Just The Caffeine Talking

Island of Lost Games: Metamorphosis Alpha

We recently got more bookshelves installed, which meant that my roleplaying game collection emerged from the closet where it had been piled up for more than a decade, and now stands again in proud alphabetical-by-title ranks, easily accessible. I found some forgotten treasures in there: my original Call of Cthulhu box set, the battered little old black Traveller box, and a lot of GURPS books I had forgotten I had.

Re-shelving also uncovered some obscure games, things I picked up here and there over the past thirty-five years: Mike Pondsmith's Dream Park, Greg Porter's Epiphany, Fading Suns from Holistic Design, Metamorphosis Alpha by James Ward, Tales of Gargentihr from Sanctuary Games, and SPI's Universe. I thought it would be interesting to look into those less-known games and do a series of posts about them. I begin with the oldest, Metamorphosis Alpha.

Metamorphosis Alpha is old. How old? It is copyright 1976; mine is the third printing, from 1978. It's so old the TSR colophon is still a little lizard-man with a halberd, before the company switched to a wimpy-looking wizard. It may be the first science fiction role-playing game ever, depending on whether you think Warriors of Mars was science fiction or swords-and-sorcery.

I have no clear memory of where I got this game. I probably picked it up at Hub Hobbies in New Orleans, but it might have been at a bookstore, or even in the dealer room at Vul-Con, the old New Orleans area Star Trek convention. I do know how much I paid for it: six dollars. I know that because the price sticker is still right there on the cover (that argues in favor of the hobby shop theory).

Physically, it's not very impressive: a stapled 32-page book with cover art of the kind only a pioneering roleplaying game publisher could love. There's also interior illustrations which wouldn't look out of place in the back of my 8th-grade math notebook. The only art credit is to David Sutherland (I should note that Mr. Sutherland's work got much better, and he was a mainstay at TSR for twenty years). But there's a lot packed into those 32 pages, in part thanks to the use of eyestrainingly small type and very narrow margins.

According to the introduction, in the year 2290 the mighty starship Warden was launched on a mission to colonize an Earthlike world many light-years away. As the ship traveled slower than light, the voyage would take decades to finish. The ship had to have a complete biosphere aboard, with thousands of animals, large open decks devoted to forest and grassland, and more than a million colonists living in a great city within the starship.

Disaster struck, in the form of a "cloud of radiation" in space, which damaged the ship's systems, killed off most of the passengers and crew, and created weird mutations in the surviving humans and animals aboard. The survivors regressed to savagery and forgot they were even aboard a ship flying between the stars.

In case you weren't paying attention in Science Fiction class, this scenario is lifted pretty directly from Robert Heinlein's novel Orphans of the Sky. The same idea was used in episodes of Star Trek and Space: 1999. Around the time Metamorphosis Alpha came out there was also Harlan Ellison's abortive TV series project, The Starlost. All involved huge generation starships, crews reverted to savagery, and mutations.

Players take the part of humans, mutant humans, or mutant animals. One starts by rolling up character stats, much as in Dungeons & Dragons, although the stats are a little different. Instead of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, Metamorphosis Alpha characters have a different set. There's Radiation Resistance, Mental Resistance, Dexterity, Strength, Leadership Potential, and Constitution. If you're playing a human, all you need after that is some gear and a name and you're done. But mutants get to roll for the number of physical and mental mutations their characters have, and then select from a list of things like "Taller" or "Multiple Body Parts" or "Wings" or "Telekinesis" or "Dual Brain." The gamemaster (known as the "judge") assigns mutants mental or physical defects to go along with their superpowers.

Naturally there are monsters to fight (or negotiate with) on this derelict starship. Things like Metaled Ones (super-intelligent badgers with armored hides and telekinesis) or Wolfoids (bipedal intelligent wolves with energy-reflecting fur and eyes capable of emitting radiation blasts). The game has no alignment system, so any beings can potentially be hostile, friendly, or maybe willing to negotiate. I think that's a deliberate choice of the designer: this is as much a game of diplomacy as it is of combat. The Leadership Potential attribute gives every character a chance to gain followers at each encounter.

Characters begin with typical low-tech gear like swords, bows, and armor made of plant fiber, but the ship holds all kinds of technological "magic items." Things like laser guns, robots, antigravity sleds, and the valuable "color band" bracelets which allow access to sealed-off compartments. Figuring out how to work their new technological toys is one of the main tasks in the game, and characters risk blowing themselves (or bystanders) up as they tinker. It's not quite as elaborate as Gamma World's flowchart for figuring out unknown devices, but I think part of the fun is supposed to be letting the players figure out what the thing is supposed to be from the gamemaster's disingenuous descriptions. (Perhaps it's no coincidence that these rules are on the facing page from the subhead "Relatives" — which explains how to let players roll up kinsmen to replace characters who die in the course of play.)

I get the impression that Metamorphosis Alpha was created to allow self-contained "miniseries" adventures rather than open-ended campaigns. For one thing, there is no mechanism for character advancement. You don't gain levels in Metamorphosis Alpha. If you wander into radioactive zones you might gain new mutations — but you could also develop new defects as well. As far as I can tell (and keep in mind I don't think I ever played the game — though I did pillage bits for Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller games), the main form of reward for characters and players is increasing knowledge and mastery of the giant starship, a growing band of followers, and more advanced items. The obvious "endgame" is to make contact with the ship's super-intelligent computer and land the starship Warden on a habitable planet somewhere.

It's an interesting hybrid of the game structures we now classify as "sandbox" and "story" games. Initially the Warden is a huge sandbox full of random encounters and perils to overcome, but as the characters discover more about their world it segues neatly into a story structure of unifying the warring tribes and making the starship great again.

Would I play Metamorphosis Alpha now? The game would certainly be fun for a one-shot lasting a few hours. I wouldn't have any trouble improvising an ongoing campaign from the relatively bare-bones material in the sourcebook, but then I am a science fiction writer so that's literally what I do all day. The main obstacle to running a game would be that I would be obsessively protective of my fragile, aging copy of the book. I think I might use it as inspiration for a Pathfinder or Savage Worlds game, and leave my venerable relic on the shelf.

 

If you want to read more adventures of strange beings and mysterious technology, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Obligatory Star Wars Post

There has been a certain amount of muted hoopla this week because it marks the 40th anniversary of the original Star Wars. One thing which I haven't seen anywhere else is a discussion of how different Star Wars was from most science fiction films up to that year. Quite simply, Star Wars turned SF cinema into part of the Action/Adventure genre; before that it was under  Drama. This turned out to be massively important.

If you look at the big-budget, high-profile science fiction films of the decade before 1977, what do you see? The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Stepford Wives, Phase IV, The Terminal Man, Zardoz, The Day of the Dolphin, Soylent Green, Solaris, Westworld, Logan's Run, The Andromeda Strain, A Clockwork Orange, Planet of the Apes (and sequels), THX 1138 (by some guy named Lucas), Colossus: The Forbin Project, 2001, and Charly.

And what do these movies have in common? They're all VERY SERIOUS. Nearly half the list are post-apocalyptic stories; half are Dreadful Warnings about technology out of control. Only four deal with space exploration at all, and in all of those contact with extraterrestrial life is shown as either dangerous, incomprehensible, or both. In short, the future — and the Universe — are simply no fun.

Oh, sure, there were some science fiction adventure films — but interestingly, most of them were not tales of futuristic derring-do, but period pieces based on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne novels, with what we would now call "steampunk" explorers finding weird cultures in out-of-the-way places on Earth. And then the volcano erupts. It's almost as if the only way moviemakers could imagine fantastic adventure and exploration was to look to the past. (Interestingly, contemporary written SF seems to have gone through a similar phase in the first decade of this century.)

Of course there were monster movies, including the peak years of Godzilla. And the golden age of disaster movies, which are kind of science fiction. And, yes, there were low-budget pictures which have since become cult classics, like Death Race 2000. But in the big new theaters at the shopping mall, the science fiction movies were grim stuff.

Then Star Wars, and huzzah, science fiction is fun again. And by the way it made more money than studio executives could even imagine up to that point. Which meant that all subsequent SF cinema (for a good decade or more, anyway) had to be like Star Wars. Even movies that weren't at all like Star Wars (like Blade Runner) got marketed as future ADVENTURE! Science fiction, as a cinematic category, moved from Drama to Action/Adventure (one can argue that it was occupying the niche left vacant by the disappearance of the Western genre).

And this may ultimately have saved it. As movies have gone more global, it's harder to do a straight-up drama. How do you market a sensitive story about growing up gay in rural New Jersey in the 1940s to an audience in Thailand or Dubai? More importantly, how do you market a grim story about the loss of personal autonomy to computers in a totalitarian future to an audience in Shanghai or London who are coming to the theater to escape pretty much that exact thing in their real lives?

But a story about a cyborg superman fighting alien invaders crosses all cultural boundaries. You don't even need subtitles. Turning science fiction cinema from Drama into Action/Adventure may have saved it from following the Western into obscurity. The very fact that SF movies made gobs of money helped make all of what we now call "geek culture" shed its old pocket-protector stigma and enter the mainstream. Without Star Wars in 1977 you would not see The Expanse on TV in 2017.

I only hope we can square the circle. We've had the thesis of Campbellian cerebral SF movies, the antithesis of Star Wars and its imitators — can we create a synthesis which combines the virtues of both?

 

For SF stories which combine action and drama, buy my new ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

 

Battle on the Tabletop!

Combat in roleplaying games has a lot of variation, but most game systems break it up into two main components: how hard it is to hit someone, and how much damage that person can withstand.

So in Dungeons & Dragons, everything has an Armor Class, which determines what one must roll in order to score a hit. Armor Class is a combination of protection from armor and shield, the character's ability to dodge and avoid blows, and any magical protection guarding him from harm.

If you do get hit, you lose Hit Points. Hit Points represent your ability to shrug off damage due to your innate toughness, luck, and years of experience. That's why a high-level character has many more Hit Points than a novice: he's better at avoiding harm.

But isn't that the same as Armor Class? Isn't that also your ability to avoid harm or absorb damage? And what about Saving Throws? Aren't they also a measure of how well the character can keep from getting hurt?

Other roleplaying systems tried to address this paradox. In original Traveller, armor affected how well certain weapons could hit someone, but when a character did take damage it directly reduced his physical attributes — making him slow, or weakened, or reduced in stamina. When I first started playing Traveller I thought this was odd and unwieldy, but now I kind of like it.

GURPS made your ability to avoid being hit entirely a matter of agility and skill, and armor simply absorbed part of the damage done to you. GURPS characters could improve their skills with experience, but their damage capacity remained more or less fixed. Gamers accustomed to high-level D&D characters, able to ignore dozens of sword blows or arrows, were always shocked by how fragile even the toughest GURPS characters are.

Some systems tried to localize the damage, so that a hit to the arm would have different results than a hit to the leg or abdomen. (GURPS used that as an optional rule.) I always found hit locations to be overly complicated: instead of rolling twice (once to hit, once for damage), hit locations rules add a third roll, and probably an extra step of calculations to see how the damage to that body part affects the character.

Combat systems in roleplaying have to satisfy multiple contradictory requirements:

• First, they have to feel realistic. A powerful sword blow or a hit from a heavy firearm should be deadly.

• Second, they have to allow quick takedowns. The commando must be able to silence a guard before he can raise the alarm, and a burly bruiser should be able to knock down a scrawny heckler with one punch.

• Third, they have to allow the player characters to survive. Which means an enemy commando should not be able to kill an unsuspecting hero before he can react.

• Fourth, they should be fast-paced and smooth-running in actual play.

• Fifth, they should allow for skilled swordplay, secret martial-arts techniques, and cunning tricks invented on the fly.

• Sixth, they should be able to account for all possible situations, no matter how bizarre, and have clear rules about them to avoid arguments.

As you can see, these goals are contradictory. Emphasizing realism slows everything down and makes fights deadly (because real fights often are deadly). Emphasizing story means player characters are somehow much more lethal than non-player characters. Emphasizing play balance means weapons are often underpowered.

Sadly, there is no one great combat system which can do everything and please everyone. The trick, I think, is to decide what kind of "reality" the game is going to simulate, and find a system which does that well.

So if you're playing a Western, you'll need a combat system with quick-draw rules so that a highly-skilled gunfighter can get off the first shot. But that shot's going to be deadly — possibly leaving the wounded man time to gasp out a confession or a mysterious clue before dying. Armor is (mostly) useless and hit points are low, but gunfighters can make use of concealment or shoot from hard cover, and it's hard to hit a moving target so galloping out of town is usually a good way to keep from getting killed.

By contrast, a Musketeers game should have plenty of parries and counter-thrusts, with bonuses for chandelier-swinging or a goblet of wine to the enemy's face. Wounds are seldom fatal, though, and an opponent bloodied in a duel can be back in his box at the Opera in just a few days.

Complicating all this is the problem of the learning curve. It takes time and mental effort to learn a new game system, and often players simply aren't willing to do that much work. This is why you see gamemasters using the Pathfinder/D&D 3.5 system to run a modern espionage game, or Victorian ghost-hunters. The rules may be an awkward fit, but the players are familiar with them so just throw out some patches and house rules and get on with the game.

I'm a firm believer in simplicity. For instance, I think hitting and doing damage should be combined into a single die roll. Add up your bonuses, subtract the target's defenses, and the result is how much damage you do. Or perhaps have both combatants roll, with the difference as the damage inflicted by the loser. I think the fewer die rolls and the less mathematical calculating, the better.

Dice do have a place. I've tried various diceless systems and most were unsatisfying. In the Amber Diceless system, the "highest Warfare ability always wins" mechanic worked because the game was all about social conflict and intrigue rather than open fighting. But that's a highly specific setting.

Greg Porter created one called Epiphany which was diceless but still gave the player some agency: each character had one or more combat points (based on skill, physique, weapons, magical bonuses, etc.) but could allocate them to offense or defense. So a weaker combatant might still be able to overcome a superior foe by clever allocation. I've never actually played that one.

The actual "roll of the dice" does have some useful features. First, it marks an end to the decision-making stage. Dither all you like, but once you roll, you're committed. Second, it provides a good physical action and a moment of tension, mirroring the imaginary battle being waged.

All of us have a paradoxical relationship to violence. We don't like to be hurt, but as human animals we have a hard-wired urge to settle problems with physical action. (Men and women both: it was a female player who said "Enough talk, let's kill something" in a game I played in.) It's satisfying to come up with a cunning plan that avoids all confrontation with the enemy . . . but it's more satisfying to drive them before you, take their horses and goods and hear the lamentations of the women.

Game systems try to satisfy those conflicting desires. I think the key to a successful combat system is to know what desires you want to satisfy.

 

For two stories about conflicting desires and exciting combat, buy my new ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Book Review: Revenger

It's sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between a genius and a crackpot. Both can be geeky, eccentric, abrasive, or just plain annoying. There is, however, one foolproof "tell" for the crackpot: they don't share ideas. If someone comes up to me at a convention or a book signing and starts going on about some amazing idea they had, but can't tell me because I might steal it (or blab about it to someone who will steal it) . . . that person is a crackpot.

All the truly creative writers and game designers I know are constantly tossing off ideas the way dandelions give off seeds. They have far more ideas than they can ever get around to writing — and if an idea is really compelling they don't waste time telling me about it at conventions, they just write the damned thing.

This is all a roundabout way for me to explain why I'm not at all unhappy to see that British science fiction superstar Alastair Reynolds has written a novel with a setting almost exactly like something in my "this could be interesting" folder of ideas. Quite the reverse: now I can enjoy reading about that setting without doing any work at all!

The novel in question is his latest book, Revenger. It's a space pirate story set millions of years in the future, when the Solar System is a "Dyson swarm" of thousands of inhabited planetoids and space habitats. Hundreds of civilizations — both human and alien — have come and gone, and some of their ancient near-magical technology still lies hidden in abandoned asteroids. Bold solar-sailing adventurers go out treasure-hunting, braving the dangers of forgotten technology and empty worlds — and the risk of pirates who prey on the treasure-seekers.

A pair of upper-class sisters, Adrana and Arafura Ness, sign on aboard a treasure-hunting expedition, partly to restore their family fortune but mostly as a lark. Things turn very serious when their ship is jumped by the black-sailed ship Nightjammer, captained by the dread pirate Bosa Sennen. One of the crew sacrifices her own safety to help Arafura hide, while Adrana is taken by the pirates and the rest are massacred. Arafura vows to rescue her sister and get revenge, and from there the plot hurtles along as she fights to survive, gather allies and weapons, and hunt down the Nightjammer.

It's a cracking good pulp-style adventure story. The incomprehensibly far-future setting means we can have all the tropes of the 1930s Solar System: lots of inhabited worlds, grungy spaceship crews, ancient supertech, space pirates, and diabolical villains. But there's a titanium core of Real Science inside it all. There are parts which reminded me of Bester's The Stars My Destination, a nod to The Princess Bride, and even a tip of the hat to the animated Disney movie Treasure Planet.

This book could also be a master-class for writers in how to create strong female characters without falling into the trap of conflating strength and violence. Fura Ness is just bursting with agency, but she is still a girl in her teens, and accomplishes her goals with appropriate weapons: deception, manipulation, bargaining, and bribes. When she does engage in a physical conflict, Fura goes to extraordinary lengths to get hold of weapons which will give her an edge. There's no "waif-fu" in this novel; no 98-pound teenager beating up hardened killers twice her size. Nor does Reynolds shy away from showing the sacrifices and compromises Fura must make in her Ahab-like pursuit of the Nightjammer. Even she admits she was a much nicer person before her adventures began.

Revenger does feel slightly like an "origin story" and I wasn't surprised to read here that Reynolds is planning a sequel. No complaints from me about that: I want to find out what becomes of Fura Ness and see more of her world.

 

For more stories of thieves, abductions, and ancient technology, buy my new ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Retro-Review: Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Part 4 and Conclusion)

At last we've come to the final stories in Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space. Time to wrap up and make a general assessment.

By His Bootstraps, by Anson MacDonald/Robert Heinlein: This is a well-known story, but I hesitate to call it a classic. It has a lot in common with Heinlein's other well-known time-loop story "All You Zombies" — in both stories, sad to say, the difficulty of working out the literally four-dimensional chess game of the plot completely overwhelms any other qualities of the story. They're neat stories in the same way an Agatha Christie mystery or a Baroque automaton is: one admires the workmanship but there's no chance of mistaking it for something alive. I wish the later Heinlein, at his peak around 1965, could have returned to this theme. Three stars.

The Star Mouse, by Fredric Brown: Sigh. I grow weary of wacky inventor stories, especially when the wacky inventor is prone to long paragraphs of exposition in a comical German accent. The anthologist's note for this story suggests it would make a charming cartoon, and I agree. Two stars (it would be three, but comical dialect exposition makes me cranky).

Correspondence Course, by Raymond F. Jones: This is a fun story about a man who signs up for a correspondence course and discovers it's much more advanced than he expected. I thought the "hook" of the otherworldly mail-order course seemed reminiscent of the beginning of the 1955 movie This Island Earth. Which was based on the 1952 novel This Island Earth, written by . . . Raymond F. Jones. No wonder it seemed familiar. Four stars.

Brain, by S. Fowler Wright: This could almost be a deleted scene from C.S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength; it's about the downfall of the Council of Scientists who rule England in the year 1990. From works like this, and Lewis's novels, and some essays by Orwell from the same period, I get the impression that the post-war Labour Party government in Great Britain may have relied a little too much on the "it's SCIENCE so shut up" argument. Still, this one is a little too over-the-top even for satire. One star.

Reviewing my ratings, I find the average rating for stories in this is just above three stars, so we'll take that as the overall rating for the entire collection. There are eleven four-star stories, so about a third of the total are genuinely first-rate work. The number of three-star stories is the same, and some of those are near-great, like "Nightfall" or "The Roads Must Roll."

It's the bottom third which frustrates me. The editors were putting together an all-star anthology — so why waste space on tomfoolery like "Time Travel Happens!" or filler like "Within the Pyramid" when they could have included C.L. Moore's "Shambleau" or Murray Leinster's "First Contact"?

I guess it's not too surprising that a collection published a year after the end of the most devastating conflict in human history would have a somewhat grim tone. Six of the stories are about the end of life and/or civilization, and another four concern either tyrannical future societies or attempts to impose tyranny, and there's even one about thwarting post-war Nazis equipped with "jetpack Hitler" super-tech (a reliable trope which continues to this day in various media).

There are four "wacky inventor" stories. As I mentioned, that's a subgenre which has more or less died out in the past few decades. I think the 1950s were the peak decade for them, in print, anyway (they have lingered on in film and television and show no sign of disappearing). The last new print story about a nutty inventor I can remember reading was "Big Jelly" by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker, and that was published back in the 1990s.

I suppose wacky inventors have metamorphosed into freaky hackers (like my own "Captain Black the Space Pirate" from Corsair) but they are as much figures of menace (or power fantasies for geeks) as comic. Unlike wacky inventors absent-mindedly causing chaos, hackers in fiction are deliberately disruptive, and are usually very serious about it.

How do the stories in this collection compare to modern short science fiction? Well, the authors are not as concerned with literary quality. Contemporary SF and fantasy stories focus more intently on character and drama; you can't get away with just tossing out Big Ideas any more.

I think part of that is simply due to the greater access modern readers have to good-quality science nonfiction. You can get the sciencey Big Ideas straight now, much more easily than in 1946. Even wild speculative notions get an airing in the popular science media, and the tone is not hostile or mocking. When readers go looking for stories, they want more than fictionalized essays.

Despite the stereotype of the Campbell era as being full of technophilic boosterism, I think it's important to note how many of these stories are dreadful warnings about scientific hubris or possible misuse of new technologies. At least half the stories (not counting the two nonfiction pieces) are cautionary tales.

One interesting feature of this collection is how many of the stories — seven of thirty-three fiction pieces — are set in the reader's present day. That includes two time-travel stories (maybe two and a half, if you count "The Twonky"), three alien-contact stories, and one wacky inventor ("The Star Mouse"). In fact, there are more alien-contact stories set on Earth, in either the present day or "twenty minutes into the future," than there are stories in this volume about space explorers encountering aliens on other worlds.

So: if you come across a copy of Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space, grab it. There are some excellent stories, including a couple which are very hard to find otherwise, and it's a fascinating snapshot of the science fiction genre on the brink of its Golden Age.

 

For a look at some stories from my own Golden Age, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!