mr. Fixer, Tempest, Fanatic, and Bunker. These weren’t necessarily the simplest heroes to play, but they were the ones that caught the eyes of the players. I ran through the villains for everyone, but got drowned out with the shouts of approval when I got to La Capitan ((“She’s a TIME PIRATE! How can we not fight her?”)), and then we chose Rook City – the Gotham City analog – for location.

The game is pretty simple in execution, but elegant in design. The fundamentals of play are straightforward – the villain and environment decks work in a clockwork-like fashion to simulate their challenges, and every turn, heroes can play a card, activate one of their powers, and draw a card. As usual in card games, individual cards can play with the way cards are drawn and played, and the strategy of the game comes in how you play the hero cards in your hand.

Again, as is typical of card games, the interactions between your hero cards can produce synergies and combinations that pay off in big ways. These interactions aren’t always readily apparent, however, so playing an individual hero’s deck is a skill that will develop over repeated plays. While this points to some interesting replay value, there are a lot of heroes in the game that I’d like to try, which means that I’m likely to suck at the game for some time to come.

The game was fun, though. We pulled a bad card from the villain deck right off the bat, which brought in La Capitan’s crew of nasty henchmen, and that was not good. To add insult to injury, two or three of the four crew members had effects that attacked the hero with the lowest HP each villain turn. Poor Tempest was taken out in only two or three rounds.

Most of the rest of us followed. At the end of the game, Mr. Fixer was the last hero standing, and he managed to take down La Capitan with under five HP left of his own. It was tense toward the end, and I’m not a huge fan of player elimination ((“You lost the game. Now go sit in a corner while the rest of your friends continue to have fun.” “But I want to have fun, too!” “No. You have proven unworthy of fun. Now go. You’re embarrassing both of us.”)), but the mechanics that come from flipping a hero card over to the taken-out side are actually pretty cool, reflecting heroic sacrifice, renewed resolve of the surviving heroes, and stuff like that. Very flavourful.

Overall, the game was a lot of fun. The learning curve was sharper than for Race to Adventure, because of the complexity of playing the various hero decks. For players not familiar with hobby card games like this, it can be pretty opaque for the first little while. It also took significantly longer than the first game – about ninety minutes. A lot of that was learning the game, though, so I expect subsequent games will go faster.

And there will be other games – with the expansions, I have 18 different heroes, 12 different villains, and 12 different environments. The combinations available boggle my mind and pretty much guarantee that I’ll be trying another game soon.

Infiltration

Infiltration

Infiltration

The third game had the most complex rules and set-up. There were cards to sort, cards to shuffle, cards to lay out, cards to deal, tokens to sort, tokens to lay out, and characters to pick. The explanation of the rules was not as clear as I might have liked, and I hadn’t had time to do a solo run of the game to make sure I knew what I was doing, so I was less confident in running this one ((Especially teaching the game last in the evening, when people were getting more tired.)).

As it turned out, this one ran smoother than Sentinels of the Multiverse. The card interactions, goals, and usage were all very straightforward and well-spelled-out on the cards themselves. Once the first round was done, everyone understood what was going on, what they needed to do, and how to do it.

In the game, you play various criminals in the cyberpunk universe of Android, another board game from Fantasy Flight. The goal is to break into a corporate installation, make your way through the two floors (and secret room) of the building, and loot it of all available data. Of course, just stealing the data is only half the job; you also have to escape before the corporate goons arrive, lock down the building, and arrest everyone still inside.

You have a hand of cards to help you accomplish your mission. Everyone has four cards to advance, retreat, download data, and interface with the technology of the place. In addition, everyone starts with (and can receive more) four item cards that give you special abilities and then are usually discarded.

Every turn, you play one card, and then resolve them in player order, and then check to see how much time you still have left using an alert tracker device. Moving through the building is accomplished primarily by using the advance and retreat cards, and each room you reveal will have some data and probably something else in them. The something else can range from a secret door to a special room, through data that you can’t get at unless you defeat the tech lock on it, to NPCs that might just gut-shoot you when you walk through the door ((This is what happened to me on about the second turn. Being injured in the game sucks, and I was injured right up to the end. Never did get off the first floor.)).

This is not a co-operative game. The winner is the criminal who is both outside the installation when the goons arrive AND has the most data downloaded. If you’re still inside the building (i.e., still on one of the room cards) when the goons show up, you lose. You can leave the building at any time through the room you came in, but you cannot re-enter the building once you leave. Thus, a lot of the game is risk assessment and management: how much longer do you think you can stay in the building, what’s the best use of your time, etc.

We had a lot of fun with this game. The constant-but-irregular increase in the alert counter, counting down to the arrival of the goons, added some very nice urgency to the game, and the rooms that we found all had something interesting going on. I’m not sure if the fact that we didn’t get much past the first floor is typical, but it felt a little frustrating – there were all these other rooms that we just weren’t getting to. Even the player who resigned herself to not escaping, and just pushed higher into the building, hoping for an emergency exit ((There are a couple of other ways you can leave the installation besides the entry room. These all seem to require sacrificing some data, but pop you right out of the building instantly, so sometimes it could be worth it.)), didn’t manage to reveal all the rooms.

But play was face, fairly simple ((Though some of the choices were hard.)), and entertaining. It’s definitely going on the list for replay.

But What About Dinner?

Dinner was tasty. We all enjoyed it.

The Games in Question

The Games in Question

Civil War: Fighting Back

By | | Civil War, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, What's he playing?
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***Spoiler Warning***

My group and I are playing through the Civil War event book for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, from Margaret Weis Productions. While the course of play may not follow the event book – or the comic books – precisely, there’s going to be a certain amount of stuff that does conform to the adventures and comic series.

In short, if you don’t want to know what happens in Civil War, don’t read these posts. Or the comic books.

***You Have Been Warned***

The last session of our Civil War game went a lot smoother than the previous one. I stuck to the basics of the system, relying on the constraints to keep me honest and to provide support for what I was doing, and it all worked pretty well. It also allowed the characters to do some pretty awesome stuff – I think every hero had a moment or two to shine ((That’s vitally important in any game, but even more so in a superhero game. The fact that street-level heroes get the same kinds of opportunity to shine that cosmic-level heroes do is one of the things that I really like about MHR.)).

We picked up with the splash page of The Doctor standing in Walter Declun’s apartment, with Declun cowering in the corner ((I had originally planned to have Declun be an active part of this scene, but the players reminded me that he had been stressed out with Emotional Stress at the end of last session.)), and three four-person squads of Cape-Killers smashing in through the windows that made up two walls of the open-plan apartment. The rest of the Guardians were in the GX-1, hovering a hundred yards or so away with the cloaking field active. Aside from the turn cards for the Cape-Killers, I put out an extra card that I told them represented whoever was in charge of the team.

The Doctor used his sorcery to try and pacify the Cape-Killers, removing their desire to act in a hostile manner. He managed to take hit two of the three squads with a Pacified d12+ complication, thanks to some hefty spends of plot points, but that left one to still attack him, and they did, but he managed to counterattack and pacify them, as well.

And that’s when Sentry arrived ((I can’t take credit for this idea. Cam Banks suggested that I throw the Sentry at the heroes if they’d been having things their own way too much – and they had. None of the fights up to this point had taxed them all that badly.)). The plan changed immediately into bugging out as quickly as possible. Volcanic smashed the GX-1 through the now-glassless windows and grabbed The Doctor, and Jumpstart used his electrical control to take control of the GX-1 and blast away from the building, with Mega Joule providing some extra thrust. They managed to lose the Sentry ((I know! I was surprised, myself! But at least I made them run.)), and retired to their hidden base.

There was a fair bit of discussion at that point about the fact that they had discovered a lockbox marked with A.I.M. logos in Declun’s apartment. They hadn’t taken it, and hadn’t had time to check out what was in it, but assumed that it would be incriminating evidence. What they couldn’t decide was how it would be perceived by S.H.I.E.L.D. – would they use it to convict or pressure Declun, or go after A.I.M., or would they cover it up, or even assume it was planted by the Guardians.

Unable to do much more than second-guess themselves at that point, they put the question aside and started working on other things. They set up an internet radio station, broadcasting essentially The Voice of the Resistance ((Though they haven’t decided on the name of it, yet.)) to help organize the anti-registration folks, and to disseminate their Heroic Code of Conduct.

I think that doing stuff like that is awesome; furthermore, I think that it’s going to be very helpful when they try to get folks to sign on with the Guardians ((Even beyond the die that they get for having the asset. They still get to use it as an asset, but it will have non-mechanical effects on those that hear it, for good or ill. Hell, it’ll probably get some folks coming to them.)). More and more, the Guardians are becoming the public face of unregistered heroes, and that gives them the power to start swaying not just the other heroes’ opinions, but also the way the average mundane person feels about the SHRA.

Anyway.

After that, they decided to look into the A.I.M. connection from the other end, tracking down a local A.I.M. lab and inviting themselves in to ask some pointed questions. They found one deep below the Ground Zero site ((I wasn’t ready for them to go looking for A.I.M. this session, so I quickly scanned the scene in the rulebook, which suggested that A.I.M. likes to build their secret labs under landmarks and important buildings so attackers have to be careful. I took the first idea that came to mind for the location.)), and Volcanic made them a tunnel right down into one of the labs.

The lab had a few scientists and some troopers watching them, as well as blaster turrets for security. Volcanic hacked the security system to get the blasters targeting the A.I.M. personnel, while The Doctor, Mega Joule, and Jumpstart took out the opposition. It was an interesting fight, with Volcanic mainly involved in a hacker duel with the scientists for control of the turrets, and the others dealing with the scientists, troopers, and reinforcements. The fight actually went on longer than I expected, and I had the doom pool up at 3d12 by the end of things.

So, keeping that in mind, when the last defender in the room went down, I had an announcement on the PA warn that the self-destruct protocols had been initiated, and that all personnel should follow their evacuation plans. Then I ended the session for the evening.

Next session, we’ll be able to start with the Guardians inside an evacuating A.I.M. lab, surrounded by fleeing personnel ((And a couple of powered-up types, because I’ll have time before the next game to figure out who to put in there.)) and with a countdown timer die in play. That’ll get things moving.

Apocalypse World: The Way Out

By | | Apocalypse World, What's he playing?
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We picked up the latest session of our Apocalypse World game pretty much right where we had left things last game, with the characters ((The hard-scrabble, desperate, morally ambiguous nature of the game world makes me hesitate calling them heroes.)) braving the night in the Ruins, along with Lark and Sparerib from Dawning. They holed up in a convenient warehouse, though Magpie and Snow went to see if they could find the hardware store that Magpie had seen a very desirable ((Well, desirable for her hoard, anyway.)) boom box. She didn’t find it, and got a little lost, and by the time they made it back to the van, it was dark and disturbing outside.

Magpie was kind of pouty about that, and convinced Nils to join her in searching the warehouse from top to bottom while everyone else was resting or on watch. She made a terrible roll, so I told the other folks that after quite some time, Nils and Magpie hadn’t returned yet. Snow tried to get Sparerib and Lark to accompany him and JB on a search for their missing compatriots, but Lark basically told him to go screw himself – they were paying for an escort, and if the escort couldn’t handle its own business, then maybe they had paid too much.

This didn’t sit all that well with Snow, but he let it go for now, and he and JB left Lark and Sparerib watching over the mysterious box they ((Lark and Sparerib, that is.)) had recovered. Their search led them down into the mechanical tunnels underneath the warehouse, and from there through a hole into the sewers. Some investigation revealed that the hole had been concealed, and there were signs of nets and dragging, leading JB and Snow to figure that their compatriots had been captured by someone who likes traps. So they proceeded carefully down the tunnel, keeping watch for traps.

And Snow blew his roll, and dropped down out of sight beneath the water ((Yeah, I was making liberal use of the Separate them move, though of course I didn’t call it that. I was frankly surprised at how easy it was to get away with that – no bluster or whining from the players, the way there often is in other games when you so obviously bone the characters using GM fiat. Obviously, they’ve come to understand the way the game works, too, and know that, if they blow a roll, I get to hurt them if I want.)). JB tried to pry up the lid of the pit that had swallowed Snow, but couldn’t find any purchase on it, and so kept going. With one character left, I decided it was time to show some of the enemy, and so JB saw some gleaming red eyes ahead, and more behind. JB ((Okay. JB’s player has chosen ambiguous gender for JB, and goes to some lengths during play to kept the question of gender open as a roleplaying thing. To respect that, I’m doing my best to avoid gendered pronouns when writing about JB, but it makes for some awkward sentences. Bear with me, okay?)) opened up and shredded the ones in front – the muzzle flashes showed wizened humans with weird metal helmets covering the front part of their heads – and stormed through them, but dropped into another pit trap.

They all woke up naked ((Take their stuff move. And if you’re wondering how JB kept the gender thing secret – don’t ask. The discussion took a sharp left into the inappropriate at that point.)) in a cold, cement room. The door had a flange wheel that turned, but they couldn’t push the door open. They sat around there for a while, talking, and seeing if they could plan something. Their captors didn’t respond to shouts or pounding, so they got frustrated. Eventually, JB decided to open up to the psychic maelstrom and try to find some answers there.

JB pictured the psychic maelstrom as a battlefield, and attracted the attention of a large, malevolent thing stalking the edges of the armies, luring it in. It tore through the enemies surrounding JB, and he managed to send it away before it got too close. The others heard and felt a rising, ultrasonic scream that almost incapacitated them, and then the door blew out of the doorframe. JB woke up then, and the gang decided that he had called in some strange, sonic-attack-using creature that scared off the things that had captured them ((This wasn’t what had happened in my head, but it’s a reasonable assessment of available information, so I’m not messing with it. If it does come up again, I’ll have to decide then whether or not their answer is the real one, or if I’m going to stick with my original idea.)), because there was no sign of their captors. They managed to recover most of their gear, and made it back to the van.

Snow had been stewing the whole time about Lark, so the first thing he did when he walked through the door back by the van was try to blow Lark away. Sparerib must have seen something in his face, though, because they were diving for cover while Snow was still bringing his gun up, and threw a nasty throwing knife into Snow’s shoulder ((Mechanically, Snow missed his Seize by Force roll, and I responded by applying harm.)). This led to a stand-off, with Nils’s van caught in the middle of things. Nils managed to get things calmed down, and negotiated a ceasefire while Lark and Sparerib cleared out ((With their mysterious metal box, of course.)), even getting the knife that Magpie wanted so badly. He gave the two directions, and they lit out.

Next day, the gang spent a little time looting the Ruins, and I was pleased at how smoothly and organically my revised Loot the Ruins move worked compared to the previous version. I think it’s a keeper. Among some other things, they discovered some sort of spider/mouse hybrid and an abandoned parking garage that was secure enough that Nils started outfitting it as a safe house in the Ruins. They stayed there one more night, and JB ((I think? Maybe it was Magpie. Or both. Can’t remember.)) went up high to keep watch. I used the opportunity to show some other little enclaves in the Ruins, including one that seemed to be made up of folks dressed like Yellowhammer’s cult back in Roosevelt.

Finally the next morning, they headed back to Roosevelt from the Ruins side. And they just happened to spot Lark and Sparerib down an alley, now with two of the large metal boxes ((Just to be clear, this is the type of box I’m talking about.)). There followed some debate about whether the group should go back to kill them – Nils had been told by Calico to make sure they didn’t return, and Magpie knew that, while Snow was still pissed and wanted them dead. Eventually, they decided that they should do it ((Basically, they let Nils make the final call, and Chris, Nils’s player, has commented on that fact. “Rick,” he said, “If Nils is the moral compass of this group, we are so boned.”)), especially as it would then mean they could find out what was in those cases. So, they swung the van around, opened the rear doors, and unloaded on the two Dawning men, killing them quickly and easily.

They made it back to Roosevelt, and Calico let them through the gate. She seemed pretty pleased that the group was two members light. And Nils went to explain the loss to Wilson, the trade rep from Dawning. She took the news well, but coldly.

So there was nothing left to do but open the metal boxes. Turns out there was a security system ((Deja vu, huh, Nils?)) that fried the contents of the box, leaving just some ruined circuit boards. He decided to take some time before opening the other one.

That’s where we called it a night.

We’re four episodes into this game, which is set to run a total of twelve sessions. I’m starting to see why Vincent Baker says that he doesn’t consider an Apocalypse World game to really be working until about six sessions in – the world has really filled in in the last couple of sessions, giving more connections and motivations to the characters as well as adding depth to the environment. I’m starting to relax a little more into the MC role, and am really enjoying the kinds of things you can do ((That is, the kinds of things the players will let me get away with, because that’s the way the game works.)) in this system. And the players seem to be enjoying the freedom and responsiveness of the system, and are getting into the world.

One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that I’m really hitting the Acting Under Fire move pretty hard. This is not unexpected; it is, after all, the default move for doing something risky. But I’m finding myself calling for it so very often. I think I need to fall back on some advice from the folks at Evil Hat, as spelled out in The Spirit of the Century: Imagine success, and imagine failure. If failure is not as interesting as success, then don’t have it as an option.

In AW, though, it’s the failures that generate the interesting expansion of the world, creating the hooks and turning points that get the characters involved, so I can’t just abandon the idea of rolling the dice. But sometimes I’m really stuck for a good move to make when they miss, which slows the game down as I think of something.

What I’m going to try for next session is, when the characters are doing something that might require an Acting Under Fire roll, I’ll think about what a good move might be for this circumstance before I ask for a roll. If I can’t come up with something fairly quickly that seems like an interesting idea, the character will just succeed without needing to make a roll. That will, I hope, improve the pacing and keep things from devolving into endless Acting Under Fire rolls.

I’ll try that next session, which is in about a week and a half. I’m excited to play and find out what happens next.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Last session of the Storm Point campaign, we wrapped up the second installment of the Tomb of Horrors adventures, called The Tomb of Shadows. We had almost a full house – missing just one player – and the group decided that one of the other players would play his character, just to make sure that Thrun the Anvil, defender supreme, would be there helping them out against what they assumed would be their toughest fight yet.

We picked up right after the fight that ended the last session, and they immediately took an extended rest. As mentioned in previous posts, resting in Moil ((Well, the way I do it, anyway.)) is not as effective, thanks to the numbing necromantic cold. Characters do not regain all their healing surges – one less for each extended rest they’ve taken here, plus they get to make an Endurance check against a rising DC or lose another surge.

So, the gang had had about enough of that sort of thing ((Also, they’d had about enough of the “Screw you, adventurers!” nature of the Shadow Tomb. They accept it, now that they’ve realized that it’s the nature of the adventure, and no longer blame it on me. So, win.)), and wanted to wrap things up and get out while they could. They continued into a maze of rough passages, many dead-ending in little alcoves filled with sarcophagi. A little investigation revealed that the alcoves were all trapped, and fiddling with the sarcophagi would drop the whole mess down into a pit.

Eventually, they found a place where the trap had been tripped, and saw a passage off the bottom of the pit. They climbed down and found a chamber where a squad of shadar-kai had triggered some sort of necromantic trap and been slain. They were suspicious of this, having not had the best of experiences with the shadar-kai in the past, but Milo was able to identify these ones as faithful servants of the Raven Queen ((Unlike the rebel shadar-kai they had previously dealt with, who had sworn allegiance to Vecna.)), and they figured out that these must have been sent to figure out who was screwing around with the flow of death energies that should be flowing to the Raven Queen.

Of course they looted the bodies. What did you expect from adventurers? But the cleric also said some blessings over the bodies.

The next challenge was finding the way out of the maze of trapped passages. They finally found it by tripping a trap and dropping down one of the pits, then noticing the trap door in the ceiling above when Soren climbed back up.  This led them to another “Screw you, adventurer!” room, with four of the demon faces that had done them so much damage the previous session. These ones were not trapped, and had real trap doors in the mouths, so once the gang got over their ((Very well-earned.)) paranoia, they dropped down into the passage that led to the final encounter.

This last room contained the mystical engine that was channeling the death energy for Acererak. They started trying to dismantle it ((A skill challenge – and not an easy one.)), but failed on the first roll, which triggered the defenses. Said defenses being the summoning of a skull with jewels for eyes and teeth that tried to eat their souls ((Actually, it wasn’t a demi-lich, but instead a construct that did almost the same things, just not as well. But it scared the crap out of the players.)). Our heroes immediately stopped trying to dismantle the engine ((Dunno if that was the best course of action, as dismantling the engine would have seriously weakened the construct. But their motto is “Get ’em!” so I can’t say I’m really surprised.)) and turned their attention to smashing the skull.

It was a tough fight. The thing managed to steal Soren’s soul early on ((Good thing his player had Thrun’s character sheet to run, otherwise he would have had very little to do all encounter.)), and got to heal himself twice – once by consuming a previously stolen soul, and then by consuming Soren’s soul, killing him dead. It almost managed to get Milo and Faran the same way, but they were luckier with their saving throws.

In the end, they managed to take the construct down, and destroyed the arcane machine. Then they used the teleport circle to head back to Belys to get Soren raised from the dead.

We’re half-way through the Tomb of Horrors, now, and I’m letting the characters advance to level 18 before we jump into the next adventure. I just need to decide how to handle getting them appropriate magic items for their level without giving away the store or being too stingy. I think I’ve got a plan, but I need to run the numbers.

Anyway, next game won’t be for a few weeks, due to other demands on my time. We’ll be ready by then.