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?    

Roleplaying on the Razor's Edge

Some game masters like ninjas.  Some like robots.  I tend to prefer pirates and their landlubbing cousins bandits.  It is pretty easy to figure out that someone who is willing to kill you and take your stuff is probably the bad guy.  Let that sink in for a moment.

When a new, piratey RPG product comes out, I generally take note.  Many of the items either seem to be reworking familiar material or just jamming pirates into an otherwise standard fantasy adventure. Sometimes, the material rises above that level and I take notice.  Razor Coast is one such product.

 At Gencon last year, I spent a good chunk of the trip dithering over whether I would buy the Razor Coast book or not.  At $100 the price was steep!  I will admit that the product was packed with material.  It was also a huge book, 432 pages for the Swords and Wizardry version I bought (544 pages for the Pathfinder version of virtually the same material!) and full color throughout. It is equal parts source book, adventure source book, and game master guide.  Finally, on the last day with a matching donation from Eric, I went ahead and made the purchase.  In order to make it worthwhile, though, we will actually have to play the game.

It is interesting to compare this product with Freeport as they both nominally mine the same territory: a mashup of Pirates and Fantasy.  It is truly a credit to Razor Coast that it really has very little in common with Freeport.  Where the older product is set on a small island chain that is close enough to a home continent to prey on well established trade lanes on an existing continent, Razor Coast has a very different feel.  Port Shaw, the central location of the game is a colony port, far removed from the mainland.  To give it a buzzword tagline it feels like Fantasy Pirates of Polynesia.

To be sure, the colonizers fill some of the usual fantasy tropes, but the setting details feel very different.  The natives are of a Pacific tribal bent, hard pressed to reconcile their current oppressed status with their warrior past.  Meanwhile, there are threats and machinations from on land, under the sea, and even from within.  The local volcano god may very well be real, and if he is, he is pissed!  The local enemies are of an interesting stripe as well:  Alligator men in the swamps, Weresharks  ply the deep, and mutated cannibal pygmies await the unwary.  I cannot express how much I want to unleash mutant cannibal pygmies on my players!

Weresharks.  These aren't in your daddy's Monster Manual.

In his blog, Zak Sabbath posts a lot of things that I thoroughly agree with, a few things that I completely disagree with, and a disturbingly large number of things that I do not understand.  Recently in the post I like RPGs..., there was a LOT of the things I agree with.  One of the statements he made that I really agree with was this: "I almost even kinda like that published modules are almost uniformly an object lesson in how much worse published modules are than what you could invent at home." Fortunately, while there is much truth to this sentiment, a great deal of the adventure material for Razor Coast does not fit into that category.  While I would not wish to use everything as written, there are some plots and scenes within the material that I would want to use without wholesale changes.

My campaign idea for Razor Coast allows the players a lot of rope when creating characters.  A mix of natives, citizens of Port Shaw, and new arrivals would all fit for what I have in mind.  They will all begin the game in Port Shaw one personal business, but circumstances will cast them together and force some initial cooperation.  Afterward, the adventures will interweave the best elements of the "adventure path" from the original book, plot elements of my own device, and the usual ramifications of player actions into a singularly tasty seafood chowder.  With weresharks.  And mutant cannibal pygmies.

One more picture of a wereshark.  Because I do not have any
good pictures of mutant cannibal pygmies. And because...
wereshark.

Role Out the Red Carpet

One genre that I have never run much before is hard science fiction.  I have played in it very little over the years as well.  In the last three years, however, the Sunday crew has done some dabbling in the genre.  The first game for the Sunday crew was a Serenity game that ran for about a dozen sessions.  One of the other GMs in the group ran a Star Frontiers/Savage Worlds that lasted a good chunk of last year.  I suppose you could consider my Savage Mars game Sci Fi as well, although I really would classify it more as Sword and Planet or Pulp Science Fantasy.

This isn't Traveller.  It is the Larry Elmore cover art for Star
Frontiers.  I am putting it here because some of my fellow
gamers  like it.  That is all.

I have, however, had a couple of run-ins with the grandfather of Sci Fi roleplaying, Traveller, over the years.  In fact, my first experience came in the summer of 1985 when I rolled up a character and played a far trader for a couple of sessions.  I am sure that it is some kind of blasphemy to say that I found the experience lacking.  The vaunted character creation system (in which you role dice and consult charts to determine your character's skills, and a bad die role could end in the death of your character before you ever played him) seemed interesting enough, but the game itself left me flat.  That happened so long ago, that I do not remember much about why I was so unimpressed.  I will say, however, that the guy who introduced it to me turned out to be a nut job, so perhaps that colored my perception.

It probably did not help that Traveller went through such a bewildering array of editions, each with a different rules set.  I was about to list them all here, but even researching it led to such a bewildering array of variants and editions that it began to give me a headache.  The upshot of it is:  there are a LOT of different games that call themselves Traveller.  Even in the olden days when there wasn't the proliferation of roleplaying products that we currently enjoy, there was enough variety out there to avoid the space game that could not seem to decide what it wanted to be.

As you can see, the cover art for the original edition left
 something to be desired as well.

My attitude on Traveller began to change sometime in the early 2000s, when I was part of a gaming group that rotated GMing duties.  Once, when the sessions cycled out of my hands the next GM offered up a game of GURPS Traveller in which we would play Imperial marines.  Since I don't care for military style RPGs and I didn't care much for Traveller either, I was initially not very enthused at the beginning of the game.  Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised. Since I had no practical knowledge about the game world, I played a character that didn't have any either.  Private Calvin Ricks took his weapon, pointed it at whatever the bosses told him to, and shot things.  A lot of things.  I came away from the game with some weird incorrect impressions as well.  For example, somehow I thought the rebellious "Sword Worlders" we were fighting actually dressed like Vikings at first.  The game was a good one, but one that I couldn't devote my full attention to.  Changes in my work schedule made my attendance spotty, a situation that I am afraid contributed to the demise of that group entirely.

The core rule book for GURPS Traveller took all the
 evocative  imagery of the original version and
added a spiffy red border.

Still, I came away with the idea that the GURPS iteration of Traveller was self contained enough.  I understood the game system even if I did not know much about the game background. When I started thinking about what kind of space game I could run, Traveller suddenly became a more attractive option.  In the last couple of years, I have amassed most of the GURPS Traveller material and even branched out into other versions of the game as well (including at least one that I intend to write up later in the month).

The classic setting for Traveller is a sector of space known as the Spinward Marches.  This area is a bit of a borderland, where systems of under more or less human Imperial control rest uncomfortably next to the aggressive, leonine featured Aslan, the lupine Vargyr, the psionic Zhodani, and the insectoid Droyne among others.   The Marches are a frontier land, where fortunes can be won and lost all in a single faster-than-light jump from one system to the next.  The ultimate disposition of this frontier is not yet settled, leaving plenty of room for some enterprising individuals to make their fortune.  Or perhaps, to die on the surface of some hostile asteroid.  You know, whatevs.

Aslan

Droyne

Zhodani

Vargyr

The Imperium is a  pretty expansive place. Most sectors of space have never seen a member of the ruling family in their entire history.  For the millennial celebration of the Imperium, however, the royal family has decided to change all that.  Various royals are travelling throughout their holdings and visiting each sector.  Naturally, the competition to woo the royal visit to specific worlds within a sector, and then to impress them on the visit can lead to some very dirty dealing.  Of course, not everyone is a fan of the royal family either…

The characters will all begin the game as employees of an Interstellar Company, one with a typically shady past.  As events progress, the group may become involved with the larger craziness of the pending royal visit.

The game will allow the players to be a “trouble shooting” crew for their employer.  This allows for both a wide variety of characters, and for an eclectic mix of potential adventures.  Some stories may contain direct references to the Imperial backstory, while others may have absolutely nothing to do with it (or do they?).

Midnight in the Garden of Evil and... More Evil

When the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons arrived in 2000, it came with a gift, a new way of thinking about things:  the open gaming license (OGL).  The OGL made it possible for third party publishers to create material for the newest edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game (at the time of course).  And create material they did.  Some of the third party content was excellent (Freeport and Ptolus).  Some of it was Terrible with a capital T.  Most of it, however, got buried in an absolute glut more or less dubious products.  The good material often could not find an audience.

One of the products that did find a bit of success was Midnight.  Fantasy Flight Games published a massive core book that went through two editions and a baker's dozen of supplemental material.  It even spawned a made-for-tv movie pilot that never became a series. In 2009, Fantasy Flight devoted themselves full time to making good, but ridiculously complicated board games and dropped the line entirely.  After a long hiatus, the products are once again available on DrivethruRPG.

Midnight has been described as Lord of the Rings if Sauron had won.  I have always found those sorts of pitch phrases reductive, but for the uninitiated, that description does serve a purpose.  The game is set on a continent that has been subjugated by the minions of a once defeated God.  This entity escaped his confinement, raised an army of Orcs in the frozen North and conquered a land that scarcely realized he was still a threat.  A hundred years after the frozen God's return, the human population has been subjugated. Elves and Dwarves have been run to ground and hunted almost to extinction.  The halfling population is routinely enslaved, while gnomes work as collaborators with the Orc occupiers and the God's omnipresent Church of the Shadow.  The Church is dominated by the Night Kings, powerful sorcerers (one is even a dragon) tasked with keeping the entire continent under their thumb.

The Night Kings.  Guaranteed to get your next party
 shut down by the cops.

In this world, magic is proscribed for all but priests of the Church.  As a result, magical items are scarce and generally of the relic variety.  The subjugated populations, however, have not completely given up the practice of magic.  In secret they create charms: small single (or limited) use magic items that generally grant skill or attribute bonuses. Possession of even these meager boons is subject to death, but their very presence shows the will to resist the occupation persists, even as the years of occupation drag on.

As far as fantasy games go, this one is pretty bleak.  The game material states explicitly that the world is so tightly under the control of the frozen god that it will likely never break free.  Into such a world, heroes are often born only to be crushed under the filthy Orkin boots.  So why, then would anyone want to game in such a world?

To answer that, I look to the words of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.  Real courage, he told his children comes "when you know you are licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do."  The Frozen God is evil and the Church of Shadow is pervasive.  Still, they cannot be everywhere.  Maybe the players, who must start from meager beginnings, can bring a little light to their corner of the world.  If the light in that corner shines bright enough, perhaps it might allow for a little light somewhere else as well.

That's a lot of water

In the 33 years that I have been roleplaying, I have run some great campaigns.  My college Autoduel game from the late 1980s is the one I usually point to when I want to highlight my greatest achievement, but certainly I have some less distant successes as well.  My recent Savage Mars game would have to rank pretty high on the list.  The first big Legend of the Five Rings campaign I ran circa 2000 which ran nearly 80 sessions and had the players begging on Friday night to play again on Saturday and Sunday would have to be in the discussion as well.  When everything clicks in a game, it can be a magical experience.

For every one of those transcendent games, however, there is a failure (or three) as counterbalance.  Some games fizzle out due to scheduling problems, or apathy.  In others, some critical portion of the group finds that they do not like the rules, or the genre.  I have even had a couple of TPK instances over the years.  I like to think that I know my limitations and do not take on games where my game mastering skills or interests will be the cause of the problem.  Consequently, the number of truly massive campaign failures over the years that I was wholly responsible for are thankfully small.

And then there is GURPS Riverworld.

There are not a lot of pictures from the game online, but the
 cover art  for this book was among the best Steve
Jackson Games ever produced.

I began a GURPS Riverworld campaign for the Bowling Green Mafia crew about fifteen years ago.  I lasted two sessions.  Two miserable, horrible, awful, terrible sessions.  They were scar-you-for-life bad.  Looking back on the situation, I have to concede that virtually the entire blame rests on my shoulders, too.  The game was bad because I misread the players and did not provide the group the sort of campaign that they would be successful in. 

Riverworld is a game adaption of a series of novels by Philip Jose Farmer, one of my favorite authors.  The premise is very high concept.  One morning, every person who ever lived is reborn at the same time on a seemingly endless river valley.  In the books, the principle characters set out to explore the river, some with the intent of finding the source and discovering who created the Riverworld and why.  Farmer mixes an eclectic group of historical and fictional characters into one of the most satisfying sci-fi series I have ever read.

The implications for a role-playing game are pretty impressive as well. Characters can come from any time and place and mix with other players of equally unique background.  Ever wanted to see Napoleon and Salvador Dali have a conversation (and who hasn't?)?  On the great river, there is nothing preventing such a thing. In fact, the central thesis of both the book and the game encourage just these sorts of encounters.

In such a game world, almost anything is possible.  And that, my friends is where I went wrong.  I let the players create characters from any place and time.  Most of them were forgettable although I do remember Eric Lindgren playing a neanderthal man pretty convincingly.  But once the characters were created and I set up the initial scene including who and what were around them, I let the players loose to do whatever they wanted.  My theory at the time was that I would just react to whatever they did.  What they did, however, was virtually nothing.

For many years I have been of the belief that having too much choice is as bad (and sometimes worse) than having no choice at all.  Watching my players in this game made this readily apparent to me. When the players were confronted with being able to take virtually any action they so chose, it completely paralyzed them into inaction.  There were certainly things to interact with, but they couldn't decide which ones to interact with and in what order.  A decisive player might have chosen a direction and struck out to see what happened.  This group, in this situation, however, was uncertain how to proceed and thus did not.

The inaction, however, was my fault.  I presumed a greater knowledge of history on the player's part than they possessed. I have since learned to presume (at least until I learn otherwise) that no one knows a damn thing about history.  This serves me well, more often than not.  Since they didn't know much about the various groups around them, they had an insufficient frame of reference.  Also, when the players did not have an action in mind, I COULD have forced the pace by having one of the various plot threads act against them.  My original thought was to present the playground and let them choose which toy to play with. The biggest mistake was not making one of the toys go and play with them until they decided what to do.

Fortunately, I have learned from this failure, both for this specific game and as a game master in general.  I have never had a repeat of this particular problem.  Fifteen years or so later, I think things have changed enough to give this world another try.  Riverworld has a ton of potential and I think my current pool of players would likely thrive in a campaign that allows for such depth of character creation. The river is there to explore, there are empires to build or topple, and mysteries to solve.  And this time, I will make sure that the environment is far too active for the players to do nothing.