Cut with Our Own Dust

"Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, like diamonds we are cut with our own dust."
-- John Webster

I started a different post for today, but it is really not coming together the way I want it to.  I have a system for writing just about everything (I know you are shocked).  The post I wanted to make has not only broken my system, it has shattered it and scattered the pieces to the four winds.  Since I am on a self-imposed deadline and time is winding down, I will change over to a different topic and try to wrangle with the original post when I have more time, patience, and a better idea of how to tackle it.

Instead, today I will reintroduce a pitch that I made to the weekly group last year.  At the time I developed a paltry five different game ideas and presented them.  As there were four players, I allowed each one to eliminate one of the pitches and then we played what was left.  That process ended in the Supers game that I have mentioned a time or two already.  One of the other pitches has made an appearance earlier in the month.  The other two have potential as well and may show up after this month is over.  Today, however I want to talk about dust.  Specifically Other Dust.

A few years ago, author Kevin Crawford came out with a pretty nifty space game called Stars Without Number. The game is an intriguing mix of old school and newer mechanics. And even better, the game is free.  He does have a spiffier version that you can pay cash for, but the free SWN is complete and playable on its own.  Unlike so many other free games, looking this one over does not give the reader the impression that they got what they paid for.  SWN is, in fact, pretty damn good.  The true innovation Crawford creates was a system of keyword that the game master can attach to a place (in this case planet) to use as shorthand in case the players decide to go there some day.  When someday arrives, the GM uses the keywords to flesh out the location.  Looking at what I wrote, what he did does not seem very impressive, but I assure you that is the limitation of descriptive ability and not his product.  The system is amazing, adaptable and deserves better than the vocabulary I possess to describe it.

With the publication of SWN, Crawford made a name for himself as a solid game designer and has developed a bit of a following among independent minded gamers.  Capitalizing on his success, Crawford has adapted his keyword system to other genres.  Other Dust, which shares a history with SWN is his post-apocalyptic entry.  It uses a system compatible with  SWN, but different enough that the characters feel like survivors instead of citizens of the stars.  The setting is Earth, but one that had already colonized the stars before the end came.  Events in SWN reveal that Earth was abandoned.  The history of Other Dust reveals what happened to those who were abandoned.  I find that combination of stories irresistible and  something I would like to explore.

The Pitch

When the cities look like this, maybe
 it is time to look to the stars.

When it was obvious that Earth had finally succumbed to the years of greed, environmental devastation, and subsequent natural disasters, those who could afford it took to the stars.  You were lucky enough to win the lottery and secure a berth on one of the last sleeper ships off of the planet.  Unfortunately, when you finally emerged from the decades of cryo-sleep, you found that your ship was damaged and never made it off the dying planet.   Now you and your fellow survivors must make your way in this strange new earth, a planet that did not actually die, but did not quite survive either.  Using your limited amount of old world equipment, can you and your fellow shipmates navigate what the world has become?  And when a stranger offers you the chance at salvation, can you overcome the obstacles that stand between you and a more permanent sanctuary? Adventures will begin with PCs just trying to survive in the unfamiliar remnants of their former world, but a definite goal will eventually present itself, if the players have the fortitude to finish what they started.

The Heartbreak of Desolation

Even with the ever greater encroachment of things that are only tangentially related, Gencon is undoubtedly the biggest annual event in American tabletop gaming.  It is THE place where gamer companies shill their products and gamers gather to buy them.  On one level that is a very good thing for both parties, the game companies have a very direct conduit to their target audience while the gamer with money has almost unlimited ways to trade that currency for product.  For the small publisher, however, this situation can often work against them.  Every year there are new, fresh faced designers who come to Gencon to sell the game that they have been working on on in their basement for years/decades.  It is their labor of love and they have brought it to the gaming mecca so that they can share that object of their obsession with the world.

The problem comes when the dealer halls open up and thousands of people come crashing into the room.  These new fledgling games are surrounded by other better established game lines, each with a shiny new project to sell.  The gamer's budget is limited (and for some non-existent).  Once Paizo, Mayfair, and Fantasy Flight have taken their chunk out of that small pie there is often very little left for those small, first time publishers.   

Now, sometimes that is just market forces working their magic.  Some of those labors of love are not really that much different than so many things that have come before.  ("But our fantasy world is so different!  Our elves are blue!")  Others are so far from the mainstream sensibilities that they seem to be more an exorcism of the designer's personal demons than a playable game.  ("But our fantasy world is so different!  Our elves eat their young to power their magic!").  Every year though, there are a handful of new products that have a new or at least fresh take on their genre without being so decidedly odd that they could never gain a following.  Unfortunately, the market is so tough that most of those games fail too.

Exhibit A.

One of the best examples of a game that came to Gencon and fell through the cracks is Desolation by Greymalkin Designs.  The core rulebook is a beautiful hardback with professional production values.  The artwork is evocative, feature some gorgeous color art in the center section, and maps by William McAusland.  The premise, of a near-Utopian fantasy society that has been recently shattered by a huge magic purge, is accessible, yet fresh enough to provide a unique roleplaying experience.  And yet, even as I was paying for the game at the booth, I could tell that the game was probably doomed to membership in the Dead Games Society within a year or two.  The booth was sandwiched among a number of well known properties, and looked more than a bit forlorn.   Also, in its original state, it uses a modified version of the Ubiquity system (originally used in the game Hollow Earth Adventures) which employs a very odd dice mechanic which can be, frankly, off-putting.

The game world, however, has a lot to recommend it.  The setting begins in a fantasy world eighteen months after a magical cataclysm occurred.  Before the catastrophe, the Ascondian Empire stood as a bastion of civilization in the known world.  By harnessing magic the Ascondians were able to make tremendous advances in agriculture, architecture, medicine, and culture.  The Empire became a model which other nations resented and admired in turn.  Even as the Ascondian's reached higher, however, the metaphysical tensions of the magic/technological union began.  Using magic could physically harm the practitioner.  The Burn, a fatigue based damage, afflicted every magic user.  Magicians used a number of means to dampen the effects of the burn, causing the magical backlash to manifest itself in a more dramatic way, the Night of Fire. 

The Dwarven race was almost wiped out as their mountain
holdfasts,  augmented by Ascondian magic, collapsed and
became their graves. 

As the sun set across the world one evening, the magical backlash manifested itself as a world spanning cataclysm.  For lack of a better term, the magic took itself back.  Magical items lost their abilities.  The huge, physics defying edifices created by the Ascondians crumbled in a moment.  The evidence of magic as a force of nature became evident as storms erupted, mountains collapsed, rivers changed course, and great chasms opened in the earth, some swallowing entire villages.  Forests burned, or turned to stone.  Stone melted or became ice.  By the following morning, almost no part of the land remained unaffected.

In the aftermath, the survivors are forced to learn to survive in a world where their previous reliance on magic is shattered.  Magic still works, but without the previous ways to mitigate the Burn, recreating the old traditions is not an option.  In an evening, the world has gone from High to Low Magic.  Those who can still weave spells must also contend with sometimes angry resistance from other survivors who worry that the effects of the casting might bring a recurrence of the Night of Fire.  

The setting offers some interesting twists on the usual fantasy races as well.  Humans come in several different flavors.  The Ascondians are the baseline human race and are analogous to a Romanesque people who expanded from their small city state into an empire using magic and force, but incorporated conquered foes into the fold much as Rome did.  Other human races from the lands outside Ascondian sway exist as well.  The few remaining Dwarves come in two varieties, Mountain Dwarves who seem intent on reclaiming what is left of their mountain holdfasts, and Desert Dwarves who have taken their knowledge to the salt mines of the Saikin Wastes.  The Elves of the world, while they did not necessarily share the technological bent of the Ascondians, were just as sorely pressed when the Night of Fire dramatically reduced their reliance on magic.  Lonarians are the small folk of the world.  Island folk, the Lonarians are a somewhat savage and strange folk who use curse magic to great effect.  Two more original races round out the Desolation role call: Mongrels and Rovers.  Mongrels are a catch all of mixed parentages.  No two mongrels look quite alike, making them the most downtrodden of pre-cataclysm races.  Now that the "great" races have been laid low, some Mongrels see the modern age as a time when they can excel as well.  Rovers can be best described as sea faring gypsies.  The are traders who live in great ship cities, and sometimes come ashore.  Their society is expressed by an intricate series of bodily tattoos that tell their life story to those who know how to read them.  While they resemble humans, they are a distinct species, and some may even possess gills.  Kinda like Kevin Costner in Waterworld, only not nearly so lame.

This is a very open world.  One that allows for both a wide variety of characters and adventures.  On one hand, I could see the characters all being from the same village trying to rebuild before some combination of winter and invaders came.  In this type of game, the characters would have a definite home base and could venture out as need dictates.  On the other hand, a game in which the characters are all travelers of differing backgrounds would be equally possible.  In this setup the players could come from virtually any background, but have decided to travel together for the safety that numbers provides.  For a game set in the world of Desolation, I think I would sit down with the players and let them decide which style of game they would prefer.

The earth is broken and I am out of glue

I have an affinity for post apocalyptic stories of a certain stripe.  Heroes struggling to survive in a world ripped apart by cataclysm or the folly of man is the sort of narrative that touches a nerve in me.  This disposition transcends medium as well.  My favorite book is I am Legend by Richard Matheson.  I am equally a fan of two of the three film adaptions of this work.  The creepy, low budget Italian version Last Man on Earth starred Vincent Price and was pretty good for what it was.  The 70s version The Omega Man departs radically from the original work, but has reserved a spot in my affection because a) I saw it well before I read the book and liked it for its own funky merits, b) the existence of this movie led me to seek out the book, and c) it had the decency to change the title when it took the basic premise of a work and then jacked it around significantly.  It is this last reason that I have a sincere problem with the actual titled adaption that starred Wil Smith a couple of years back.  I understand that some things get lost in the translation from page to film.  Changing every damn thing about the the premise, plot, location, and moral of a story and then calling it the original story is just low and dirty.

My love of the genre, however, transcends this one work. The Road Warrior movies also figure strongly in my story telling reserve.  A number of zombie movies, particularly Dawn of the Dead, overlap the PA genre. Usually it is the struggle-to-survive parts of those movies that I enjoy more than the actual walking dead parts.  Even the Resident Evil movies that I seem to like, even though I couldn't really tell you why I like them, have a strong survival element in them.

Aw, hell!  Everybody knows this is why I like the Resident Evil movies.

There are a number of good PA roleplaying games out there.  The original Gamma World had its merits.  Fantasy Games Unlimited's offerings were always too scarce and expensive for me to have ever gotten a copy of Aftermath! back when it was in print, although they are now readily available on DriveThruRPG.  More modern offerings include Fantasy Flights' Redline, the criminally little known Motocaust, the much better known Darwin's World, the WAY over the top Mutant Epoch,  and the quirky, but brilliant Other Dust (which I will likely make an entry about later in the month).  I reserve a spot of honor for nifty (and now  FREE!) Atomic Highway, the rules for the last PA game I ran, which also happened to be the first TPK I delivered in my adult game mastering experience. Steve Jackson Games even touched on the genre with the Y2K rulebook although much of that material seemed immediately outdated and quaint as soon as our computers did not implode at the turn of the millennium.  Mr. Jackson has reserved writing an actual GURPS Apocalypse sourcebook for himself.  Since he no longer actually produces more than the occasional bit of GURPS material, it seems likely that the apocalypse will actually occur before the SJG sourcebook will.

There are a lot of flavors of AP out there, from the brutal and gritty (Darwin's World) to the straight "everyone has four arms and laser eyes" gonzo (Mutant Epoch).  My favorite games in this realm, however, are scale back on the mutant animals and go for a more realistic (or at least less fantastic) experience.  One recent game world that really seems to strike balance I like is Broken Earth from Sneak Attack Press.  Broken Earth has been adapted to both Savage Worlds and Pathfinder, so there is a PA version for both the rules lite and the complex RPG enthusiast.  

Pathfinder cover art for Broken Earth.

 The setup is not astoundingly original. In the near future, the world powers collectively lose their minds and drop the bombs.  World civilization as we know it it over quite suddenly.  The present for the world is 2114.  The world population is now only a fraction of what it one was.  The remaining enclaves of people struggle to survive in a world where safety and security are the scarcest commodities of all. Technology is still around, but frequently there is no way to power it, few people who understand how it works, and even fewer that trust it.  This would make for a terrible world for most of us to live in, but it seems like the perfect place for Player Characters to run around in.

The science of the collapse, the authors admit would likely not hold up to rigorous scientific scrutiny.  It does, however, seem to have an internal consistency.  If you are willing to believe that a nuclear holocaust that could kill 99.9% of the human population could also leave enough of a world viable enough to support the remaining .1%, then the rest of the scientific improbabilities are really minor leaps of logic.  Certain humans have mutated into a new strain of existence. The unchanged humans dubbed those who mutated as Freaks, a name the changed have chosen to embrace.  In addition, some humans and freaks have developed psionic powers, mostly of the relatively mundane telepathy/telekinesis variety.  As a final wrinkle, while there are likely no humans still alive from the days of the apocalypse, a few experimental, synthetic life forms that resemble humans enough to pass among the population unnoticed are present in the setting with an unknown agenda.

Savage Worlds cover art for Broken Earth.

In the campaign I would like to run, the players begin as members of a small village near, but not a part of, several of the factions available in the game setting.  A sudden midnight attack leaves the players on the run, the whereabouts of loved ones in doubt, and the continuing existence of the community a doubtful proposition.  Can the players save their loved ones, or at least avenge their deaths?  If the community cannot be preserved, do the survivors relocate, seek admission into one of the other local communities, or strike out for Wrighttown, the closest thing to a city that remains in this shattered world, to seek their fortune?  Of course, the attackers may have designs on the players as well. 

Lastly, what is the source of that ever-present hum that only one of the PCs hears?  Could it be the source of the occasional violent outbursts that cause a lot of people to avoid that character?