On Alpha Centauri, everyone can hear you scream. They are all psychic.

Civilization IV

I am not a huge video game person.  I haven't the manual dexterity to play real time games and I find first person shooters dull.  I do like the occasional turn based strategy game, though.  And among the best of those over the years has come from the studio of Sid Meier.  If I had a nickel for every hour of the various iterations of Civilization I have played over the years, I would could fill a sock big enough to clobber Godzilla.  Recently, I got a copy of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a game beloved by many of his devotees, but one that I didn't have the PC capacity for when it was new.  By the time I had the computer to support it, I had moved on to Civ IV and the graphics of AC were a little hard to digest.

Alpha Centauri.  See what I mean?

In most of the later versions of Civilization, one of the ways to win the game is to build a colonization ship and send it to... wait for it... Alpha Centauri!  On the surface, AC is a sequel game in which you find out what happens to those colonists once they get to their new planet. Not content to make "just a sequel," the Sid Meier crew created a fascinating and complex back story for the colonists, why they are scattered all over the planet, and why they don't always get along.  In addition, as the game unfolds, the player discovers the story of the new planet and the life forms that already inhabit the land masses.


In the back story, mankind has begun suffer from the long term effects of living as if our planet was an infinite resource.  Earth is dying and threatens to take the human race with it.  In an effort to save humanity, the nations of the Earth begin the Unity Mission, a colony ship effort to send a representative sample of humanity to the nearest habitable planet.  Being the horrible creatures that humans usually are, the colonists pack all of their ideologies and prejudices in their luggage and carry them along.  Ten thousand colonists start the trip to Alpha Centauri.  And they almost make it.

On entry into the system, a collision with some space debris turns tragic.  One of the cryogenic bays is completely destroyed, killing hundreds of colonists in one terrible moment.  As the crew tries desperately to repair the ship, the deep factionalization causes riot and mutiny.  A brutal act of sabotage seals the fate of the Unity Mission and the remaining colonists start a mad dash for the escape pods.

This cartoon came from Virtual Shackles.  If you like video games and/or
web  comics  the have something for you.  go check them out.

Sister Myriam.  The greatest
example of the preceeding
 punch  line.

In the game proper, the player takes control of one of the factions and tries to lead that group to leadership of the whole planet.  The process takes hundreds of years in game.  At the beginning, the player controls a single unit, explores the map for supplies, and creates the first colonies on the planet. Before planetary communications can be established, each group of colonists is completely isolated and left to their own devices.  The leaders of the various factions naturally create colonies that reflect their ideology.  When those colonies finally do initiate contact with the others,  the expected conflicts erupt.  Some leaders are more reasonable than others.  Which is to say that some of the leaders are completely implacable and the others are just ludicrously stubborn. In addition to this, it seems that Alpha Centauri is not quite as devoid of sentient life as the colonists first thought. Some of that sentient life even has telepathic powers, causing technological and ethical ripples in the game.

Fortunately, the fine folks at Steve Jackson Games thought a role-playing game based on this property was a good idea.  Their book is is a valuable resource for any game set on Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, even if GURPS isn't your system of choice.  It does a very good job of explaining the technology available. Author Jon E. Zeigler does an even better job of neutrally describing the various factions and leaders without portraying them as the total knobs that they are.  GURPS Alpha Centauri examines how to run a campaign at several different points in the progression of the video game.

The game idea that interests me begins with even before the players leave the Unity.  As members of the ship crew, they can remain largely above the ideological squabbling, at least at first.  When it all goes tits up, they will have a limited amount of time to save comrades and gather supplies before escaping in an emergency crew evacuation pod (one separate from the pods dedicated to all of the main factions).  Once they land survival becomes the first order of business.  A wide variety of adventures could then be in store as the players work to build their own immediate shelter into a budding colony.  Scouting forays to recover supply pods can intermingle with first contact missions with the local flora.  As the players establish themselves, they will gradually come in contact with some of the other, likely factionalized, survivors.  Do they join with one of the factions and risk alienating others?  Do they try to remain independent and risk aggression from the more warlike leaders?  Does someone do the colonization effort a favor and shoot Sister Myriam in the face?  And most importantly, will they be able to make Alpha Centauri the next chapter of the human story instead of just the last one?

Song of Hark and Wood

My engagement with the various elements of geek popular culture is pretty hit or miss.  Outside of Boba Fett and Han Solo, I really don't give Star Wars much thought.  Monty Python and Hitchiker's Guide quotes leave me flat.  I am really freakin' tired of every damn RPG product having some kind of Cthulhu tie in.. I don't give a good god damn about any of the various Doctor's of Who, their companions, or the Tardis. The influence of Harry Potter, Twilight, and even (to a lesser extent) the works of Tolkien leave me usually more than a bit sad.  The Marvel superhero movies interest me, but are not appointment theater experiences for me.

I am not completely on a deserted geek island though.  I have a deep affection for Firefly. I like Star Trek, although my preference for DS9 seems to make me apostate in some quarters.  I can quote The Princess Bride (and often do), watch Walking Dead every week that it airs a new episode, and wait longingly for the fall return of Sleepy Hollow. My closest association with the cutting edge of geek culture, however, is that I follow Game of Thrones.  I have read all the books, and am working my way through the Dunk and Egg short stories.  I own all the legal seasons of the HBO series, although I am a haven't yet gotten to season 3.  Not an uberfan, perhaps, but at least I knew the red wedding was coming, and I periodically fret about how long Mr. Martin takes between literary installments.

Even their logo is bad ass.

I even own most of the Song of Ice and Fire RPG by Green Ronin.  Green Ronin is one of my favorite companies.  The publishers of Freeport and other nifty products over the years, they have earned a reputation for making quality games.  SOIAF is no exception:  it is beautiful, thorough, and elegant in its own, complex way.  It is also a game that I do not think I will ever run. The mechanics make internal sense, but the nuances involved look like exactly the sort of crunch-intensive game that I try to avoid. One of the things I really like about the system is the idea that the players sit down together and design their own minor house, with each player working out their own position within that house.  That is a brilliant design choice, but I once sat down with a group of three players to do just that and it took us an entire evening to design three characters and the house they belonged to!  When that game got scrapped before we even played the first session, it sapped a lot of my desire to go through that process again.

Also, there is the matter of the whole weight of the expansion weighing down on the enterprise.  When playing material set in a pop cultural universe, the game master often must face two problems that do not crop up in less well known material:  property familiarity an expectations.  As a game master with only casual engagement with the sacred cows of much of geek culture, both of these can be an issue.  If even one of the players is familiar with the property, then their perception of the major players and events of the property may be very much at odds with my own.  If they are deeply invested in the property, it may very well be that their perception is correct, and what I am presenting is less true to the source material than it ought to be.  Given the rant in my previous post, I should probably avoid that sort of thing.

Expectations are equally troubling.  The SOIAF game is set four years before the events of the first book.  In one respect this is good, since Mr. Martin seemingly created a cast of thousands and is determined to kill every one of them before the series is over.  Placing the game before the book ensures that all of the characters in the books are still alive for the game.  On the other hand, it can seriously rob the game of tension.  If the game master tries to preserve the game world in such a way that the events in the books will come about, it robs some of the tension from the game.  Why bother saving King Robert Baratheon in the game if you know that he will somehow make it to the boar hunt in the first book no matter what your actions?  Why engage in a duel with Jamie Lannister if you know he must survive the encounter? On the other hand, if the game master does allow the players to kill or save any of the major characters from the books, then the game can spin so far afield of the books as to no longer resemble the material the players found so engaging in the first place. Quite the pickle, no?

GURPS Banestorm. One of the few Fourth
 Edition products that wasn't complete rubbish.

Still, the backstabbing and political machinations that are the trademark of SOIAF are perfect for a roleplaying game.  So how can I as a game master who admires the spirit of that tension, but probably does not have the inclination to wade hip deep into Westeros' cast of characters (and their baggage) proceed?  By transporting the skullduggery to another, less burdened setting!

 One of the best things that Steve Jackson Games ever produced was their fantasy setting, the Banestorm.  In this world, a splinter group of elves cast a ritual to rid them of the rising Orc menace, by banishing their enemies forever.  The ritual catastrophically failed, and not only did not expel the Orcs, but the resulting backlash (the titular Banestorm) dragged individuals and even whole villages from other realities into their own world.  A large number of these new transplants came from our world circa the year 1000.  For the last nine-hundred years, the old races and the new have lived hand in glove.  Jealous of their prerogatives, magic users ruthlessly suppress many technological advances, especially gunpowder, leaving the world roughly in the same feudal condition as when the importees first arrived.

Banestorm's brightest spot is the Aaron Allston classic Harkwood,  set in the low magic nation of Caithness, a kingdom that has recently lost its charismatic leader.   Harkwood is a fiefdom loyal to the new, uncertain young king.  Forces loyal and rebellious conspire at the Baron of Harkwood's annual tourney, and the players are inserted into the middle of the activities. One of the best parts of this supplement is that it allows you to chose which of any number of NPCs might be the ultimate bad guy.  Even players who might have played in this scenario before might not have an inkling about what is going on.  I ran a heavily modified version of this years ago.  A change of villain, new players and the twist I envision, could turn it into an very different experience.

For all the goodness that Harkwood contains, I think it could stand to be a bit nastier.  As written these are the machinations of the costume dramas of the 1950s.  If a clever game master (or failing that, if  I...) mixed the interesting succession conflict from Harkwood with the nastiness of the politics in SOIAF, a very satisfying campaign could result.

This union could even be taken a step further.  The players could use the house construction system from SOIAF (known as the Chronicle System) to create their own minor house of Caithness nobility and determine their level of (dis)loyalty to the young king.  When the events occur at Harkwood, they already have a vested interest in the outcome.  From there, the game progresses into the full blown political and perhaps military campaign as the various forces vie against one another for the very future of Caithness.

For this game, I would probably convert the whole magilla to Savage Worlds.  Changing a system can often lead to different character choices.

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?).

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.