Just The Caffeine Talking

Mr. President, We May Be Looking . . .

. . . at a wargames GAP! Apparently the Pentagon needs to find replacements for the generation of beardy wargame grognards who are starting to fail their final saving rolls. Here's an article about the problem from War on the Rocks.  

Dragon Awards!

Congratulations to this year's Dragon Award winners:

Best Science Fiction Novel: Artemis by Andy Weir.

Best Fantasy Novel: Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson.

Best Young Adult/Middle Grade Novel: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi.

Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel: A Call to Vengeance by David Weber, Timothy Zahn, and Thomas Pope.

Best Alternate History Novel: Uncharted by Kevin J. Anderson and Sarah A. Hoyt.

Best Media Tie-In Novel: Leia: Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray.

Best Horror Novel: Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King.

Best Comic Book: Mighty Thor by Jason Aaron and James Harren, Marvel Comics.

Best Graphic Novel: Brandon Sanderson’s White Sand Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson, Rik Hoskin, and Julius M. Gopez, Dynamite Entertainment.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series: Game of Thrones, HBO.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie: Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy PC/Console Game: Middle-earth: Shadow of War by Monolith Productions.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Mobile Game: Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery by Jam City.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Board Game: Red Dragon Inn 6: Villains by Slugfest Games.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Miniatures/Collectible Card/Role-Playing Game: Magic: The Gathering Unstable by Wizards of the Coast.

Island of Lost Games: A Footprint in the Sand!

Exciting news about one of the first titles I covered in the "Island of Lost Games" series — John Hill, one of the original Droids gaming group, ran across my post and sent this reply:

I enjoyed your recent post about the game "Droids", though the circumstances that led me to discover it leave much to be desired.  The gentleman that is listed in the "Edited by..." credit of the Droid book, Derek Stanovsky, passed away unexpectedly on Nov. 1, at the age of 54.  I was trying to find leads to Neil Moore to inform him of Derek's passing.  Sadly, I, and several others that had some involvement with Droids failed to find any leads to Mr. Moore.

I find it delightful that there is a conversation and interest in this game after all these years.  And to answer the question at the end of your article, I have indeed played the game.  Sadly, Droids was developed at a time that I was very busy with my engineering degree, so I didn't get to play it extensively, but I definitely recall playing a few sessions with Neil as Game Master.

I'm attaching a photo you may find amusing.  Originally, we we're going to use photos of droid models instead of the illustrations.  I took apart several of my various tank and spaceship models and built some Droids.  Everyone loved the model, but the pictures left a lot to be desired.  If only we'd had the image manipulation stuff available now, I'm sure we could have made it work.

Thanks again for the kind words about the game.

Here's the photo of Mr. Hill's Droid model.

It's wonderful to hear from someone with a connection to the game. If anyone knows where to find Neil Moore, drop me a line and I'll forward the information to Mr. Hill.

 

For more stories about relics of the past and adventures in the future, buy my ebooks: Outlaws and Aliens, and Monster Island Tales!

Random Encounters: Steampunk Paris

I'm starting a new feature of the 'blog this week: your Weekly Random Encounters. Each week I'm going to post a new random encounter table for a particular setting. Use these for roleplaying games, story prompts, or as a kind of I Ching to predict your week. I'm also appending the Situation generator to each entry.

Our first Random Encounter Table is for Steampunk Paris, where the powers of science have transformed the city into a Vernean fantasy — or nightmare.

ENCOUNTERS IN STEAMPUNK PARIS

(roll 1d10 if the party remain in one place, 1d20 if they are moving through the city)

1. Roll Twice and Combine.
2. Plot-advancing encounter: Something or someone connected with the reason the party have come to Paris in the first place.
3. Enthusiastic Students: Claude and Mimi Ardan, students at the Sorbonne Institut des Études Extraordinaires. They are naive and helpful young mad scientists in training.
4. Gendarmes: 1d6 Paris policemen, equipped with flame-resistant cloaks and electric truncheons. They are either on regular patrol, looking for the adventurers, or responding to a call about a disturbance.
5. Giant Sewer Rats: 2d6 rats as big as Jack Russell terriers with near-human intelligence. They are stealing food, but might pick up anything small and shiny.
6. Luddite: Henri Lenoir, anti-technology terrorist armed with handmade black-powder bombs and a sharp rapier.
7. Murderous Ape: A brain-augmented Orang-outang, driven mad by surgery and armed with a straight razor. It gets around the city by rooftops and trees.
8. Robbery: 2d6 bandits on steam unicycles pull off a daring heist. They are armed with gas and smoke grenades.
9. Runaway Automaton: A mechanical man whose regulation machinery has broken. It is hostile to everyone.
10. Weather: A heavy downpour lasting 1d4 hours.
11. Abandoned Factory: This giant automated furniture plant shut down after a financial scandal. The building holds rats, pigeons, dangerous machinery, and a few street urchins.
12. Aristocratic Troublemakers: 2d6 young dandies armed with sword-canes and pocket derringers, drunk on absinthe and pineal extract, looking for amusement and/or trouble.
13. Cycle Race: There are 1d100 speeding bicyclists and a dense crowd of cheering onlookers between the player-characters and their destination.
14. Fille de Joie: Alluring young woman who is fronting for a gang of 1d8 organ-harvesters. They want a good healthy spleen.
15. Fire!: A building on fire. There are people trapped in the upper stories and the flames threaten to spread to neighboring structures. The Fire Brigade may not arrive in time!
16. Low Dive: A basement tavern catering to crooks and science-spawned mutants. Upper-class types, scientists, or detectives get a very unfriendly reception.
17. Mimes!: They appear to be street performers doing the classic "invisible box" routine. Actually they really have been trapped inside forcefield bubbles for days and are getting desperate.
18. Street Market: The next couple of blocks are crowded with vendors selling produce, old clothes, cheese, old books, live poultry . . . and whatever the adventurers really need right now.
19. Workers' Demonstration: 2d100 burly laborers protesting the Government. They are angry and it wouldn't take much to turn this into a riot.
20. Tracks/aftermath: Reroll to see what traces they come across.

SITUATIONS

Roll 1d6 on the table below, then roll on the table above to determine who A and B are.

1. A desires B.
2. A wants to capture B.
3. A wants to harm or kill B.
4. A wants to go somewhere. B may wish to prevent this.
5. A wants to solve a mystery. B doesn't want the truth to be known.
6. A wants something. B may have it, or want to get it.

 

For more perilous encounters, check out my new ebook Monster Island Tales!  

 

 

After-Action Report: Basic Dungeons & Dragons at JiffyCon

(Blogging has been interrupted lately because I bought a new computer and had to spend far more time than I liked getting it set up. That's done, so with luck I can return to my two-or-three-times-a-week schedule.)

A couple of weeks ago, on October 28, I attended JiffyCon, a mini game convention held at Smith College's Seelye Hall (not to be confused with its counterpart, Unseelye Hall, which only appears at midnight during the dark of the moon). The Northampton game store Modern Myths sponsored and managed the con this year — which was how I heard about it in the first place, since I run a weekly game session in the shop.

Since 2017 marks the 40th anniversary of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, which brought roleplaying to the masses, I decided to take the opportunity to give modern gamers a taste of history. So I signed up to run a session of Basic D&D, using my ancient blue-box rulebook by John Eric Holmes (the box has long since disintegrated).

I created a classic old-school dungeon: "Into the Catacombs." The adventurers would be exploring the cellars and crypts to Normont Abbey, which mysteriously burned down in a single night fifty years ago, leaving no survivors. The PCs know that an old man in the village nearby mentioned a vast treasure still hidden under the abbey — and that the monks had brought about their own destruction by dabbling in the Black Arts.

The dungeon had four main sections: a cellar inhabited by a band of Goblin bandits, another cellar controlled by a pack of giant rats, the actual catacombs infested by zombies (the accursed undead monks), and a hidden demonic temple where the monks called up That Which They Could Not Put Down — and where the big fat treasure awaits. The complex also boasted a half-flooded room infested with giant frogs, some giant spiders, and that classic old-school monster: a Gelatinous Cube. I figured all that would keep us busy for a three-hour play session.

My dungeon did diverge from the Gygaxian paradigm in a couple of respects. First of all, it had almost no traps. That was simply because the concept (the abandoned cellars and catacombs of an abbey) just didn't seem like the kind of place you'd find concealed pits and deadfalls. Second, the dungeon wasn't very magical. It held monsters, including accursed walking dead monks, but I didn't put in any illusions or enchanted pools that reverse your alignment or whatever. Finally, I didn't include any puzzles or mysteries. That was mostly because I knew this was a one-shot with limited time. When you've only got three hours you don't want to spend two hours and forty-five minutes trying to figure out what the anagram over the door is supposed to mean.

I also created a whole lot of pre-generated characters for the party, because low-level characters in old-style D&D games die like teenagers in a horror movie. Following my self-imposed rule of doing everything old-school, I rolled the characters up according to the rules in the Basic Set: roll 3d6 for each attribute, in order, no substitutions. I did follow the "prime requisite" rule allowing fighting-men to trade unwanted Intelligence and Wisdom points for additional Strength, and magic-users to do the reverse to boost their Intelligence.

And so at 10:00 a.m. on a bright Fall morning, six intrepid players selected their characters for the venture Into the Catacombs. The party consisted of:

A Human Cleric (Strength 8, Wisdom 14, Charisma 8, 3 hit points, Armor Class 2, wearing plate mail and shield, armed with a Mace, a Wooden Cross, and a vial of Holy Water; Basic D&D clerics don't get any spells until 2nd Level).

Human Fighting-Man #1 (Strength 17, Charisma 11, 7 hit points, Armor Class 2, wearing plate mail and shield, equipped with a sword, short bow, and 50 feet of rope).

Human Thief #1 (Strength 11, Dexterity 15, 3 hit points, Armor Class 7, with leather armor, a short bow, and a dagger).

A Human Magic-User (Intelligence 11, Charisma 3, 4 hit points, Armor Class 9, armed with a dagger; 1 spell for the day from a list rolled randomly).

The Absurdly Powerful Elf Fighting-Man/Magic-User (Strength 16, Intelligence 12, Charisma 13, 3 hit points, Armor Class 2, wearing plate mail and shield, armed with a sword, can cast 1 spell from a list of six spells known).

Human Thief #2 (Strength 13, Dexterity 16, 2 hit points, Armor Class 7, equipped with leather armor, a short bow, a dagger, and 50 feet of rope).

It's instructive to compare this crew to a "modern" adventuring party. Since Dexterity doesn't give any advantage to defense in Basic D&D, everyone plates up in the heaviest armor they can afford. Much depends on the random roll for starting wealth; this particular bunch rolled well. Their hit points are miniscule — even a modern magic-user typically starts with at least 6 hit points. Here we've got a Fighting-Man with just 3.

The team began at sunset amid the burned-out ruins of the abbey, now covered by vines and shrubs. Two of the party heard faint noises from underground, and the group discovered a stone slab which seemed to be a hidden entrance. Rather than go charging in, they elected to toss a flask of oil down and set it alight, then close the slab again. This tactic failed to kill off any of the goblins down below, but the smoke did let the party spot another potential entrance, which they investigated: a crude chimney barely wide enough for an unarmored person to shinny down.

It also alerted the goblins, and a team of them snuck out through the flooded crypt, trying to take the interlopers from behind. The party spotted them and our first combat erupted! The players learned that in Basic D&D everyone uses the same table to hit, and all weapons do 1d6 damage. (This led one player to rely exclusively on shield-bashing attacks thereafter.) The skirmish with four goblins armed with clubs and slings left the PCs victorious, with a couple of minor injuries.

They decided to split the party, because that always leads to good results. One bunch went into the flooded crypt while the second team lifted the slab and tried to fool the goblins with a dummy improvised from goblin armor and brushwood. That didn't work against creatures with night vision, and the players learned that the goblins had at least one crossbow down there.

The crypt team fought off a killer frog and found the back entrance to the goblin lair. The magic-user explored the kitchen and the room used by the goblins to pickle giant frogs (for use in pies) while the Fighting-Man and thief pushed ahead toward the sounds of battle.

The sounds of battle were coming from the other half of the party. The Absurdly Powerful Elf took matters into his own hands and went down the stairs holding the unconvincing dummy in front of him, trying to intimidate the goblins. It didn't work, but his comrades hurried down to join the fight. One goblin managed to kill the Absurdly Powerful Elf, and another took down the second Thief. The party slew all the goblins but two: one bolted away up the stairs, the other surrendered, promising to show the humans where his leader kept the loot and the pickled frog pies.

The team also rescued two captives, replacing the casualties:

Halfling Thief (Strength 9, Dexterity 16, 2 hit points. Armor Class 7, with leather armor and a short bow).

Human Fighting-Man #2 (Strength 13, Dexterity 13, 7 hit points, Armor Class 7, equipped with leather armor and a short bow).

They gathered up the goblins' loot: 2,000 silver pieces, jewelry worth 200 gold, and some expensive rugs. They left the rugs to retrieve later, but took the coins.

Then, back through the flooded crypt (no frogs this time) to examine a pair of heavy doors in there. Those led into a mortuary chapel, which fortunately wasn't flooded, but unfortunately was home to several giant spiders. The heroes tried to chase the spiders away using torches — it worked on two of them, which retreated to the upper corners of the room, but the remaining spider wasn't scared, and instead dropped down onto the cleric. A brief but spirited battle resulted, with the cleric dead along with all three of the spiders.

It was getting close to the end of our time slot, and when the thief opened the door at the back of the chapel to reveal a long tunnel lined with burial niches — and a distant shambling humanoid shape — they decided to seal it off and retire with their loot. Game over.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the session (including me). Of course, I've been running games since, well, 1977, so I could probably manage an entertaining session using baseball cards for characters and rock-paper-scissors as the combat system. The players were amused by the game's quirks, and I was fascinated by the primordial DNA of certain game features. If I were to run it again I'd set it up as a two-parter, with a second session to let them finish exploring the catacombs.

What have you played lately?

 

For more adventures out of my fertile brain, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Island of Lost Games: Epiphany

Throughout the history of roleplaying as a hobby, there have been attempts to remove the dice from the games. The argument usually goes something like this: real life isn't random, at least not on the scales at which humans act in day-to-day life. Events have causes. So why do we roll dice to see if a skilled warrior can hit someone with a sword?

A second argument comes from storytelling: if the events of the story are determined randomly, then what's the point? (Signor Calvino, please sit down and stop trying to interrupt!)

So ever since the 1970s there have been attempts to create "diceless" roleplaying games. They have met with mixed success. The Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game system works pretty well and has a dedicated fan base, but even fans of the game agree that its system is tied to a specific type of fictional subgenre (fantasy intrigue), and wouldn't be as useful for something like Conan-esque sword and sorcery adventures.

The big problem is overcoming the inherent determinism in a diceless game. In the Amber books by Roger Zelazny, the character Benedict really is the greatest warrior — not just in the Universe, but in all possible universes. So in that setting, it's perfectly right and proper for the Gamemaster to resolve a battle between anyone else and Benedict with "You fight. He wins." Contrast that to the duels between equals or near-equals in The Three Musketeers: the question of who will win is always in doubt, a source of tension. Having the GM simply state "Rochefort has a higher Fencing rating so he beats you" would be unsatisfying.

So the big question for game designers is how to create a diceless system which still preserves uncertainty and tension? Well, that question was answered more than twenty years ago in 1995. It's called Epiphany, by Greg Porter.

Epiphany looks like a throwback to the first generation of roleplaying games. It's a 48-page stapled softcover with decent interior art (though more nipple-rings are on display than one would have seen in the original Dungeons & Dragons). The typeface is slightly goofy, in the tradition of mid-1990s desktop publishing, but one can actually read it, so no points off there.

The setting of Epiphany is pretty neat: it's set in the warm Arctic lands surrounding the giant hole at the North Pole which leads into the interior of the Hollow Earth, at some time during the last Ice Age. The entire region is called Hyperborea, and encompasses the kingdoms of Atlantis (inhabited by sorcerous quasi-Aztecs), Lemuria (Vikings), Mu (kind of intermediate between the two). All of them have a mix of pulp-fiction super-science, magic, and steampunk technology. Adventurers can travel to remote regions in their flying machines, but defend themselves with swords and muzzle-loading firearms.

Given the small size of the game book, setting information amounts to only ten pages or so, and is necessarily done in broad strokes. To actually run this game one would have to borrow liberally from Phil Masters's GURPS Atlantis, M.A.R. Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne, and Jeff Combos's Hollow Earth Expedition.

But that's not where Epiphany really shines. The strength of this game is in its diceless mechanics.

Characters start with one Attribute and two Abilities, and can gain more by taking Burdens. Attributes are chosen from a list of a dozen, grouped into Physical (Strength, Physique, Agility, and Endurance); Mental (Perception, Intelligence, Charisma, and Will); and Spiritual (Aura, Insight, Faith, and Serenity). These are not at all "granular" — if you have even 1 point in the Strength attribute that means you're notably stronger than other people.

Abilities are more free-form, like "Good Looks" or "Swordplay." The player relates his Abilities to an Attribute, though it's up to the player to justify which Attribute controls the Ability: a cunning thief could have the "Lockpicking" Ability linked to Intelligence, while another rogue could attach the same Ability to his Agility.

Characters can also have Boons, which are either social advantages or supernatural abilities, and can have Tools, which are pretty self-explanatory.

When resolving an action, the player totals up the Attributes, Abilities, and Tools his character is using. If that total is higher than the difficulty of the task (as set by the Gamemaster) then the character succeeds. Simple enough.

But when there's someone opposing the character, then it's a Challenge, and that's when things get interesting. Combat is an obvious Challenge: the players both total up their relevant advantages (Strength, Agility, swordsmanship, armor, a sword, and perhaps some situational advantages like "fighting with the sun at my back" or "ambush").

The two combatants allocate their respective advantages between attack and defense. This is done secretly, then both sides reveal at once. If one character's attack is greater than the other's defense, he scores a hit and the loser must abandon one advantage. So if my character is using his Agility, his Fencing ability, and a sword, I must decide which one to lose. I sacrifice Agility (the fight is wearing my character down), so the next round the character only has two advantages to use instead of three.

What makes it interesting is the secret allocation step: you don't know in advance if your foe is going to fight defensively, go for an all-out attack, or try to balance between the two. And he doesn't know what you're going to do, either! So an incredibly good fighter, with all the personal and material advantages, could still get hit by a novice if the rookie puts all his advantages into offense. Sure, the rookie's going to get hit, too — ability and equipment do give one an edge, after all — but the outcome isn't preordained, so there's still a place for tension.

It's a really neat system, and would adapt very easily to live-action roleplaying games as well, especially games where one-on-one combats are an important element, like The Three Musketeers or feudal Japan. Unfortunately, I've never seen any copies other than the one I bought directly from Greg Porter one year at Gen-Con. It's one of the greatest advances in roleplaying game mechanics and nobody's ever heard of it.

Maybe this 'blog post will change that. Maybe people will suddenly wake up and realize what they've been missing. Maybe they'll have an . . . Epiphany.

 

If you want to see my own works about strange creatures in exotic lands, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

We Have A Situation Here

Most roleplaying games display a curious paradox. The player-characters, the ones controlled by the players, are literally the only people in the game setting with free will, yet they tend to show a crippling lack of agency. Player-characters are forever getting hired by bossy patrons, handed orders by their commanders, or being assigned quests by passive-aggressive wizards.

There's the so-called "sandbox" style of play, in which the player-characters wander around a setting having encounters, but in practice that often devolves into either a series of muggings, or desperate flailing as the players look for some obvious adventure hook. Many game systems have "random adventure generators" but most of those could more accurately be called "mission generators" — ways to randomly determine what the bossy NPCs are telling the heroes to do.

Surely there must be a way to create adventures which aren't pre-scripted, preserving player agency, without leaving them with nothing to do except kill everyone they meet. I decided to come up with a way to randomly generate situations in the game setting, situations which could then be used to create adventures.

I began with George Polti's famous "36 Dramatic Situations" and then reduced the list based on what kind of physical actions the characters are likely to perform. So Polti's situation 3 (Vengeance for a crime) is physically the same as his situation 4 (Vengeance taken for kindred upon kindred): both involve killing or punishing someone.

Some of Polti's situations seem more like "backstories" to me: his situation 16 (Madness) isn't really a situation in itself but rather the potential cause of others (perhaps 2: Deliverance, or 19: Slaying of a kinsman unrecognized). The same applies to his 17 (Fatal imprudence) or 32 (Mistaken Jealousy). So those get dropped.

Since players make the moral choices for their characters, some of Polti's situations involving self-sacrifice or the consequences of bad choices don't really apply. My players may want to sacrifice themselves to save another . . . or they may run away. So those drop off the list. (Note that self-sacrifice is a theme of games like Delta Green, but that still can't be the hook for an adventure. Rather, it's an "emergent property" of the setting and the situation.)

Once you start this kind of reduction it's hard to stop. I finally managed to boil Polti's list down to a dice-friendly list of six situations.

So: how do we apply this list to a roleplaying game? Simple. Pick one non-player character or creature in the setting — if there's a random encounter table, just roll a die. That's person or element "A." Roll on the Situation Generator Table below. For additional elements (B, C, etc.) roll again on your encounter table or pick from the list of NPCs. Inanimate objects (represented on my table by "X") can be whatever seem appropriate, or possibly rolled on whatever "random treasure table" your game system features.

Now, notice that these aren't "missions." Simply because A wants object X doesn't mean A is going to hire the player-characters to get it. Maybe A is trying to steal it and the heroes have to protect it. Maybe the heroes learn of A's desire and can use that as leverage to get something they want from A. Maybe they will try to rob A's lair while A is away trying to get X. Whatever.

Generating situations rather than missions means the players can decide how to react. This puts more agency back in their hands — and frees the Gamemaster from the drudgery of shepherding the players along the path of a scripted adventure scenario.

Situation Generator Table (roll 1d6):

1. A desires B: Someone wants to win the love, loyalty, or services of another; or help that person escape from danger. There may be a guardian (C) who wants to keep B away from A, or a rival who also desires B.
2. A wants to capture B: Someone wants someone else alive, but that person resists. There may be a person C who wants to prevent this, or a rival who is also trying to catch B.
3. A wants B dead: Or ruined, or exiled, or whatever. Again, there may be guardians for B, rivals who also want B dead, or someone who wants to take B alive.
4. A wants to go someplace: This is either an escape (in which case there's some person B who wants to keep A from leaving), a journey (in which case there are encounters along the way), or an intrusion or attack into a place (in which case B may be guarding the destination).
5. A wants to solve a mystery: There is a secret A doesn't know; possibly some person (B) is trying to keep A from finding it out.
6. A wants X: Someone wants a thing. Its location may be unknown. It may belong to someone else (B). There may be a rival (C) who also wants it.

Worked example: to show the Situation Generator in action, let's turn to the venerable Dungeon Master's Guide for the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, by the mighty Gary Gygax himself. Consulting the random encounter tables for Rough terrain in a temperate climate*, I roll a 63: a Gynosphinx. Then rolling on my own Situation Generator I get a 2: A wants to capture B. I roll again on the random encounter table and get a 73: a Troll.

So the Sphinx wants to capture a Troll. How does this affect the player-characters? If they encounter the Sphinx she may bargain with them, asking if they've seen her quarry or demanding their help. They may simply see the Sphinx searching. If they run into the Troll it may beg for help hiding from the Sphinx, or offer to pay the heroes for protection. Perhaps they'll decide to capture the Troll themselves and trade it to the Sphinx for treasure or information.

Things can get very interesting once the Gamemaster has generated multiple situations in the same area. A second set of rolls for that same patch of Rough terrain indicates that some Orcs are looking for a magical Bowl of Commanding Water Elementals, which is currently guarded by a Wraith (evidently in a tomb). The Sphinx might know where that tomb is hidden. And why do the Orcs want the bowl?

I'm probably not the first person to take this approach to adventure generation, but I've made good use of it in games I've been running, and as always the random table makes a good spur to creativity. I'd love to hear feedback about this — has anyone else used a similar method? Are there situations I missed?

*God, this takes me back . . . 

 

For more situations from my brain, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Island of Lost Games: Nephilim

Nephilim, published by Chaosium in 1994, is one of the handful of French roleplaying games which have been translated or adapted into English-language editions — Steve Jackson Games's In Nomine is the only other one I'm familiar with. Compared to Anglophone games, the French ones all seem more cerebral, more mystical, and much more closely-coupled to real-world religious and occult beliefs.

When you pass a French occult roleplaying game to the American genius game designer Greg Stafford — who is also a scholar and devotee of shamanic spiritual practices — you get something strange and amazing. In the American version of Nephilim, the player-characters are ancient immortal spirit beings who have lived through multiple previous lives in human form, who are striving to gain magical knowledge and power in order to attain supreme enlightenment and transcend the material world. The feel is very much like its near-contemporary Vampire: The Masquerade, from White Wolf. (The Chaosium version of Nephilim came out in 1994, three years after Vampire.) You've got powerful supernatural beings with an array of different types and factions, living in secret among modern humans, and fighting against a variety of powerful conspiracies and ancient secret societies.

The main difference between the two is one of tone. Vampire is a horror game in which the characters are, frankly, monsters, and the main conflict is just how monstrous they allow themselves to become in the course of their intrigues and infighting. Nephilim is more straight-up urban fantasy in which the characters are trying to be morally better than ordinary humans. Guess which one found a bigger audience?

The underlying game engine of Nephilim is Chaosium's sturdy and reliable Basic Role-Playing system, with a few modifications for the elemental affinities and mystical powers of the Nephilim. The fact that the characters can have multiple past lives across human history creates a nifty bit of game balance mechanics: your past lives give you both mundane skills and mystical knowledge, but each incarnation reduces a character's magical power level. You can be wise but weak, or strong but naive. Having past lives also offers the gamemaster the chance to run "flashback" adventures set in the past, in which players can game out episodes in their characters' backstories.

The strong historical and "real occultism" focus of the game means the book is packed with (mostly) accurate info about mystical conspiracies and secret societies, ancient esoteric traditions, and things like Tarot and alchemy. Unsurprisingly to Those Who Know, one contributor to the game was a Chicago upstart named Ken Hite, who thereby kicked off a long career of Getting It Right in historical/occult gaming.

One lovely feature of Nephilim is its magic system. Not the system itself, actually, but the names of the spells that characters can learn in the game. While many of them are pretty straighforward ("Choking Vapor" creates a cloud of pungent smoke), the category of Summoning spells have wonderful names like "The Jade Flowers, Mysteries of the Dark Forests" or "The Spirits of the 24th Part of an Instant" or "The Powerful Pale Queen of Torment, With Tears of Flame." To be candid, the spell list was the primary reason I bought the game, as I was interested in maybe adapting some of the Nephilim material to Call of Cthulhu, as they have (sorta) compatible mechanics.

Nephilim is not without its flaws. The biggest one is simply the literally arcane nature of the game world — it has no easy point of access for players and gamemasters. For Call of Cthulhu, the hook is simple: you're characters in an H.P. Lovecraft horror story. Even if the players aren't familiar with Lovecraft's work, "characters in a horror story" gives them a lot of information about what the characters are likely to be doing. For Vampire, the hook is equally accessible: you're vampires. (And Vampire: The Masquerade even conveniently populates its game world with versions of all the popular fictional vampires, just to make it easier.) Whereas in a Nephilim game there's a lot of made-up cosmology the players have to digest just to create a character, let alone play.

The second is a problem shared by nearly all of the wave of what we can frankly describe as "Vampire knockoffs" of the same era: the designers wanted to contrast the superhuman powers of the characters with their status as powerless outsiders in society. The sample characters in Nephilim, for example, are a goth rock-band leader, a bike messenger, a "loser," a con man, a graduate student, and so on. There isn't much wish-fulfilment fantasy in any of those roles. And more integrated, socially-powerful roles just tie the characters to jobs, family responsibilities, and all the other things people play roleplaying games to escape. You wind up with all the bother of real life and Templar assassins.

I bought Nephilim in North Carolina in 1995 or thereabouts, but never played it. I created a couple of characters to try out the system, but never got the spark of inspiration to write any adventures. Now that I've re-read Nephilim for the first time in twenty years I actually do think it would be an interesting game setting, but not in the way the creators intended. Suppose that, instead of immortal superbeings living as bike messengers, the player-characters were ordinary humans, possibly with an interest in the occult, who become aware of this secret world and get swept up in its conflicts. That way the players can learn the game's cosmology bit by bit rather than in an appalling dose right at the beginning. Maybe give them one sympathetic Nephilim as a mentor, but otherwise play up the literally inhuman nature of these beings, and their indifference to human concerns. The villainous secret societies may still be bad guys, but they can be open to temporary alliances and "nonaggression" agreements with the heroes. That might be a fun game to run . . .

 

For stories of strange creatures in the modern world, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Island of Lost Games: Dream Park

One could write a whole series of blog posts on the theme of "unlikely licensed roleplaying games," and somewhere near the top of that list (but below GURPS Planet Krishna) you would undoubtedly find Mike Pondsmith's Dream Park: The Roleplaying Game, from R. Talsorian Games.

The 1981 novel Dream Park, by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, was a fun science fiction/fantasy/mystery set in a futuristic amusement park (called Dream Park, duh) which combines advanced hologram technology (i.e. magic) with elaborate big-budget live-action roleplaying games. In the Dream Park future, game creators are rock star celebrities — well, at least indie rock star level — especially since high-powered computer technology takes the place of the enormous design and programming teams required for real-life games. The novel focuses on a Dream Park company policeman who has to go undercover in an ongoing game in order to solve a murder. The game itself is a wild World War II Cargo Cult fantasy adventure, so the reader can enjoy three simultaneous plot arcs: the mystery, the fantasy game storyline, and the interactions among the players in the game. The authors scored two direct predictive hits: first that games would become an industry rivaling film in scale, and that large audiences would enjoy watching other people play a game.

But while it's fun to read about people playing a game, it's awfully "meta" to actually sit down a play a game in which your characters are people playing a game. (Adding to the meta-ness is the fact that much of the rulebook is written as a guide to the "home tabletop version" of the games played at the "real" Dream Park, with sidebars by some of the characters from the novel, as well as others by Mike Pondsmith and Niven & Barnes.)

Dream Park: The Roleplaying Game was published in 1992, a slim 126-page softcover with a nice color painting on the cover and decent line art inside. R. Talsorian Games always paid more attention to art and book design than their competitors, and it shows.

I think the game was designed to appeal to fans of the novel who might not be familiar with roleplaying games otherwise, because the boilerplate "what is roleplaying?" section at the beginning is quite extensive, especially for 1992, almost a generation after Gygax and Arneson discovered polyhedra. The game comes with two pages of ready-to-run characters, nicely color printed on cardstock. (I never cut mine out.) The "character sheets" are tiny, just 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches. Everything is aimed at the most casual of casual gamers.

But there's a solid game-mechanics engine underneath the novice-friendly approach. Everything, including combat, is resolved by rolling a single 6-sided die. You roll and add your skill, your target rolls and adds its Dodge ability, and whoever gets the higher result wins. If it's a task rather than a fight, compare your result to the Difficulty level assigned by the gamemaster. It's simple but not overly so — change the cube to an icosahedron and you've essentially got the D20 engine which currently runs the two most popular roleplaying systems out there.

If you're not satisfied with ready-to-play characters there are 40 pages (a third of the book!) of character-creation rules, with everything from swords to blasters to spells to superpowers. As Pondsmith casually admits in a sidebar, this is really a robust multigenre roleplaying system. All the kids were doing that in those days.

About a quarter of the book is devoted to sample adventures and gamemastering advice. Some of the adventures are ultra-simple one-page scenarios, good for an introduction or a couple of hours around the dining table. But there's also some nice discussion of story beats and how to mix combat scenes, chases, dramatic revelations, and all the panoply of techniques storytellers have devised over the past few millennia. Pondsmith even touches on non-linear "sandbox" style scenario design.

Overall, this is a good game, as one would expect from the man who created Teenagers From Outer Space, Cyberpunk 2020 and Castle Falkenstein. I think one could easily use this as a "starter game" for novices or as the engine for a homebrew game which doesn't easily fit with existing systems. I doubt that Dream Park would stand up to a long-term campaign, though. It seems to have been designed for one-shot scenarios or limited-series adventures like the ones in the novel.

I'm not entirely sure where I picked up Dream Park. The publication date suggests I must have gotten it while I lived in Durham, North Carolina, but it's possible I picked it up at one of my old haunts during a visit to New Orleans. I never played it, but I did write an adventure for the game which I tried to peddle to some of the game magazines I was writing for back then. I don't think I ever sold it; Dream Park just wasn't a popular enough "property" for any magazine to devote space to it. And that, I suspect, sums up the fundamental problem that kept this game from becoming better known. Even a best-selling science fiction novel is not really "big" enough to generate the fanbase to support a game line. Best-selling books move hundreds of thousands of copies. Failed movies and TV shows have millions of viewers. And in 1992, before Kickstarter funding and direct sales over the Internet, a game based on a ten-year-old novel just couldn't make it.

If you want stories about people who aren't playing games, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Island of Lost Games: Droids

(Sorry for the hiatus. Events happened.)

No, it has nothing to do with Star Wars. Droids is a fascinating and unique little roleplaying game which came out in 1982 from a company called Integral Games, in Arlington, Texas. The lead designer was Neil Patrick Moore, and according to the RPGGeek Web site Droids is his only title.

The game itself looks like a Traveller supplement: it's an 80-page stapled 5 1/2" by 8 1/2" black book, using the same clean interior layout format that Game Designers' Workshop used, and maybe five illustrations total. (In fact, my copy spent the past 35 years in the box of Traveller books.) It cost $7.95 new, at a time when a paperback novel was about a dollar cheaper.

So what's it about? Well, droids, mostly. In Droids, all the characters are intelligent robots in a post-apocalyptic world after a revolt of the machines wiped out humanity. Instead of rolling up a character with dice, you design one with a starting budget of twenty "Construction Points" (CP), which can be spent on things like locomotion systems, manipulating arms, weapons, powerplants, sensors, armor, and so forth.

There are some fun options in those lists of components: your locomotion can be wheels or legs — but can also be exotica like a helium balloon, a boat hull with a sail, or a tunnelling drill! Weapons include guns, lasers, and energy beams, as well as torpedo tubes for boat droids, and the "Fluid Gun," which is a giant Super-Soaker loaded with acid, freon, or glue.

So, yes, you can play The Terminator, marching around with a machine-gun arm, but you can just as easily be a glue-spraying balloonist droid, or a tunnelling mine-layer.

The characters exist in a lawless wasteland, and must cope with other droids, robot drones controlled by large computerized factories, natural and artificial hazards, and maybe a few deathtraps left behind by the long-gone humans. Combat is pretty straightforward, with a hit location system based on the size of the droid's components. So if your biggest module is a powerplant, that powerplant's going to get hit more often than smaller parts will. There's also a system to track wear and tear on components, which get more likely to break down if not properly maintained. It's all very clean and intuitive.

Droids does have the most unusual character advancement and/or treasure mechanic I've ever seen in a roleplaying game. When your character wins a fight against another droid, you can loot the wrecked body of your foe, detaching usable parts and bolting them onto yourself (or just carrying them to trade later). In D&D terms, the "monsters" become both the "treasure" and the "experience points" in a very direct and literal fashion. That right there makes this game something special. You're not just playing humans in robot costumes, you're playing machines, with a very different sense of identity than living organisms would have.

The game didn't include much gamemastering advice. There's maybe a page about possible droid societies, another page about random encounters, and a very simple three-page "dungeon" adventure set in a derelict factory. But in conjunction with something like Gamma World (or Metamorphosis Alpha . . .) it wouldn't be hard to create a much more elaborate setting in which the droids can explore, discover and solve mysteries, and perhaps build a society of their own.

As with so many relics from the Island of Lost Games, I never got the chance to play Droids. I did, however, include a tip of that hat to this obscure pioneer in an article I wrote for Steve Jackson Games's Pyramid magazine, called "CybEarth." It was about a distant planet inhabited entirely by robots after the human colonists were wiped out in a mysterious disaster. Most of the robots had created weird variations on the defunct human societies on their world, so I had Musketeer robots and Victorian robots and giant transforming-mecha Samurai robots. But one part of the planet was an anarchic wasteland where lawless feral robots roamed, fighting each other to survive. As in Droids, the survivors in that harsh part of the world were made of salvaged bits and pieces from defeated enemies. It was an homage that maybe half a dozen people could have noticed. 

Once again I ask the teeming millions out there: has anyone ever played Droids? It always seemed as though it would be a fun game, especially for a one-shot at a convention or the game store. Perhaps I'll make up some enemies and run a session some time.

(If you like stories featuring interesting nonhuman perspectives, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!)