Monthly Archives: February 2013

Civil War: Final Night, First Strike

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***

Last Friday night was the latest session of my Civil War game. We’d missed the last game due to scheduling issues, so it had been a long wait between sessions. Now, we’re back on track ((Hopefully.)) and making some progress through the game ((We actually, finally ended Act One! Yay, us!)).

The timing in the game was a bit convoluted, because we had one player who had missed the last couple of sessions ((Welcome back, Doctor!)), but had things that he wanted to take care of before the end of the act. Meanwhile, the other players had done enough stuff that they were up to the last day before the SHRA came into full effect. Rather than just run two solo scenes while the other three players just sat around, I told the gang that they could take part in the scenes if they wanted to, and we’d run them as flashbacks.

The Doctor’s ((I’m going to point out again that this character is patterned on The Authority‘s Doctor, and not Doctor Who.)) first scene was him talking with Doctor Strange about what was coming. Doctor Strange said that he would be guarding the gates of this reality to prevent any nasty extradimensional beings ((I’m looking at you, Dormammu!)) from taking advantage of the chaos that the oncoming conflict was sure to cause. The Doctor’s role as the guardian of the Earth’s metaphysical wellbeing was going to be tested in the coming days, as friend turned on friend, and fear multiplied, and Doctor Strange advised our Doctor to be ready for a nasty, challenging time of things.

The Doctor then wanted to go see Tony Stark ((Our Doctor is a member of the Illuminati, and knows all these big movers and shakers.)) and find out where he stood on things. The rest of the Guardians decided they wanted to come along on this one, so they all climbed into the GX-1 and flew to Stark Tower. There, they met with Tony Stark, who seemed somewhat preoccupied and unwilling to give any straight answers. The Doctor thought something seemed a little off, and used his mystic senses to discover that he got no reading at all from Tony, concluding that it was in fact an LMD ((Life Model Decoy.)).

About this time, Maria Hill and a squad of Cape Killers showed up and began asking Tony when S.H.I.E.L.D. could expect the next shipment of tech for the new initiatives. He talked a bit about needing some more time and such, at which point Pepper Potts showed up to lead the Guardians out. At the GX-1, they tried to get her to talk about where Tony really was, but she stuck to the story that Tony was down in the lab, and then, very deliberately, powered down her tablet and said goodbye to them. And about a minute after the GX-1 lifted off from the landing pad on Stark Tower, all the plane’s systems went dead and it started plunging toward the street.

Here, I stole a new mechanic from the Annihilation event book – a countdown timer ((Seriously, there is so much smart new stuff in Annihilation that you need to buy it. It is all immensely lootable, as I’m demonstrating. I also used the system for starships in the book to wrap some rules around the GX-1.)), showing how much time the heroes have to act before something bad happens. In Annihilation, that’s usually something like a planet exploding, but here it was the GX-1 crashing into the street or a building or a puppy or whatever.

This proved to be a really effective ((In my opinion. I thought it worked great, and the players seemed to have fun with it.)) way of modeling conflict with the environment. Characters rolled against the doom pool ((Plus an extra die or two for some distinctions or complications which may or may not have been obvious right off the hop.)), and tried to get the GX-1 powered up and flying again. Some of them spent their turns trying to step back the countdown die, buying them a little more time to operate, some built assets to help other rolls, and some worked directly to target the Fried Systems d12 complication that I told them they had to reduce to 0 in order to restart the engines.

Once they got the ship powered up again, I told them ((And maybe this was a bit of a dick move, but I did it anyway.)) that they weren’t home free just yet – they were still falling, and needed to pull up by stepping down the countdown die to 0, as well. This kinda sounds like double jeopardy, but I wanted to create the experience of a desperate struggle to get power back to the plunging craft, and then the adrenaline-filled rush of pulling out of the dive mere feet above the ground ((And this is the moment in the session when the players started talking about actually getting the Vehicles specialty for at least one of them if they wanted to continue using the GX-1. Probably a good idea.)).

As the rest of the systems came online in the couple of blocks around Stark Tower, the huge STARK on the side of the building switched over to CLOSED, and a broadcast from Tony Stark informed everyone with any sort of receiver that Stark Industries was officially closed as a protest against the planned nationalization of his company and his technology. The Guardians headed back to Stark Tower to make sure that everyone – specifically Maria Hill and the Cape Killers – was uninjured, then returned to their base.

Now that we had The Doctor caught up with things, we jumped back to the cliffhanger where we had left the previous session – the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier was closing in on the GX-1 that was carrying Volcanic, Jumpstart, Mega Joule, and the apprehended Nitro. I think the group had some idea of being able to outrun or evade the helicarrier, but I had ended the scene last session with 2d12, and so I narrated the opening of this scene as everyone standing on the flight deck of the helicarrier, surrounded by S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.

Commander Hill thanked the heroes for apprehending Nitro, and offered a chance to attend a media event the next day, receiving a commendation from the President, and getting all the credit for bringing the butcher of Stamford to justice. The only catch, of course, was that the SHRA would be in effect the next day, and so the Guardians would need to be registered or face arrest.

Surprising no one, the Guardians declined the honour offered them, and decided to take their leave. Commander Hill said she’d allow that ((Though she told Jumpstart that Captain America was on his way up to the deck, and wanted a word. Jumpstart decided not to wait around.)), but that Nitro was now in S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, and would remain that way until his trial. There was some discussion of taking Nitro with them, but the gang decided that:

  1. They didn’t want to start an all-out war with S.H.I.E.L.D. right here and now, and
  2. They had planned to turn Nitro over to the authorities anyway, and these authorities at least knew how to confine superhumans.

So they bugged out just as Captain America reached the flight deck ((After Jumpstart’s last interaction with Captain America, I’m having a lot of fun teasing a rematch and building up the tension between the two.)), leaving Nitro in S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, and went home to get ready for the gathering at the Baxter Building that evening.

The gathering was some fun roleplaying, with the Guardians taking a bit of time to talk to other heroes and tying themselves a little more tightly to the Marvel universe. They spoke with Reed Richards, Spider-Man, Captain America ((And that was a little tense.)), Sue Storm, and maybe a couple of others that I’m forgetting. And, just before midnight, the Watcher appeared.

I told the gang that the Watcher just looked around at everyone, who had all gone very quiet, with just a few hushed whispers filling those who didn’t know about who the Watcher was. I also told the Guardians that they had the very real impression that the Watcher looked at each of them in turn. Why? Well, mainly to emphasize that this is their story, not the story from the comic books, and not even necessarily the story from the event book. By having the Uatu single them out for special consideration, I wanted to drive home the idea that things in this event will turn on the player character decisions.

That sort of took the air out of the gathering, and people started heading home. The Guardians, now that they were officially outlaws ((Yeah, The Doctor decided not to register, too, refusing to let the dark emotion of fear dictate his actions.)), split into two groups and each took a different underground route home. I asked which group would arrive home first, and they told me that it would be Volcanic and The Doctor, so they popped up in their secret lair, and were instantly attacked.

I snagged the datafiles for Steel Spider, Sepulchre, and Jack Flag from the 50 States Initiative book, and went to town. The surprise round was helpful, but not enough to actually turn the tide in favour of the baddies – I believe The Doctor took some stress, but then our heroes had everything their own way, and took their assailants down pretty quickly. They rendered Jack Flag and Sepulchre unconscious, and shorted out Steel Spider’s arms, leaving him pretty much defenseless. A little bit of negotiation, and they let Steel Spider take his friends out in a Volcanic-crafted box ((The Doctor also healed them. The Guardians are working hard to be above reproach – y’know, aside from the whole breaking the law by not registering thing.)).

Meantime, Jumpstart and Mega Joule were cornered in the sewers by a squad of Cape Killers and Captain America. There was a little discussion, but the fists started flying pretty quickly. Things were not going all that well for Cap and his buddies ((I need to do some thinking about how I run the bad guys. They tend to fold pretty quickly under the combined onslaught of the good guys.)), despite the fact that I was using the 4d12 I currently had in the doom pool very liberally, and buying them back whenever I could. When I saw that things were going to go badly for Cap in the next few turns, I broke down and spent 2d12 to end the scene with a sewer collapse, because I really want to keep the Cap-Jumpstart rivalry going.

That’s where we left things. As we were wrapping up, Clint asked if they had done something to pooch the secrecy of their lair, and I said yes. They didn’t want to just leave my answer at that, though, so I reminded them of the time a couple of sessions ago when Volcanic left the GX-1 ((Still called the GuardJet, at the time.)) sitting unguarded on the helicarrier flight deck for almost an hour as he went to retrieve Jumpstart from S.H.I.E.L.D. custody. Of course Maria Hill put a tracer on it. That’s how S.H.I.E.L.D. tracked them on their little trip to get Nitro. I had thought that would be a clue, but in retrospect, it wasn’t a strange enough event to make the characters wonder, and there was too much time between sessions to keep it in mind. So, I failed on that one.

But still. Yeah. Tracer on the GX-1, and attempt to apprehend the most prominent anti-registration heroes that S.H.I.E.L.D.’s got.

Now, the gang are discussing what they want to do next. I look forward to seeing what they come up with.

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***

When we got together for the latest Storm Point session, it had been over two months since the previous session. Scheduling is always difficult over the holiday season, and it spilled over a fair bit into the new year this year. But we finally got everyone together, and last Sunday, we had a full house for the return to the game.

We picked things up right where we had left them, with our heroes continuing to explore the dead city of Moil, searching for the epicentre of the funnelled death energy ((Yeah, it’s a whole thing…)). They had just slain a massive undead creature made of bones and the rubble of the city’s towers, and took the opportunity for an extended rest. I’ve been making the characters make Endurance checks every now and then to avoid losing a healing surge to the necrotic cold of the Shadowfell, and I decided that, after an extended rest, each character would recover one fewer healing surge than usual, as well as having to make an Endurance check to avoid losing a second surge.

The reason for these checks and the loss of healing surges is twofold. First, I want to emphasize the fact that the characters are on a different plane, one inimical to life, and they need to realize the danger of that. Second, I want to put a clock on the game – if the characters stay too long, their life-energy will drain away.

I decided that this session, I wanted to get the characters into the final dungeon area at the end of the adventure. So, I routed them to the gate puzzle. I let them spot the Vestige ((Player: “What’s a Vestige?” Me: “Well, when a god loses worshippers and fades away, it leaves an impression on the world. That’s a Vestige.” Player: “So… you’re telling us this is the negative space of a dead god?” Me: “Pretty much.” Group: “Well, crap.”)) coming at them a fair ways off, making the threat of its presence obvious enough that the characters were motivated to unscramble the puzzle of the gate. They failed the skill challenge, and took the damage from the misfiring gate as they passed through.

Two of the party didn’t make it through the gate before the Vestige arrived, and they took some nasty damage – and were set up to take quite a bit more – before they were able to escape through the gate. It nicely put the fear of (dead) god in them. The fact that they landed in a room with bodies hanging from chains, a big demon face is the middle of the floor, and two nasty sword wraiths waiting for them helped accentuate the point.

The fight went fairly quickly, though the gang seemed well-threatened by them. When they wrapped it up, they were faced with the puzzle of the archways.

The whole thing with the arches struck me as nicely retro, with the silly, nasty effects of the arches, and the hidden exit guarded by a sphere of annihilation. The characters spent a fair bit of time monkeying around with the arches, winding up variously shrunk, donkey-headed, half-disintegrated, and stripped of magic items. They finally figured things out through the clever use of the hand of fate and speak with dead rituals to gather information, and made their way through the exit to the next room.

That’s where we stopped for the evening.

Between this session and next, I’m planning to take a hard look at the rest of the dungeon, to pare it down to two to three sessions of play, while still getting the best of the cool, nasty, fun stuff in the game. That way, we can get through the last two adventures in Tomb of Horrors and wrap up the Storm Point game in the epic tier and end on a high note.

Or, y’know, TPK. Whichever.

Edge of the Empire Beginner Box

By | | What's he playing?
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I’ve been kind of curious about the new Star Wars RPG from Fantasy Flight Games since it was announced. I managed to get a copy of the Edge of the Empire Beta book shortly after GenCon last year, and it looked pretty good, but until I actually played it, I wasn’t sure how much I would like it.

Then FFG released the Edge of the Empire Beginner Game. It’s been very carefully constructed to take new players ((And by this, I mean the set presupposes no knowledge of gaming at all, teaching the basics of RPGs from the ground up.)) from no knowledge of the game to basic competence with the system. The contents of the box includes a number of books and papers labeled with the order in which the GM should read them. There’s an intro sheet to read first, the adventure book to read second, another sheet with info about a follow-up adventure ((The Long Arm of the Hutt, downloadable from FFG.)), and a pared-down rulebook. In addition, you get four character folios for the pregen characters, and a set of the special dice you need to play. There are also an extra pair of character folios you can download to run the game with more than four players.

I wanted to see how the game ran, so I gathered four of my friends, and we took the Beginner Game out for a spin.

I’m not going to say too much about the adventure, both because I don’t want to spoil it for others, and because it’s a pretty linear story, with no real twists or surprises. That said, it provides a few hours of good Star Wars amusement, covering most of the kinds of things you want to do in a Star Wars game.

The main thing I was interested in seeing was how well the structure of the set taught the game. Each encounter teaches one or two new rules – or tweaks on rules – leading the players from simple ability checks, through combat, opposed rolls, minion rules, and even starship combat. By the end of the adventure, the new players have had a taste of just about everything available in the game, with one exception that I’ll talk about later.

One of the big things I wanted to see was how the the fancy dice worked. Like they did with the latest Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay edition ((Although, not with such wanton exuberance.)), FFG created a new dice mechanic to work with specialized dice in a simple dice pool system. You build your dice pool based on attributes and skills possessed by your character, adding difficulty dice based on opposition, difficulty, and situation, and roll them all. Add up success symbols, cancel successes with failure symbols, and if you have one success symbol left, you succeed. There are a couple more tweaks to the system, with advantage and triumph symbols on the positive side, and threat and despair symbols on the negative side, but you get the idea.

The dice give outcomes along two different axes – success/failure and advantage/threat, tweaked by triumph and despair. It works pretty slick, and the players learned the language of the dice symbols quite quickly, so play actually went fast after the first couple of encounters. What I found, though, was that estimating the odds – what was a long shot, what was a sure thing – was difficult. I mean, you can ballpark the odds based on the types and numbers of dice in the pool in a broad way: more green skill dice than purple difficulty dice mean that the roll is likely to succeed. But how likely is more difficult to tell ((Why do I care? Well, it’s not a gamebreaker, but I’m so used to examining and understanding the odds on numerical dice rolls that I feel a little adrift without the ability to do that. Not a huge deal.)).

Combat runs pretty quickly, and the threat and advantage mechanic adds some colourful variation to the vanilla back-and-forth of the standard “I hit him, then he hits me” of the basic combat system. The minion rules turn groups of stormtroopers into serious opposition without bogging the game down. And the starship combat runs smooth, with options for everyone on the ship ((At least, everyone on the ship in the playtest.)) to do something every turn.

Opposed rolls work very much like normal rolls in this system, with the difficulty dice that are added to the pool being determined by the skill of the character opposing the active character’s intent. So, if you’re trying to talk a junk dealer into selling you a part he promised to another ((Just as an example.)), the difficulty dice in your pool are based on the junk dealer’s Discipline skill. This nicely resolves in a single roll what normally takes two separate rolls. I like the idea, and it works pretty well in play.

The one thing that the Beginner Game doesn’t cover that exists in the Beta version of the game ((Well, the one play aspect that I noticed. Of course, the Beginner Game has no info on character creation, fewer equipment listings, etc. As one would expect in an introductory set.)) is rules for Force users. Now, Edge of the Empire doesn’t deal with Jedi or Sith characters, and rightly so; the default setting of the game is the interval between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back ((I’m pretty sure, anyway. I don’t have the book handy right now.)), when the Jedi have been hunted almost to extinction and only Vader and the Emperor stand for the Sith. Out on the Rim, the eponymous edge of the Empire, there may be a few minor Force users that haven’t been exterminated yet, but anything more impressive gets far too much Imperial attention.

So, as I say, no Force use in the Beginner Game, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Based on what I’ve seen in the Beta book ((And bear in mind that it is a Beta book, so things are apt to change.)), Force powers add another layer of complexity and another new type of die, along with a whole set of powers and abilities. They look interesting and useful but, as I say, they weren’t in the Beginner Game, so I didn’t get to test them.

Anyway, final verdict on the game is that it was fun to play. The linearity of the adventure can be forgiven in light of how the game is structured to teach the system, and there’s enough fun stuff in the adventure to make it enjoyable to play. It did a good job of teaching the basics of the system to new players ((And GMs.)), while hinting at how much more fun you can have using the full game.

So, if you have an interest in a Star Wars RPG, I suggest checking it out. It’s not that expensive, will give you a taste of the system, an evening’s play ((More, if you download the sequel adventure.)), and a set of the dice you need for the game.

Go check it out.

Apocalypse World: Ruins

By | | Apocalypse World, What's he playing?
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Saturday night ((Actually, a couple of Saturdays ago, now. I’m behind on this post.)) was the second installment of my new Apocalypse World campaign. Because of scheduling issues, I had to move it up a week which, as it turned out, meant that I hadn’t got all the prep work that I had planned done in time ((Let me be clear: I could have got more done, but I chose to do some other things, pretty much right up to the last minute.)). Because I’m new to the game, this was a bigger deal than it might otherwise be – mainly, what it meant was that I didn’t feel as confident in running the game as I like.

Prep for Apocalypse World, like most of the rest of the game, is a little different from most other games I’ve run. Instead of creating story lines and adventures, what you do is create what the game calls fronts. These are collections of threats, arranged into similar groupings, with some notes about how things escalate. It sounds like splitting hairs, but the difference in perspective is important. I created one front to reflect the unsettled political situation and threats in Roosevelt, and one to reflect the external threats of raiders, cannibals, the ruins, and the twisted creatures of the wastelands.

As part of this second front, I created a custom move for exploring the ruins – the players had established in the first session that much of Roosevelt’s wealth and influence came from looting the ruins ((I think that I may have been a little overly generous with the move, but we’ll see how it plays out over a couple more sessions before I change it.)). For those who are interested, this is the move:

Loot the Ruins: Spend the day searching the Ruins for salvage and roll + Sharp. On a 10+, pick two items off the list below. On 7-9, you pick one and the MC picks one. On a miss, the MC picks 2.

  • Find oddments worth 1-Barter
  • Find a common firearm
  • Find a common melee weapon
  • Find a common outfit that grants 1-Armour
  • Find an attachment that lets you add a new tag to an existing item
  • Find equipment that lets you add an improvement to a workspace
  • Suffer a mishap and take 1-Harm AP
  • Break a weapon or piece of equipment in an accident
  • Encounter hostile forces (human)
  • Encounter hostile forces (animal)
  • Get lost in the twisting by-ways

I wanted to finish one more front before play, relating to the weirdness in the world – the psychic maelstrom, Yellohammer’s cult, stuff like that. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, I didn’t get that far, so I’m working on it for next session.

When we got together for the game, I gave the players the option of picking up right where we left off, with them our at the ram stead with too few snowmobiles to get them all back and one member unconscious, or starting a day or two later, back in Roosevelt, with me dictating how the return went. Three-quarters of the players didn’t trust me ((They’ve played in my games before, you see.)), so they wanted to pick things up out in the wild. After some futzing around, they decided that Snow would take Nils back to Roosevelt on the one working, non-booby-trapped snowmobile, while JB and Magpie would wait out at the raided farmstead for them to return.

Back in town, I got to set up a PC-NPC-PC triangle, as suggested in the rulebook ((To be fair, Snow and Nils did it mostly themselves.)), having Calico and Snow almost come to blows while Nils did his best to keep things calm. It was fascinating to watch it play out, and I see the value of the construction very clearly now – it generated a lot of drama in the game, and made the world that much more interesting and real. Out at the farm, JB and Magpie had to deal with cold, boredom, and the threat of more raiders ((There weren’t going to be any more raiders right now; another fight out in the cold was all that interesting to me. But the imminent threat of more raiders was something the characters had to be worried about.)). Finally, with Nils recovering in Wei’s clinic ((And all the jokes about Nils’s scorched groin were making the rounds of Roosevelt, of course.)), Snow took Nils’s van out through the night to pick up JB and Magpie – also, the wrecked snowmobiles, the booby trapped snowmobile, and the raiders’ guns ((The one surviving raider that they had captured died slowly during the night. He’d suffered 2-Harm, and the game advises looking at NPCs through the crosshairs.)).

Once everyone was back in Roosevelt, I moved time forward a week or so, giving everyone time to recover a segment of Harm and get back on their feet, then asked them what the wanted to do. After checking on how things were going in town ((Someone was back working Inch’s beer stall, for example, though he or she was wearing the heavy, obscuring robes of Yellowhammer’s cult, so no one knew for sure if it was Inch or not. But at least the beer was flowing again.)), they decided to head out into the Ruins for some salvage – they were pretty much all low on funds, what with Calico being pissed at JB and Snow and not giving them any work.

This is where I began to question the custom move I made, seeing everyone grabbing some really good loot. I did manage to stick them with  few little problems – Nils’s van broke down, Snow’s box of AP ammo was infested by scissor worms ((Little things like silverfish, but with something like a crab claw at the head. And now Roosevelt has a scissor worm problem.)), and Magpie ran into some other looters who wanted to take the leather vest she found ((That turned kind of dark – Magpie isn’t much of a fighter but, as a hoarder, when her stuff is threatened, she gets ruthless.)). And then they got a little lost on the way out of the Ruins. Still, it was a successful expedition ((Perhaps a little too successful.)), and everyone was happy with it.

I felt is was a little slow and awkward, though. The way things hinged on the new move, the balance between letting the group get stuff vs. causing them problems, all of it was a little off and artificial. I think I need to rewrite the move to let the players pick only one thing off the list, and bring in the concept of hard choices, strings, hard moves, etc. I’ll think about that for the next session.

Anyway, they made it home, and I floundered a bit, trying to figure out what to do next. I mentioned in the last post that we got a lot more done in a single session than I had anticipated, and that trend carried over. I underestimated how much more we get done with Apocalypse World, and hadn’t finished the other piece of prep I had intended to do before the game: writing up some one-line hints of things to use to hint at future badness related to the fronts I had prepared ((I was going to do this after I had finished the three fronts I had planned so, when I didn’t finish the third front, obviously I didn’t get to this, either.)). Fortunately, the fronts are incredibly useful tools for figuring out what to do next, but you need to take a breath and look them over ((The AW rulebook tells you to take breaks whenever you feel the need, and that’s some good advice.)). Once I did that, I had an idea of what to do.

So I had Wilson, the trade representative from Dawning, the city to the north, come to talk Magpie into leading some 0f her people deep into the Ruins. Nils overheard this proposal, and stuck his oar in, so Wilson included him in the discussion. They dickered for a while before settling on a price, and the requirements of the trip, and the hiring of a couple of extra guns ((That’d be JB and Snow.)) for escort. When asked the reason for the trip, Wilson said that she was in negotiation with Boss T, much of which was based on the ability  of Roosevelters to recover interesting salvage from the Ruins, and Wilson needed to understand exactly how difficult this salvage was so as to value it appropriately.

Of course, Nils and Magpie are pretty sure that’s bullshit.

And then Calico called Nils in to talk to her, and said that it would be a good idea if Wilson’s people didn’t survive the trip.

That’s where we left things.

Before the next session, I’ve got to finish my third front, rework the Loot the Ruins move, and make some hints at future badness for spur of the moment use. It’s taking a little time, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of the game, and figure out how to make it work.

And everyone seems to be having fun so far. So, it’s a win.