Praise Gygax

Growing Up Wireless: Culture and the Matrix

2009-12-14T23:04:00.000-08:00

Move Your Body: Traveling in the Flesh

It is an undeniable fact that the differences drawn between rich and poor in the Shadowrun world are stark and appalling. It's part of the dystopic charm. But the worlds of rich and poor are actually far away from one another in space in addition to any other adjective you choose to use. See, if you're a corporate citizen and you want to visit another corporate citizen, you just do it. There's a high speed tube from your arcology to the airport, and you can just wave your credstick and get on a high speed transport to another airport somewhere else in the world and get on a high speed tube from there to another arcology. On the flip side: if the same Aztechnology citizen wanted to go out and visit someone in the Redmond Barrens, a place which he can physically see from the window in his apartment, he would need to go to customs and be screened to make sure he wasn't taking classified corporate property out of the compound; he'd need to rent a vehicle and get a validation for it to enter Z zones; he'd need to drive it through non-gridlinked areas where some of the streets have actual barricades set up on them and many others have paralyzing foot traffic clogging them. Even not including the bureaucracy, it takes more physical time to drive across town into a place in the Redmond Barrens than it does when traveling from the Aztechnology Pyramid in Seattle to the Aztec Pyramid in Tenochtitlan. Seriously.

Airplane security is basically a thing of the past in 2071 if you happen to be a corporate citizen. If you're walking in from corporate controlled territory, the RFIDs on any weapons you happen to be carrying will tell the computer system whether they are allowed to be taken off premises, which is the only thing that really matters. A corporate wage slave can pretty much walk onto an airplane with automatic weaponry if for some reason they decide that this is what they want to do. The assumption is that anyone doing that is probably required by their job to carry such weaponry, and it's just not worth anyone's time trying to keep people from breaking airplanes from the inside (it's just too easy to destroy them from the outside; airplanes stay in the sky because international mobility is pretty much in everyone's interests these days).

Matrix Dialects: 133+ and lol
“N0 U”

Every metahuman literally creates a new language internally as they grow from a baby to a child, and they do so based upon the inputs they receive growing up. Because the inputs are generally from people around them who speak to and mostly understand one another, it is a historical fact that children generally grow up speaking a language that is similar enough to those around them that misunderstandings are rare. But misunderstandings do happen, and languages do change over time because each newly created language in the brain of each child is a new and somewhat mutated version of the languages that came before. Metahumans who have a need to communicate can create pidgins out of the languages they speak and children who grow up amongst these speakers will form true languages out of those inputs and such is the manner in which new languages are formed.

So what does this mean for people who grow up in a world where concepts can be literally projected directly into the brain and essentially instantaneous communication exists around the world? Mostly it means that language continues to evolve and change – only now it does so across cultural groups which have little or nothing to do with geographical distribution or historical parental languages. Over the last decades, several dialects have sprung up that are formed entirely from inputs passed to children through the Matrix. Adverts, trans-continental game pidgins, and matrix flame wars are as good a scaffold for children to form their lingual formations as anything else; and so it is that the world has seen the creation of 133+ and lol. 133+ has several roots going back as far as the telegraph, but most proximately is a combination of text pidgins created for the limitations of archaic commlinks and obfuscatory hacker slangs created specifically to limit comprehension and confuse older search engines. lol is a language composed primarily of stilted matrix humor and advertising jingles.

There is a pervasive idea amongst the speakers of older languages that the people who speak and read these new languages are illiterate and uneducated. And while many of them actually are uneducated, literacy rates of this younger generation is actually incredibly high. It's just that the accepted spelling in lol is so different from the spelling in English or Nipponese that the assumption that the lol speakers are writing “wrong” is very common. But lol speakers do spell consistently with themselves and thus any linguist will tell you that they are not writing badly, merely differently (although many would grit their teeth before admitting to this).

Consumer Culture: You are what you Buy
“Have you been feeling the inadequacy of your NERPS lately?”

Corporations keep lists of spending records attached to everyone's SINs, and they buy, sell, and trade this information back and forth amongst each other a million times a second. And the reason for all of this is to better target marketing campaigns and more precisely gauge production runs of future goods and services. But these purchasing records have gained a life of their own, and become the primary tool by which the veracity of an identity is measured. A person who doesn't buy things clearly does not really exist in the eyes of the law and even in the eyes of other people. A person who drops out of the continuous rat race and goes and joins an urban tribe or whatever may well find that in as little as a few weeks their SIN will have been tagged as a possible fake all over the Matrix because of the lack of financial activity. And any such tags have a tendency to accumulate and reinforce themselves. A person's SIN can become literally unusable in a shockingly short amount of time if one doesn't continuously purchase goods and services in an extractable pattern.

And the flip side of this of course is that if one's purchases are predictable, that the same corporations whose data mining operations hold the stick of ostracization over everyone's life also hold the “carrot” of tailoring one's adverts to conform to their expected lifestyle choices. That is, from the first time you start out buying groceries and working at a Stuffer Shack, every time you walk into a Cameron's you'll see advertisements for basic and luxury goods that you might plausibly want popping up on displays pointed at you as well as projected into your AR experience as advertisement Arrows (depending upon your Firewall settings). This frankly may not seem like much of a carrot, and indeed many of the Neo-Anarchists and Pinkskins argue that it is not. There are a number of cultures and regions where this sort of practice is heavily discouraged by means running from legal injunctions to sabotage. And people in these areas are considered by the rest of the world to be SINless even if they aren't in their region of choice.

It is important to note that the strength of product liability and anti-trust legislation in 2071 is laughable. Major corporations make objects as safe or as dangerous as they think that the market will bear. If it weren't for the awesome power of modern medicine, the awe-inspiring number of carcinogens that ordinary people are exposed to on a daily basis would shorten lives tremendously. And indeed, the moment one steps outside the confines of reasonably affluent neighborhoods, the life expectations are offensively tiny. A random selection of sodas off the shelf would find many that were quite horrendous for health, but none of the cans would feel any need to mention this fact. Ironically, competition limiting rules in place at the corporate court that prevent most corporations from negative advertising campaigns make it highly difficult for anyone to raise a fuss about such things. If Wuxing's new softdrink is both addictive and toxic, the other major corporations (and their affiliates) would not report that fact for fear of running afoul of unfair competition clauses, although they might well arrange for freelancers to deliver the research data to independent news groups.

Life With RFID: It's Almost Like Trust
“Do you accept the charges, punk? Well, do you?”

The RFID is a very tiny chip that gives a very small amount of data out wirelessly and continuously. Very small amounts of data for the 2070s are surprisingly large compared to what a reader in the 2070s would think of the term, and so it is that a casual perusal of the RFID in a can of peas will tell you how much they cost, every warehouse they have ever been stored in, when and where they were canned, how many peas are supposedly contained, and so on and so forth.

All consumer items contain RFIDs, and it is in this manner that items are purchased. The days of waiting in line to “check out” are long gone. Instead one merely picks out what they want and walks out with it, with the RFIDs on all the goods alerting the store's system that they are leaving and the store responding by requesting a monetary transfer to cover the costs of everything. If you, or anyone else sends the requisite funds, all the items are tagged as sold both in the store database and on the RFID tags themselves. Getting RFID tags to mark themselves as sold without help from the store is supposedly essentially impossible, because each one is equipped with a short and completely arbitrary one time pad that would cover that particular change – but of course the realities of high density signal interaction is that one can directly flip the requisite bits on the RFID without sending the appropriate password (which of course you will never ever guess unless you outlive the sun).

And of course, sometimes things are mislabeled. Sometimes to hilarious effect, and there are matrix hosts given over entirely to AR stills from people getting sent Arrows from goods with the wrong ID tag (last month's winner was from a hospital in which a baby was mistakenly marked as a sharps receptacle: “Please Insert Used Needles In Mouth”). But human error in slapping RFIDs around is no worse than human error in running things through a scanner at a check-out counter, and the amount of labor saved by just having a lot less people working retail far outweighs any additional shrinkage from having people occasionally able to walk out with goods that got shelved without proper RFIDs. And yes, there is still work for bag boys even if cashiering is a lost art. Many classier retail outlets will giftwrap your purchases, and big box stores will help you get your stuff into bags.

Enforcing the Matrix: I fought the Law(s)
“No. You're off the case!”

The rules governing the Matrix are bewildering and perplexing. Ideally, whoever holds jurisdiction over the location where actual hardware had signal passed into it holds sway over the definition, investigation, and prosecution of crime. Mix in the fact that many matrix actions (especially data searches) involve hundreds or thousands of physical machines, and that technically any device that a AAA corp has designated as a “major” installation is extra-territorial corporate property and you've got a recipe for bureaucratic gesticulation that is hard to even imagine. Basically what it comes down to is that almost anything you do on the matrix is technically illegal somewhere, especially if you're performing data searches. The Sixth World has a lot of authoritarian hellscapes in it, and almost any information you want is probably contraband somewhere, and your computational actions will probably end up sending signal into and through some of those places, meaning that you've broken the law of someone with every blink and breath.

Of course, in practice this is merely paralytic. The fact that the Tír na nÓg theocracy has a number of portions of Irish history as criminal offenses to even talk about has little effect on a person in the United Netherlands researching Celtic culture even though their matrix signals will doubtlessly be transmitted into Tír territorial matrix hubs many times. Sending law enforcement contractors after whoever breaks these laws is usually not in the interests of anyone. In a world where virtually all activity is criminalized, it's very much like nothing is against the law. Except that occasional people are sent to the Gulag for indeterminate amounts of time in order to somehow set an example to a fearful and perplexed populace.

A GOD from the Machine: The Grid Overwatch Division
“I am the Law.”

The corporate court has their own pet matrix enforcement division, called the Grid Overwatch Division. Their jurisdiction is nominally any matrix crime which “concerns” two or more voting members of the corporate court. They answer directly to the Corporate Court, but each individual officer is put forward originally by a specific AAA corp, and honestly a fair number of them are spies.

The GOD has an extremely high opinion of itself, as do most of the spiders in their employ. They have some impressively pretentiously named subunits (such as the Artificial Resource Management division – the ARM of GOD – eyerolls are appropriate at this juncture). There are a number of things holding GOD back, which is great news for shadowrunners. The most obvious of course is that each GOD officer is sent to the agency from a corporation, which means that while they are very good they are specifically notthe top talent of their home corp (top talent is kept in-house). And the other part is that the very nature of their jurisdiction leaves them in bureaucratic limbo constantly. Any event which concerns two or more AAA corporations is usually politically sensitive, and corporations are often lethargic when it comes to actually cooperating with the agency.

WRIA: The World Recording Industry Army
“You wouldn't steal a policeman's helmet, would you?”

One of the few organizations that is actually willing to pursue the massive number of seemingly minor matrix offenses which come like a driving rain against the precepts of modern society is the World Recording Industry Army. They are a mercenary force hired by a conglomerate of intellectual property producers called the World Recording Industry Association (which is conveniently also abbreviated as WRIA). They have dubious jurisdiction and pay even more dubious attention to it. The WRIA very publicly executes people with large caliber weaponry for pirating software. The concept is that if uniformed men burst into peoples' homes and shoot them in the back of the head for sharing music files, that intellectual property will globally be safeguarded. In reality, this seems to have little effect on world wide software piracy, but once an organization like this has actually killed people, it is hard to even imagine them admitting their mistake and dong something else.

Not all countries and corporations allow WRIA hit teams on their property. Others allow them only with restrictions. For example, the UCAS recognizes the enforcement rights of the WRIA to shoot people down in the street for software piracy, but it does not recognize its investigative authority in their territory. Which means that technically the WRIA is supposed to wait around until the UCAS government tells them that someone has been pirating simsense chips and then they can go in guns blazing. In Aztlan on the other hand gives the WRIA unlimited access to parts of the Yucatan and the Panamanian Isthmus, and no access whatsoever to Tenochtitlan and the surroundings.

The Infrastructure and Topology of the Matrix

2009-12-14T23:02:00.000-08:00

Atlas is an angry titan, but it is folly to believe that we could live without him.

The world of 2071 is a wireless one. What this means is that the end users of the Matrix don't have wires trailing between themselves and the informational infrastructure of the world. This does not mean that wired connections are unheard of or even that they are rare. Indeed, even on a single person, many of their devices will be wired together. Indeed the preferred connection between the brain itself and the machine is still wired (either through a datajack or internal commlink). It's just the connections between the user's Personal Area Network (PAN) and the devices and other networks with which it interfaces is wireless. And thus, the experience of the metahumans within society is one of total freedom to access the matrix from anywhere. And total subjugation before the fact that the matrix is equally free to access them no matter where they go.

High Density Signal and Low Density Signal

There exists the possibility in the world of Shadowrun to manipulate hardware at a distance with the use of very large amounts of data projected across a signal in very short amount of time. The very most basic and obvious of these hardware manipulations is where one can project it into a metahuman brain and accent or replace their sense data. High density signal can be projected into a metahuman's optic nerve and cause them to “see” something different from that which would be expected from the colors and intensities of light striking their actual retina – indeed this is the very basis for AR Arrows. And yet, as one can well imagine this capability comes with an inherent possibility for abuse: a hacker can just as viably send fake sense data intended to confuse as a McHugh's is capable of sending fake sense data to inform one of the critical savings available on the value menu. And failing to utilize these channels is no defense against the actions of hackers. Just because you aren't projecting Arrows into your field of view doesn't mean that no one else is.

High density signal can only travel a total of about 30,000 kilometers before the propagation time of quantum effects and electromagnetic interaction actually looms large enough to render the enterprise nonfunctional. The universal speed limit is the speed of light, and while it is very fast (299,792 kilometers every second), it is nonetheless an actual speed and if signals are required to travel about a tenth of that they simply no longer can be reasonably approximated as interacting in real time.

Low Density Signal is less exciting, as it's essentially the kind of stuff we call “broadband” today. You can send basic video across it, but it skips sometimes. You can run some quite impressive networked games across it, provided that almost everything is actually run on the hardware of the people actually playing the game and not server side (and of course it limits the simsense communications between players to essentially nothing).You can send phone and text messages of practically limitless lengths across Low Density Signal just as you can across wireless broadband today. But simsense is too intense, just as it is today. Low Density Signal is relatively “safe” because it can't do any kind of crazy direct hardware manipulations, and it goes much farther than High Density Signal does because it can accept data clarity which is much lower at its final destination.

Cables and Satellites: The Spine of the World
“We have built our tower into the heavens and beyond, and now all languages are 1 and 0 again.”

High density signal can travel up to 30,000 kilometers before time delays render it meaningless. However, there are few transmitters that are capable of sending data that far, especially compared to the amount of data which is actually sent. No two points on the globe are substantially more than 20,000 kilometers from one to another but to actually get any substantial distance around the planet requires an indirect path because the planet is essentially round. Wireless transmissions pretty much go in straight lines, so the fact that you can't draw a real straight lines between most major cities without drawing it through the Earth (who is damnably resistant to wireless transmission), means that most real signal paths involve either being bounced through satellites, or routed through fiberoptic cables.

LEO and Up
“Long ago, when all the stars moved through the sky together...”

The atmosphere mostly craps out around 70 kilometers above the surface of the world, and it is at that point that pilots can see the stars in the day and astrally projecting magicians dare not travel further. But things don't have really stable orbits that close to the Earth. The first nice and long term orbits start cropping up over 1000 kilometers above sea level. And these are called “Low Earth Orbit” and comprise all of the high density signal satellites. Things lower than that are in temporary orbits, which is why semiballistic planes have no real chance to run into communication satellites.

Beyond that, there are geosynchronous satellites that orbit the world somewhere over 40,000 kilometers from the center of the Earth (which puts them comfortably outside the 30,000 kilometer cutoff for high density signal). These satellites all rotate around the Earth such that they pass over the same point on the Earth once each day at the same time. This means that with enough of them in play, you can use a sat phone to always make a phone call from anywhere on Earth. And yeah, the 2070s have more than enough satellites for that.

The Shadowrun future also has a number of space stations of various sizes. Many of these are set low enough that they can interact with high density signal from the ground, and many others are set to be high enough that they can't.

Connections
“With enough legos you can make the world.”

While high density signal can indeed forcibly transform one bit into another and manually change the results on another piece of hardware, this is very much not what people normally do in order to get the matrix working for them. Most data transfer happens across established connections where tremendously titanic amounts of data flow relatively free of constraints. These large data flows are incredibly dangerous, and so it is that most systems take a fair amount of care to limit what they open connections with. A connection can only be opened by both networks together, although of course hackers and spammers spend a considerable amount of effort in tricking or forcing other networks into opening connections.

Data connections can pass across anything that can carry signal of the appropriate density, and many connections have dedicated fiberoptic cables to them – a practice which severely limits the abilities of shady individuals to listen in to the contents of the shared traffic.

Servers
“I want all of that in here.”

Very large computers have a purpose even in 2071. Not to process the powerful equations that are needed to make the modern world go – those use a bunch of tiny computers and run it orchestral style with the awesome power of a metahuman brain. But instead in the switchbox of connections that different networks need to pass data back and forth between each other. These are expensive pieces of hardware and do a similar job to the human brain running an occupied network in running other occupied networks together. Running things through a server allows networks to have very large numbers of very fast connections running all over the place. A server can be powerful enough to run its own IC to protect itself, and most corporate servers are.

Wireless Communication: The Web Between
“The fridge bone connected to the trid bone. The trid bone connected to the light bone. The light bone connected to the washer bone. Oh hear the word of the lord!”

While tremendously large hunks of data are sloshed hither and yon through the medium of lasers fired through clear fibers, a myriad of devices share data across the medium of wireless waves transmitted at the speed of light. What goes into those wireless waves? Not really sure. It's some kind of radiation, probably lots of different kinds of radiation because the carrying capacity of the airwaves is apparently very, very high.

Personal Area Networks
“Your pen is low on ink. Purchase ink refill [Y/N]?”

The Personal Area Network is an elaborate amalgam of transmissions and conductions, using whatever form of signal happens to be available. Much of it is conducted through skinlink, a system whereby the skin's charge is modulated to send signals. And much of it is conducted through little fiberoptic cables. Topologically, these PANs are basically mesh networks where the integration of them is handled by tapping into the power of the metahuman brain that is at the center.

Since every metahuman brain gives off brainwaves, it is not really possible to hide a PAN just by wiring all the connections together. There is however massively complicated math that one can do that will hide a PAN from outside observation. But stealth in the Matrix is an active process.

Wireless Terrain
“Welcome to our secret lair. Thousands of meters below the Earth's crust.”

We're not overly concerned with what kind of waves are specifically being transmitted from one network to another. However, while devices are frequency agile and such in the 2070s, they are using some kind of radiation from the electromagnetic spectrum. And that means that it probably causes cancer. But that's a bridge that modern society has obviously agreed to burn when it comes to it. More immediately important to the modern hacker is the fact that it can and will be absorbed or reflected at some rate by various materials and electrical events. What precisely those materials and such would be would vary depending upon precisely what frequencies were used, a question which as previously noted we have no intention of answering. However, this information is known to the engineers of the late 21st century, and it is entirely possible for them to create composites that have extremely high or low transmittance of communication frequencies – and indeed they have done exactly this.

The Earth
The Earth itself has a crap tonne of crazy metals and such in it, and will absorb or reflect pretty much any frequencies you care to mention with at least some of its constituents. In general, you can assume that transmissions cannot go through the planet as a whole. In addition, it's highly likely that any particular signal can't go through a particular cross section of earth if it has to go through very much of it. Practically what this means is that if your signal goes through some part of earth your effective signal is reduced by the one more than the amount of signal that would be required to go through that amount of empty space (so for example, going through 40m of empty space would require a Signal of 1, so sending your signal through 40 meters of earth would set your signal back by 2). Practically this means that you probably can't send signals through mountains or even hills. A 1km obstruction would drop signal by 5, meaning that the base signal would have to be 9 just to get through.

WiFi Blocking Paint and the Faraday Cage
A barrier that is completely covering something topologically that is made out of something conductive is called a Faraday Cage. It can have holes in it, provided that those holes are not much larger than the wavelengths of the radiation passing through them. What it does is divert electromagnetic radiation into itself and essentially stop coherent transmissions through it. These things are not one hundred percent or anything, and short of busting out the measuring laser to determine the thickness and hole size of your mesh, the game simplifies these things to just have ratings that reduce signal ratings.

The really exciting part comes with the invention of WiFi blocking paint. That is, a flat (and thin, and light, and inexpensive) electromagnetic barrier. The physics of that sort of thing are really weird, since of course in the regular world radiation effectively bends around barriers really easily. But for whatever reason, a WiFi barrier reduces signal strength if the line of effect is drawn through it, and not if it does not. That's whacky, but it's also simple. I suggest that physicists not think about it too hard.

Why Money?

2009-12-14T22:54:00.000-08:00

“Why rob a bank? That's where the money is.”

Perhaps the most extraordinary claim of all in the annals of hackerdom is the idea that these people get paid in electronic currency to break the laws of society and change electronic records. The extremity of this claim is quite apparent: people are breaking the rules of society to change data records in exchange for being gifted with data records that according to the rules of society entitle them to goods and services. Why not eliminate the middle man and just hack the money records directly? The fact that people in the Shadowrun universe don't is highly indicative that they can't. And the reason for this is primarily because the monetary records themselves are very far away.

Electronic Nuyen: The Ledger in the Sky
“It is the finding of the Corporate Court that the creation of a unified currency that is itself immune to the damaging effects of speculation and devaluation is an essential pillar upon which the global economy must be placed.”

Electronic money can exist in a world where people can force the changing of electronic data from a distance by impressing it with high density signal because it's actually really simple: it's just a number. That means all transactions of electronic money can be done entirely with low density signal. There's nothing complicated enough going on to actually need any of the fancy processing that Shadowrun era signaling can do, and so it lies within the capacity of those maintaining the money to block out all high density signals and still conduct business. To hack the money supply with traditional methods would thus require one to get inside the barriers and thus be on site. Considering that the money is “kept” in servers that are extremely inaccessible, this rarely happens.

The biggest reservoir of money is a series of servers maintained in Zürich Orbital, a space station which passes over the Earth at nearly 2,000 kilometers above the seas. The “money” is a series of account numbers with money amounts on servers that sit inside this well fortified bunker floating continuously in space. These servers are connected through low density signal cable to retransmitters attached to powerful receivers on the outside of signal shell. The externally available computers don't hold any account information, encryption keys, or passwords, they literally just retransmit heavily encrypted (and short) data bursts into and out of the internal server farm through a signal bottleneck. Thus ideally there is nothing whatever that an external hacker could hack that would mean anything.

Now this doesn't mean that the enterprising hacker can't steal money, just that they have to steal it from a specific account by getting a hold of an actual credstick or commlink and hack them to authorize the transfer of funds. However this is understandably dangerous, because doing so still leaves a trail of money transfers on the hidden servers that the hacker is probably in no position to do anything about. It is for this reason, that fraud of this sort is mostly confined to spending sprees on relatively untraceable goods and services rather than actually getting the money into one's own credit line. And thus we get back to the question of eliminating the middle man: it is often plain easier and safer to just hack a carpet supply warehouse to think that it should deliver you some sweet rug than it is to hack a stolen credstick to transfer money to the carpet supply warehouse and “purchase” the same rug with money that may well be flagged as illegit in days, hours, or even seconds. For this reason, personal credsticks are often left to lie by hardened criminals.

Equipment Spotlight: Cash

Cash is generally avoided as a medium of exchange by corporations and wage slaves alike because it is essentially untraceable. Very large piles of cash are viewed with suspicion even by shady people. The general feeling even amongst criminals is that anyone who could steal themselves a very large amount of money should be able to get themselves together to get an off-shore bank account like a respectable gangster, and that anyone who isn't a criminal should also have a bank account rather than piles of bills that could be so easily stolen or misplaced.

Other Currencies: ¥, $, €

ZO is not the only game in town, but the others aren't super different. The Malaysian Independent Bank operates an island fortress where they keep all the records, and while it's not actually “in space” it might as well be as far as most people are concerned. The European Economic Commission operates the Euro rather than the ¥, but its account server vault at the bottom of a mineshaft is not especially easy to crack into either. Aztlan's secret bank is so secret that they don't even tell people what is protecting the Peso accounts, but it's presumably pretty intense because all legends of people hacking that particular server are vague and unlikely.

Debits and Credits: Debt Slavery and the Credit Spiral
“Work your fingers to the bone and what do you get? Bony fingers!”

An interesting thing that happens in Shadowrun is that despite the fact that the characters are getting a brand new identity several times a month in some cases, they still feel the need to work for a living. And that's actually somewhat odd when you think about it in terms of modern finances. See in 2008 “you” can borrow fairly substantial sums of money at any time at merely ruinous interest with no collateral. The threat of destroying the credit rating of your identity is considered sufficient of a stick to make these short term loan sharking operations solvent. In 2008, identity fraud comes with a certain amount of cash money automatically. Simply by virtue of trading the credit rating in for cash advances on loans that one has no intention of repaying, someone who is already committing the crime of fraud on their identity can gain a steady income from sketchy banks and loan houses until one is caught for the first offense.

And yet, in Shadowrun that manifestly doesn't happen, because the characters are perjuring their identities again and again and they are paying money for the privilege instead of vice versa. What does this mean? It means that the credit system in Shadowrun is somehow set up so that taking a loan with an identity that is going to cease to exist long before the first payment comes due is not a no brainer. In fact, it seems that taking a loan is itself so onerous that characters just are not doing it at all – even though the campaign only takes place over a short period of the character's life and thus can be looked at as being in the disposable ID situation even if the character is a SINner. See, the campaign is likely going to end in a year of the character's life, so anything she ever has to repay at any interest in 13 months is just flavor text in any “real” sense. And yet, players just don't take loans. They spend money that they have already earned rather than drawing on the reserves of a speculative future to gain monetary advantages during the actual game.

The primary reason for this is probably linked directly to the reason that people call corp workers “wage slaves.” See, when you take a loan in 2071 you don't just get a pile of money that you are expected to pay back. You actually sign up for employment and the corp gives you an advance on your wages. Wage slaves literally are slaves. Or indentured servants. Or whatever. They work for nothing except food and board, occasionally having the number of required work hours they are required to put in go up. And that's why player characters don't usually take loans – they would actually have to show up for work in order to get the money. Which is really just like their current job as freelance mercenaries except less awesome.

Equipment Spotlight: The Credstick

Credsticks are much less common in 2071 than they were in 2050, when literally everyone had one (or more). This is because commlinks now do much of the work that Credsticks used to do. But one is entitled to wonder what exact “it” is. The answer is that a Credstick carries a symmetric encryption key that is otherwise held only by part of a secret bank server somewhere on an island or in space. Each credstick sends a set of encoded low density signals to the bank that authorize the bank to move a certain amount of money from one account to another. And because no one actually knows exactlywhat your credstick is saying to the bank (without hacking the credstick), EUE (Effectively Unbreakable Encryption) is maintained as long as no one breaks into the credstick itself. Lower quality credsticks simply send the signal through a stick reader and hope that it can pass through the Matrix to the bank so that the money transfer will get authorized. Higher quality credsticks (with names like “Platinum” and “Ebony”) are able to send the information directly to the bank themselves and are able to transfer money whether there is a stick reader on hand or not. Most credsticks have some sort of system by which to verify that the right person is actually authorizing transfers of funds. Passcodes, retina scans, and even blood samples are used by various credsticks. Some credsticks send portions of the data from their activation to the bank itself as part of money transfer, while others merely require it as a check before they send the encrypted request. A “certified” credstick is actually the least secure of all – the stick doesn't correspond to any specific real person, the account is just a number associated with a credstick. So anyone can hand the certified stick to another person and that person can trade that money as if they were the original stick holder. In modern times, people quite often make use of credit modules in their commlinks. This works pretty much the same, except that the range of finding a matrix connection that is capable of reaching the (doubtless distant) secure bank servers is much greater.

Aside: The Security Camera

2009-12-14T22:52:00.000-08:00

No single device in a modern or science fiction setting causes as much paranoia (both justified and not) as the security camera. And this should come as no surprise, for regardless of what kind of force ratios your team can bring to the party at an instant of your choosing, the fact is that the amount of force that any particular society can bring against an individual is practically infinite in any modern or futuristic setting (as opposed to medieval settings with barest nods to science fiction window dressing like Warhammer 40K). So any object which promises the heavy hand of eventual retribution by the whole of society against transgressors should be a scary thing, and indeed in Shadowrun it is.

There are three main camera setups that one must concern yourself with in the day to day criminal operations of Shadowrun: the solitary camera; the networked camera; and the low resolution camera. The solitary camera is exactly what it sounds like: it's a trid recorder that is completely self contained. It's fairly trivial to smash it with a baseball bat or hack it into oblivion and since it's entirely self contained that's the end of any data the recorder had on you. The network camera is attached to a network, which means that destroying the device itself won't do anything at all to the trid already recorded. It'll have to be hacked if you want to get rid of the data already stored (but good news: hacking any part of the network will allow you to edit any of the data from any of the recorders on the system). And finally the low resolution camera takes basic video and sends it one way by low density signal to some storage system that may be very far away. You can do anything you want to the recorder itself and it won't do a thing to any video already recorded and sent unless you get direct access to the storage systems (wherever they are). Fortunately for the criminally inclined, this last type takes the kind of crappy security camera footage that we get in 2008 – so the security forces who go back and review it will have such wonderful information as “two orks and a human committed this crime.”

Why Crime?

2009-12-14T22:50:00.001-08:00

"Why yes, Big Brother is watching. However Big Brother has ADHD, so I'm going to sit here drinking my soykaf like any of a billion wage slaves are doing right now. And then Big Brother will get bored. And distracted. And then I'm going to do… anything I want."

One of the core conceits of the Shadowrun game is that crime is possible, and that crime pays. Given the wealth of potential satellite oversight (just look at Google Earth in 2007 – imagine the law enforcement version in 2070), and the incredibly daunting task that is cracking through somewhat decent encryption, it is entirely reasonable to project a future where getting away with any crime at all requires some sort of elaborate social engineering to pull inside jobs that play off of secret limits of the anti-crime system. But this isn't Minority Report or any other Phildickian setup, this is Shadowrun. And in Shadowrun: bad people shoot other people right in the face for money and get away with it to do it again.

So here are some quasi-plausible justifications for that:

A Revolution in Data Collection, a Crisis of Storage
"I'm sorry, I seem to have misplaced my 'give-a-damn'."

Throughout human history the creation of data has exceeded the capacity to store it. It starts in infancy where a babe simply doesn't remember every single thing she sees, and it continues on through the Age of Bronze where not every conversation or every play gets written down, and it continues today. It could very plausibly continue in the Shadowrun future and for the sake of playability we're assuming that it does. The cameras in the world exceed the number of people who could watch them, and they collectively generate more video footage every day than can be stored on all the world's storage media.

And that is amongst the things that makes crime possible. When you go to the bathroom, a computer is measuring the mass of your deposit. When you flee a crime scene you're being watched by every store front you pass. But likely as not, none of that information will actually be saved anywhere. Some of it may be, but it quite likely isn't organized enough to actually identify you as the perpetrator (of the crime or the leavings). More importantly, information getting deleted isn't really news. If 18½ minutes are missing or overwritten by elven pornography, that's not weird.

Furthermore remember that in the world of 2071, it is entirely possible that a "legitimate" information request from investigating authorities will simply be refused. There's nothing in it for a Wuxing or Aztechnology subsidiary to share their security footage with Evo security to assist in the investigation of a crime against Evo or one of its subsidiaries. Corporations, especially major corporations are in competition, but beyond that they actually are regularly committing crimes against one another. Even showing what footage Aztechnology has of an event would be tipping its hand to Evo and it isn't going to compromise itself that way under normal circumstances. Further, it is in the interests of Aztechnology to make investigation and enforcement as expensive a proposition as possible for Evo as this reduces the company's ability to compete with them in other areas. So even when data is successfully stored, there's no reason to believe that investigating authorities will ever be allowed to actually see that data – which when you think about it is a lot like that data being lost or simply not recorded in the first place.

A Life in Horror: The Good and The Bad

2009-12-14T22:43:00.000-08:00

“Interesting fact: The Final Girl trope emerged shortly after young women became a major component of horror movie attendees.”

Life in the World of Darkness is actually pretty horrible, and extremely dangerous. Life in the World of Darkness is life in a horror movie. Or rather, it is a world not unlike Earth would be if all the horror movies are real. This means that body counts are extremely high, and it is very difficult to get help. This is good news if you happen to be a vampire, but really bad for anyone looking for a life of vaguely normal properties. Here are some important things to remember:

The Police are no help at all. Heavily infiltrated by cultists and secret societies, the police in the World of Darkness are astoundingly ineffective. Sure they will occasionally bring down a killer, but the vast majority of crimes go unsolved. Many crimes don't even get investigated, especially if something supernatural is afoot.
Telecommunications are Shoddy Sat Phones aren't available in the World of Darkness. Cellphone coverage cuts out constantly at inopportune moments. Regular telecommunication wires go down frequently and are out for days at a time. The inability to get a call out of a building or town isn't unusual, that kind of thing happens a lot in the World of Darkness.
People Don't Travel Much It's not weird for people to not know what goes on in the next town over in the World of Darkness. Things are just more dangerous, and people keep to themselves more.

Keep this in mind when you're planning your nights in the World of Darkness. Life is less connected to other life in the World of Darkness and it is much easier for dangerous elements to thrive in such an environment.

That being said, it is important to remember that most horror movies begin with people thinking things are pretty normal, and end with something of a return to normalcy as well (or do they?) So it's not like Jason is running around the streets murdering people left and right. Indeed, while the death rate from serial and mass murder is large enough in the World of Darkness to compete with traffic accidents or opiate abuse, the fact is that you're still more likely to die from cancer. Supernatural creatures remain hidden and the president of the United States is openly a mundane human. A vampire can't just flash their fangs to get free entry to a movie theater, and indeed they could be in a lot of trouble if they flash their fangs in a public space of any kind.

The World of Darkness is Overcrowded

2009-12-14T22:40:00.001-08:00

You can't have been Rasputin, our guys were Rasputin!

Let's face it: the World of Darkness is cluttered. oWoD has way too many secret groups and supernaturals, and the nWoD is no better. With each group having their own sub-groups and politics and multiple groups of antagonist supernaturals it gets explosively, exponentially more complicated with the addition of every book, and no one knows how it works. That's not good for a political game. The players need to know at least enough of what's going on that they can advance agendas and make plans – otherwise there aren't any political maneuverings; it all devolves rapidly into hack-n-slash or just plain slash.

The concept is that you are a classic Universal Studios Monster and you engage in narrative driven dramatic role playing of both horror and intrigue. This is essentially impossible when there are too many world running conspiracies to keep track of or when people are going all Dragon Ball Z on things right next to you.

So we're paring things down. A lot. We don't have, need, or even want a bajillion clans of vampires, or fifteen tribes of werewolves. There should be few enough flavors of things that all the players can remember what the differences between them are. Ideally, people should be able to play whatever supernatural guys they want, sort of like the League of Extraordinary Gentleman; but in practice you have to put explicit limitations on what is part of the story or things get all weird. Like with Martian invasions and stuff. A story that doesn't have specific exclusions does not truly have any specific inclusions. It's not really a story at all at that point, it's a mess.

It is important to note that you can't take everything from myth and legend and cram it into a story. I'm not saying that your story will be completely incoherent, although of course it will be. I'm saying that you are literally incapable of doing that. The Vampire Book is an encyclopedia of just vampire lore from various cultures and it is literally over nine hundred pages long. And we're not talking about character backgrounds or rules text or any of the other crap that we know eats up word count like you wouldn't believe. We're talking about just a bare list of facts by mythical origin. So it is imperative not only that you acknowledge that you're going to have to cut things down to a manageable amount, but also that you establish specifically what is off limits and what's fair game.

Roleplaying Games & Minigames

2009-12-04T02:13:00.000-08:00

Recently someone asked me:

So what are the problems with 7th sea?

To which I responded:

This is pretty much from memory and a recent flip through but I think the core problems are:

* The distracted and unorganized way the book is written
* The amount of time that goes into the minigames of the game compared to what the result is
* The fact that it was written far before the likes of Window, Scion, PDQ, and FATE's "Keep challenges a challenge and let your players do the simple fun things without obstacle"
* The fact that it doesn't pay much attention to the extreme focus a Swashbuckler game needs for both Social and Physical Challenges.

A good way to look at the last one: Starting up a new final fantasy video game takes exactly 2 steps. These steps are purely technical and are "obstacles" to playing. However "puzzles" in the game, like figuring out a sequence of notes, are elongated and protracted.

In 7th Sea and a lot of games in that era plus one or two in this era they're switched. The game mechanics become "obstacles" and "puzzles" become abstract roleplaying. Rolling dice and such should be fun parts of the games and not purely technical steps to get to playing.

The extended problem with 7th Sea is that

A.) None of the books are really available by sale (Or sail! Ho ho ho)
B.) All the PDFs are non-searchable
C.) All the PDFs are megabig due to direct scanning
D.) The scans are usually shitty
E.) Any torrents have low seeding
F.) The books are just plain ugly

And he replied:

What is wrong with how &th sea handles those things? What other games handle those things in specific in a better way?

Normally I wouldn't call those minigames. Managing your manor house is a minigame, handling having children and raising them is a minigame. In some games Duelling is a minigame because it uses different rules than the usual combat stuff. Those seem more like tropes. Which should be handled in a fun way, I agree.

Me, i thought 7th sea dice were whacked, and that they had way too many specific skills for situations. The extra detail seemed to be requirements to have fun, not additional fun to be had.

So I told him what my thoughts were:

See that's what a lot of older and newer games missed. The game part of RPG is just a mesh of various minigames put together.

The object of Connect Four is to put 4 discs in a row. That makes up a game. One objective and a procedure for obtaining that objective. What does that sound like? "Combat Rules" in RPGs. There is an objective (Defeating the opponent) and procedure for obtaining that objective.

RPGs are just various games stuck together and layered on with a "theme" or "setting" so you can act out and pretend. It's all just a mask over a bunch of games though.

Once you've got that figured out you can notice which "parts" of an RPG are actually minigames and not just technical obstacles. 7th Sea tends to make a lot of the game play into technical obstacles instead of being a minigame.

It ended up being a rather interesting conversation and lead me to a deeper understanding of my belief about RPGs.

After looking at my Google Analytics results...

2009-11-24T22:53:00.000-08:00

Thanks for the extra hits! This puts me over the amount required to get in a pay-to-review program.

Merci!

My History In Gaming

2009-11-04T16:24:00.000-08:00

(This post is going to be totally re-written.)

Community Catastrophy

2009-10-25T11:03:00.000-07:00

Recently, and times before, I've been asked:

Why do you have a problem with RPG.Net?

I'll attempt to answer that question in this post, but let's clarify first, as I don't have a problem with the RPG.net reviews or newsletters, I find them incredibly informative and revealing. Instead I have a problem with the forums. First lets talk about the new website owner, Skotos. Skotos is a company/man that specializes in selling MUDs cloaked in wording like "prose multiplayer game", where they focus on "telling a story", and being "true roleplayers". Here's a quote:

Johnathan (not verified) — Mon, 2001-10-29 12:01

Been playing for a week and it rocks, best true RPing I've ever seen. Killing monsters and gaining xp is not roleplaying, castle marrach is.

And then below that comment:

EndUser (not verified) — Tue, 2001-10-30 12:45

Tried it a while back. If Skotos had the basic decency to let players, say, use plain ol' MUD emotes/poses or, oh, actually describe their characters instead of picking a couple of traits from a list, I'd be wasting my life there 'stead of on Iconoclast.

As you can see, it kind of clashes with the reality of online RPG play. Online RPG play is confusing from the start and Skotos tends to shake it up some more with pretty language and a hefty bill to boot.

But that's just the owner of RPG.net, and I have much more to talk about.

TBF

Demons

2009-10-04T12:39:00.000-07:00

“Match wits with a creature older than time? Match wits with a prince of the dark dominions?”

The Demons were seemingly around a lot longer than other supernatural creatures: the oldest records left by vampires or the recollections of the Returned allow for the civilization of the Demons as having been around for unfathomable years even then. This makes their predicament something of a puzzle, because every Demon is imprisoned in Limbo to a greater degree than any of its other inhabitants. Who or what imprisoned the Demons there is not particularly clear, and individual Demons advance distinct theories when asked. All Demons live forever, and many of them are frightfully old. Many of them claim to have been around during “The Great Banishment” – but in almost all cases this is certainly a lie. It's not even clear where the banishment was from. Some claim that it was the Material World, while others claim that the original Demonic home world was Maya. Still others claim that it was some as yet unnamed world that they cannot return to. What is clear is that Demons have a tremendous difficulty leaving the Dark Reflection: their Potencies are considered four higher for purposes of overcoming the Gauntlet.

Akuma
“I always get what I want because I take it.”

The Akuma were never human and this fact cannot easily escape onlookers. Standing about a meter taller than a man, Akuma are also blessed with extra... parts. Rows of teeth, third eyes, sometimes even extra arms or mouths. Many come equipped with extra part that are not analogous to any found in normal people such as horn, pincers, and tentacles. They come in colors like red and blue rather than the tan and slightly darker tan that humans are familiar with. Even the white ones are white, rather than merely a slightly paler shade of tan. These are the demons you imagine when your imagination has a bottomless budget for costuming.

Akuma need to feed on sapients in order to restore their powers. Left on their own in the Dark Reflection they foist mirror goblins into their maws with wild abandon, but they prefer the flesh of humans. While Akuma do not strictly speaking need to eat, they love doing so and their gluttonous appetites cannot be sated easily or long. Akuma are a huge social problem for mortals and supernaturals alike when they appear in the material world, for they lack subtlety in any of their dealings. Akuma are lazy bullies whose only redeeming feature is that at least their short sighted avarice makes them easy to manipulate by those with sufficient power to not be devoured right off. An Akuma has no driving passions, and is dominated by Master Passions of Rage, Hunger, and Fear.

While it is possible for an Akuma to gain power nonfatally from a victim, their love of livers and poor discipline ensure that this almost never happens. An Akuma cannot turn their Giant Size off. An Akuma's claws, horns, teeth, or whatever constitute a damage 3 weapon. Akuma have a nonstandard attribute array because they were never humans. Before their Potency modifier and their constant Giant Size, their attribute ranges are:
S: 6/11 A: 1/5 I: 1/3 L: 1/3 W: 2/7 C: 1/4

An Akuma has an Infernal power source and a Feeding power schedule.

Story Inspiration: Where the Wild Things Are, Legend, Urotsukidoji,

Sidhe
“And for revenge thou hast created this demon. Her domain is darkness - her purpose is wickedness”

The Sidhe appear as relatively attractive, if distant and cruel humans. As the only type of Demon that is not constitutively required to eat or torture people to death, they are the most likely to have neutral or positive relations with residents of the mortal world. Nevertheless, Sidhe very rarely behave in any manner that could be even generously described as less than unnecessarily dickish. While they gain no literal sustenance from harming people, they are often pressed into the service of powerful Ifrit to do so and just plain seem to like doing it. Despite the subtleties of their abilities, most Sidhe have a master passion of Rage.

Some Sidhe have wings that resemble those of swans or bats growing from their backs. The ones that don't have either wheels of fire or tiny clouds appear under their feet when they fly. While technically a Sidhe was never a human, they are close enough in appearance and capabilities that their attribute ranges before Potency modifiers are human standard.

Sidhe are superficially similar to Daeva, and it is primarily for this reason that Daeva were often subject to persecution by Sabbat forces about 400 years ago. More extensive investigations recognize many key differences. For example, while a Daeva is born as a human luminary and is converted into a Vampire upon death at another's hands, a Sidhe comes into being by coalescing out of ash in Limbo, already fully grown. Blood flows in the veins of a Daeva only when they have recently fed, while blood does not actually exist inside a Sidhe at all – when their skin is broken it cracks like porcelain and a fine ash drifts out.

Sidhe easily insinuate themselves in leadership positions in the mortal world because of their tremendous and magically augmented presence. These qualities are held in no esteem whatsoever in Demonic culture, and mere likability is treated with extreme contempt. Virtually all Sidhe have been made to swear total vassalage to a more powerful Sidhe or Djinn. Domination, whether magical in nature or simple brute force is the currency of Demonic relationships.

A Sidhe has an Infernal power source and a Ritual power schedule.

Story Inspiration: Succubus, Disgaea, Hell Bent

Ifrit
“I don't need you dead, just for you to wish you were.”

By far the rarest and mos terrifying denizens of Limbo are the Ifrit. They are not especially powerful physically, and indeed they are normally intangible when encountered. But they have incredible mystical powers, almost unmatched amongst supernatural creatures. Not a few of them have taken to passing themselves off as gods when they reach the material world, and yet they have never achieved much status within any of the major Earthly covenants. This is primarily because as a group they do not normally join supernatural covenants – even the King With Three Shadows counts few Ifrit under his dominion.

An Ifrit can look like anything and they do. But in their truest form they seem to be hideous humanoids of approximately 2 meters with craggy skin of vivid primary and secondary colors. Their vibrant hues appear like something more at home in a crayon box than a living being.

In order to feed, an Ifrit must be within a meter of someone in wracking agony. They do not have to actually consume any blood or viscera and indeed they generally cannot because they are incorporeal anywhere but the Depths of Limbo. While Irit were probably never living mortals, their attributes are normal for their Potency. It's not entirely clear if Ifrit ever were anything before being magical beings, no one knows of any of them coming into being, and the lowest Potency of any Ifrit seems to be 4.

An Ifrit has an Infernal power source and a Feeding power schedule.

Story Inspiration: Wishmaster

The Giovanni

2009-10-04T12:34:00.001-07:00

“Loyalty to the family. To death and beyond.”

Originally a family of Venetians who turned to dark magic, the Giovanni family became a criminal syndicate amongst the supernaturals, adding to their ranks a great number of unrelated supernaturals who wanted in on their necromantic protection rackets. Never achieving the wealth or strength of the World Crime League in impoverished and superstitious Europe, the Giovanni never achieved covenant status. Upon running into the WCL, they found themselves badly outnumbered in the world of supernatural crime and largely caved in to pressure from the East. The Giovanni mostly went legit and now provide gray market financial services and money laundering to supernaturals with little or no presence in the human world.

The Giovanni are still operated like a mafia family, and they still do a lot of criminal activities. It's just that now they make sure to avoid strongarming other supernaturals – at least without WCL permission. While it is now common for a Giovanni Don to be something other than an Italian Khaibit related by blood to the founders, it is still incredibly rare for anyone without necromantic power to rise to any meaningful level in the organization. The organization is called by those inside “The Family” even though it no longer cares about a prospective recruit's skin color or family background.

Missions for the Giovanni: The Giovanni are a full service outfit, and when you mess with a family client you are messing with The Family, capiche? Very frequently, the Giovanni will send teams to clear up some “misunderstanding” involving one or more Giovanni clients. These sorts of missions will often involve bailing clueless supernaturals out of legal problems with the mortal world or covering up potential masquerade breeches before they come to covenant attention. The Giovanni are also quite aggressive in business and may send teams to “persuade” potential clients to sign on with the Giovanni before someone gets hurt.

Sample Adventure: An ancient vampire in good standing with the Sabbat has awoken and is trying to do things the “old ways.” The Giovanni want the family member to take his friends off to convince this powerful but dangerously naïve monster to allow family specialists to handle his interface with modern society (and pay the going rates for this service, natch).

To Triumph Over Evil

2009-09-05T17:46:00.000-07:00

Equally important to the place of ultimate Evil in your game is the activities of Good in your game. Like Evil, the designers have tried to run the spectrum of possible interpretations of righteousness… and the results are that the overlap of actions depicted as Good with those described as Evil is almost total. Ultimately, your campaign is going to have to come to a consensus over what you are going to accept as Good. Most importantly, the inverse of Evil is not Good. It really takes a lot less harm to be Evil than it takes aid to be Good. If you fix twenty people's roofs, you're Jimmy the Helpful Thatcher. But if you eat your neighbor's daughter, you're Jimmy the Cannibal – and no additional carpentry assistance will change that. This is why the Book of Exalted Deeds is such an unsatisfying read… you can't just take the material in the Book of Vile Darkness and multiply by negative one to get Good.

The Importance of Consequentialism

Every action has motivations, expectable results, and actual results. In addition, every action can be described with a verb. In the history of moral theory (a history substantively longer than human history) it has at times been contested by otherwise bright individuals that any of those (singly or collectively) could be used as a rubric to determine the rightness of an action. D&D authors agreed. With all of those extremely incompatible ideas. And the result has been an unmitigated catastrophe. Noone knows what makes an action Good in D&D, so your group is ultimately going to have to decide for yourselves. Is your action Good because your intentions are Good? Is your action Good because the most likely result of your action is Good? Is your action Good because the actual end result of that action is Good? Is your action Good because the verb that bests describes your action is in general Good? There are actually some very good arguments for all of these written by people like Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, and David Wasserman – but there are many other essays that are so astoundingly contradictory and ill-reasoned that they are of less help than reading nothing. Unfortunately for the hobby, some of the essays of the second type were written by Gary Gygax.

This is not an easy question to answer. The rulebooks, for example, are no help at all. D&D at its heart is about breaking into other peoples' homes, stabbing them in the face, and taking all their money. That's very hard to rationalize as a Good thing to do, and the authors of D&D have historically not tried terribly hard.

Godliness isn't Goodliness

Whatever religion you personally have, the religion in D&D revolves around a set of gods both Good and Evil of equal strength and importance. Most modern day religions have however many gods they worship be of sufficient goodness that they are at least worthy of respect – so it can be hard to remember that in D&D the gods as a whole are precisely zero sum on any issue. Being "divine" doesn't make you Good in D&D, it just makes you more. If you're Good it makes you more Good, but if you're Evil it makes you more Evil. Clerics detect strongly of whatever alignment they have, but there's nothing Good about priests as a whole. Turning your back on the gods isn't a bad thing in D&D, it's a perfectly valid and neutral choice. If Ur Priests are to have any alignment restriction at all, it should be the same as Druids – stealing from the gods is a profoundly neutral act, not Good and not Evil.

There is no Salvation or Redemption in D&D

All of the major religions of our world that utilize the concepts of Ultimate Good and Ultimate Evil use the concept of Redemption (that people have a state of innocence that they can lose and perhaps regain through atonement) or Salvation (that people have a state of inherent unworthiness that they can overcome). D&D, despite having a spell called atonement actually has neither of those concepts. The atonement spell actually dedicates (or rededicates) a character to any alignment, Good or Evil, Law or Chaos. Baby kobolds are not born into original sin and baby elves are not born in a state of grace, D&D doesn't even have those concepts. Creatures with an alignment subtype (most Fiends, for example) are born into that alignment and are only going to stray from it if subjected to powerful magic or arguments. Everyone else is born neutral.

In D&D, creatures do not "fall" into Evil. Being Evil is a valid choice that is fully supported by half the gods just as Good is. Those who follow the tenets of Evil throughout their lives are judged by Evil Gods when they die, and can gain rewards at least as enticing as those offered to those who follow the path of Good (who, after all, are judged by Good Gods after they die). So when sahuagin run around on land snatching children to use as slaves or sacrifices to Baatorians, they aren't putting their soul in danger. They are actually keeping their soul safe. Once you step down the path of villainy, you get a better deal in the afterlife by being more evil.

The only people who get screwed in the D&D afterlife are traitors and failures. A traitor gets a bad deal in the afterlife because whichever side of the fence they ended up on is going to remember their deeds on the other side of the fence. A failure gets a bad deal because they end up judged by gods who wanted them to succeed. As such, it is really hard to get people to change alignment in D&D. Unless you can otherwise assure that someone will die as a failure to their alignment, there's absolutely no incentive you could possibly give them that would entice them to betray it.

Code of Conduct: Paladins

Nothing causes more arguments in-game than Paladins. Can Paladins kill baby kobolds? What about baby mind flayers? Honestly, while these questions have generated a lot of ink and a lot of bad feelings, they aren't important. Paladins are Lawful Good, but they aren't "champions of Law and Good" – that's an Archon. A Paladin doesn't get Smite Chaos, they aren't forced to abandon team members who behave in a Chaotic fashion (whatever that means, see below). Paladins are Champions of Good™ and they are required to be Lawful. Whether or not that makes any sense depends on how you're handling Law and Chaos.

Paladins are as Good as any character can be, and they are required to follow a code of conduct. However, following this code is no what makes them Good, we know this because Clerics of Good (who detect as being just as Good as Paladins) don't have to follow that code. The code is completely arbitrary, and has no bearing on the relative Goodness of a character. Paladins also lose their powers if they don't drink for a few days, but that doesn't put Blackguards in danger of losing their alignment when they quaff a glass of water.

The Paladin's code is uncompromising, but it is also exhaustive about what it won't allow:

The Use of Poison: If a park ranger hits a bear with a tranq dart, that's not an Evil act. Poison isn't any more or less Evil than a blade. Paladins can't use poison because they agreed not to – not because there's anything wrong with poison. Maybe Paladins only get to keep their magically enhanced immune system so long as they don't take it for granted by using things that would tax it on purpose. Maybe their concern for public safety is so great that they are only willing to use weapons that look like weapons. Whatever. The point is that Paladins have to be Good and they can't use Poison, and these are separate restrictions.
Lies: A Paladin can't lie. Whether telling a lie is a good or evil act depends on what you're saying and who you are saying it to. But a Paladin won't do it. That means that if the Nazis come to the door and demand to know if the Paladin is hiding any Jews (she is), she can't glibly say "No." That does not mean that she has to say "Yes, they're right under the stairs!" – it means that she has to tell the Nazis point blank "I'm not going to participate in your genocidal campaign, it's wrong." This will start a fight, and may get everyone killed, so the Paladin is well within her code to eliminate the middle man and just stab the Gestapo right there before answering. That's harsh, but the Paladin's code isn't about doing what's easy, or even what's best. It's about doing what you said you were going to.
Cheating: Paladin's don't cheat. They don't have to keep playing if they figure out that someone else is cheating, but they aren't allowed to cheat at dice to rescue slaves or whatever. Again, there's nothing Good about not cheating, it's just something they have to do in addition to being Good all the time.
Association Restrictions: Paladins are not allowed to team up with Evil people. They aren't allowed to offer assistance to Evil people and they aren't allowed to receive assistance from Evil people. Intolerance of this sort isn't Evil, but it isn't Good either. It's just another thing that Paladins have to do.

Morality: How Black is the Night?

2009-09-05T01:00:00.001-07:00

Those readers who have been following this series will remember the basic moral question regarding Necromancy: namely the fundamental decision for each game as to whether to treat Negative Energy as an objective force or an ultimate moral indictment. The central question surrounding fiends is less obvious, but in no way less important to your game. We know that a Gelugon is Evil, he's got a subtype that denotes him as being specifically Evil, that's not the question. What we don't know is how Evil he is. That's a central question that has to be addressed within the context of each game. Let's face it, a lot of people really aren't comfortable with villainy more pernicious than the antagonists in a Saturday morning cartoon. Other people have a different and equally valid hang-up: they aren't comfortable having their characters stab enemies in the face repeatedly until they bleed to death unless those enemies are extremely bad people. As so frequently happens, the rules for Dungeons and Dragons are written to accommodate both play styles, which in reality ends up including nothing. Perhaps unfortunately, you must come to a table-wide consensus about what your gaming is not doing before you can have your game do anything at all.

Keep in mind that none of these play styles are "worse" or "better".

Moral Option 1: A Worthy Opponent
"Fools! You have interfered with my plans for the last time!"

For many games, the fact that the bad guys are bad is pretty much sufficient. Like the villains in Saturday Morning Cartoons, their villainy requires – and gets – no explanation. Actual villainy is fairly upsetting to contemplate, and a lot of people don't want to do it. I don't blame them, cannibalism, deliberate infliction of pain, and exploitation of the innocent are unpleasant. Talking about secret prisons where torture is conducted night and day without respite or reason is super depressing.

Implications: The biggest implication here is that since Evil and Good are basically just political parties or ethnic hats, it is perfectly OK to have mixed alignment parties or to ban mixed alignment parties. You're never going to have a serious discussion about what it is that Evil people do, so it's actually not important how you handle them. You can even switch how you're handling it in the middle for no reason. One day, the Atomic Skull can just chip in to save the world from Darkseid. Another day you can go kill the Atomic Skull without feeling bad. It's very liberating, because you can tell a lot of stories – so long as none of those stories involve actual evil actions happening on camera.

Pit Falls: While it is certainly a load off the mind to not be constantly reminded of child abuse, torture, and sexual misconduct, bear in mind that this is Dungeons and Dragons – your foes are more than likely going to be killed with extreme stabination. Possibly in the face. Possibly more than once. If the villains aren't doing anything overwhelmingly bad, it's entirely possible that it won't seem like they deserve being killed. If subjected to enough analysis, one might even find that your own "heroes" appear to be the villains in your cooperative storytelling adventure. Certainly, He-Man never took that sword and chopped Skeletor into chunks. Star Wars: Episode One was such an unsatisfying movie in no small part because the villains never did anything bad.

Glossing over the villainous activities of the bad guys should go hand in hand with all of the players acknowledging and understanding what you are doing and why you are doing it. As long as everyone is making the active and informed choice to not deal with the heavy moral questions – it's all good.

Moral Option 2: The Banality of Evil
"It's 9 O'clock, time to get back to some Evil."

Many DMs will want to play their fiends pretty much like Nazis – their agenda is hateful, but in their off time they go hang out at the pub just like everyone else. You could even sit there with them and drink together unless you happen to be a Jew. This is the default assumption of a lot of Planescape literature, for example. An Evil creature is Evil because it ever does Evil things, not because it's necessarily doing any Evil right now. Darkness and light are, in this model, pretty ephemeral concepts – characters who wish to save their own sanity will end up either paying perhaps too much attention or ignoring them completely often as not.

Implications: Since bad guys (and presumably good guys as well) spend most of their time being regular guys and only infrequently perform acts worthy of praise or scorn, it's extremely easy for heroes to fall to Evil and extremely easy for villains to be redeemed for full value. People on both sides of the Good/Evil axis are doing pretty unexceptional stuff most of the time, so the allegiance that even Evil Clerics have to darkness is pretty tenuous.

This way of handling things is so much better at handling mysteries than are other morality systems that it may as well be a requirement if you ever want to play a "who-done-it" adventure. Since the good guys and bad guys spend most of their day being actually indistinguishable one from another, it makes distinguishing them actually difficult – and that has to happen if there is to be any question of who the PCs are supposed to stab.

Pit Falls: Be wary of over-humanizing the villains. In many stories, the bad guys are a lot more interesting than the white hats; and that can seriously derail a campaign if it happens in a role playing scenario. Beware also of the fact that if the Evil Overlord is mostly chillin like a villain with his family and having brews with his bros, it's going to be pretty hard to justify it when you inevitably stab him right in the face. Also remember that while The Banality of Evil is great for mysteries, it's actually so good for mysteries that the game can bog down. Players can get caught up in the minor goings-on of characters you don't even care about. Paranoia can be paralyzing when any scullery maid could really just go Evil at any time and poison your food to try to get your wallet. It can be realistic, but realism takes place in real time. That's not good if you're trying to raise hippogriffs as steeds.

Moral Option 3: The Face of Horror.
"I think I have Evil sand. In my pants."

Many DMs will want to make their Evil as Evil as possible. That can get… pretty Evil. It can actually get so Evil that people who overhear you playing the game will get a very bad impression about your group and the things you talk about. The starker the contrast between Good and Evil, the more righteous the acts of heroism the players commit. Tales of monstrous action are fascinating and the horrid and disgusting can hold people's interest indefinitely. By having the forces of Evil disembowel people in loving detail you can capture the imaginations of your players with actually relatively little creative work on the part of the DM. There have been over 10 Jason movies because those things practically write themselves, and people keep watching them because they genuinely are as intriguing as the are revolting.

Implications: With the forces of Evil running around doing actual stomach churning crime, having Evil and Good "team up" is essentially implausible. In fact, having Good and Evil characters in the same party is pretty much a non-starter. When playing with The Face of Horror the universe is essentially a cosmic battle between Good and Evil, the forces of Law and Chaos have some fights too, but essentially that's just crime compared to the world shaking conflict of darkness and light.

Further, while Good and Evil being as immiscible as Rubidium and Water makes for a well defined party demographic, it also has other far reaching consequences. When you go to the Abyss, the sand itself is Evil. Once you've made the determination that this means more than that Paladins can find every grain – you've bought yourself into the determination that beaches in the Abyss are themselves morally reprobate somehow.

Pit Falls: While The Face of Horror ends up making Good and Evil a much more important distinction than Law vs. Chaos, that's not really a problem. Sure, it's not reciprocal or equivalent and that's a breach of the Great Wheel tirade, but that's not really important to the game. Let's face it, when was the last time you saw a statted up enemy prepared to cast dictum? No, the problem is that if you make Evil as nasty as it can be made, it's really nasty. It makes other people in the game uncomfortable, and it disturbs people who hear portions of your game out of context. People like talking about stabbing their sword into an evil monster, that's all heroic and crap, but actually looking at sword wounds is icky. People don't want to do it.

Evil, if defined as "things we don't like", is pretty much exclusively composed of things we don't like. That means that the more we focus our attention on the details of what's going on, the more we'll want to clean our eyes out with soap. And while skirting that line can make a story grimly compelling, remember always that different people have different tolerances for this sort of thing. Just because something is gross enough to catch your prurient interest without wrecking your lunch doesn't mean that it isn't so nasty as to drive other people away. Tolerance for discussing child murder in the context of a story is not a virtue, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with the people who don't enjoy watching movies in the splatter horror genre.

Moral Option 4: Perfection in Balance
What use is the light that casts not a shadow?"

In this model, evil is a force that sits diametrically opposed to good. In order for one to exist, the other must exist as well. Evil is what gives good its meaning, and in fact one can simply define one by the other: to be good is not-evil, and to be evil is to be not-good. When playing with this option, evil plays a vital role in society and cannot be eliminated without dire consequences. For example, when the Jedi eliminate the Sith Lords, they set themselves up for an even more powerful Sith Lord to rise and kill them all, ushering in a new order of Evil, which is in turn later demolished by the calling out of a powerful Jedi who can defeat it. Neutrality is the rule of the day in this model, in the sense that evil and good will always be in the midst of trumping each other in an effort to “win”, a goal that is as meaningless as it is impossible.

What does that mean for your game? In this model, evil will always be the fly in your ointment and the piss in your cheerios, and good will always be the silver lining in the stormcloud and the complementary bag of nuts in your red-eye flight. Even the most powerful and good organization of clerics in your world will have a cruel inquisitor, and even the most death-hungry cabal of necromancers will have a guy who is kind to puppies and little children. Organizations and people will be “mostly” one thing or the other, but not all of anything, and people will be OK with that. Kind kings will be mostly good, but will have no problem massacring an entire generation of goblinkind in an effort to keep the roads safe, and liches who eat souls will defend the land from rampaging chimera without reward in an effort to keep the peace.

Implications: In a sense, this is the easiest of moral options, as you won’t need to really keep track of what’s going on with alignments. People will occasionally do things out of character, and that’s fine. Society will be quite tolerant, as they completely think its OK for there to be a Temple Street with a shrine for Orcus worshippers competing for space with a hospital sponsored by the clergy of Pelor. When one organization for good or evil gets stomped down, another one will pop up to replace it in an endless game of cosmic whack-a-mole.

For character with alignment related class features, atonement is a far easier process. Occasional deeds that violate your alignment are tolerated, as long as attempts at acts of atonement are made in a reasonable time frame. The Paladin that kills an innocent to defeat a powerful demon may have to visit the innocent’s family and make restitution after the battle, and the Cleric of Murder who defends the king from an assassin may have to seek out several of the King’s loved one’s in order to rededicate himself to his dark god.

Pit Falls: It can be pretty cool to have a party that has an assassin, a druid, and a champion of light in it – there's a lot of early D&D that has that as virtually the iconic party – but if the great game between Good and Evil is an inherently pointless game, that can make the story of your characters seem pretty banal. It's a line that can be hard to walk. It's just plain difficult to simultaneously have any individual attempt to destroy the world be important while having it be built into the contract that there will be another one tomorrow.

Backgrounds and Qualities

2009-09-05T00:58:00.001-07:00

So... Backgrounds and Qualities. These have always been a major portion of the WoD and they've always been over-the-top broken as fuck. Perhaps the biggest offender is that traditionally a five point merit (or background) has been worth very much more than a 2 point and a 3 point one together. While possibly inevitable for any system of social resources that hopes to model characters who know "some sketchy characters from down by the docks" or possibly "Bill F. Gates" (the F. stands for fucking), it's not much of a bold claim that WoD has always gone way too far in that direction. Most damningly, there is so much overlap with these things that there is frankly little reason to split one's background dots between anything. Why buy a few points of Resources when for a few more points of Fame or Status you can just get paychecks that are six figures or more?

Many of the backgrounds are just broken on the face of it. Age (the background that gives you more points that in turn can be used to purchase other backgrounds), Retainer (for a few points you can have an assistant whose is worth more points than you are in classic Jeeves and Kato fashion), and the various "I have a higher power stat" ones (such as Avatar and Generation) are the most egregious. But really all of the Backgrounds tend to fall into the categories of "fucking useless" (like Haven) or "way too powerful" (like Status). Worse, the vast majority of Backgrounds seem to hop directly from the garbage pile to the gamebreaking pile after a certain amount is purchased. Resources, for example, go up exponentially and it is literally one dot standing between an amount of money so small that it has no real effect on the story and a warchest of such power that it wraps the game around its mass.

Further, there are way too fucking many of these things. Chantry? Legacy? Artifact? What the fuck!? Even if it weren't for the fact that splitting your backgrounds traditionally makes you suck ass, the fact is that there are so many around that you really can't even have them all. It's just not practical to have friends and a paycheck and a flat. And while maybe that's supposed to be some sort of deep insight into the frailty and unrealistic expectations of the supposedly normal life expected by modernity - frankly I think it's actually just the kind of bad design you get when you have stream of consciousness design by multiple authors who aren't talking to each other.

So step one is to divide things that are about you from things that are about resources you currently have. If you happen to be from a prestigious line of vampires or have a set of memories gong back centuries or something, that's really unlikely to go away. If you go into torpor and wake up in a hundred years you'll still have all that. On the other hand, if you have some friends, a house, and a bank account, that could all go away if you fucked a corpse when the cameras were rolling. Things like Lineage make more sense as a merit or "positive quality" to use SR lingo. On the other hand, financial resources are only ever "yours" in the sense that they are real objects that you happen to have proximity to. Which brings me to the idea that everything like that should be called a "resource." And once play begins, resources of any kind are not bought with experience they are picked up and lost in play.

So here's an initial thought, Resources are things you have "access" to that can help you out in one or more areas of your investigations. They are divided based on how they help you:

Financial Resources: Stock, property, piles of gems, kilograms of coke, or just plain piles of cash - Financial Resources are portable and usually fairly anonymous. Easily transferable, and good for bribery, they usually don't do anything much if you elect to not trade them to others.
Social Resources: Contacts, friends, favors from powerful people, and even personal fame - Social Resources aren't anything tangible at all. They are the expectation that others will use their abilities and knowledge to help you.
Magical Resources: Magical artifacts, special places, strange curses and the like - Magical Resources are things you can use to solve magical problems.

Does it need subdivisions?

When looked at from the standpoint of Resources vs. Debts the social connections that might fight on your behalf really do look differently from the social connections that provide other kinds of services. So the ones like Retainer or Backup probably do want to go into a different category from the ones like Contacts or Influence. Because the negative version is totally different. The negative version of the former is Enemies (guys who come after you) and the negative version of the latter is Obligations (guys who you have to do shit for).

So that seems like 4 kinds of Resources and 4 kinds of Debts.

Financial: You either have things that you can spend like a suitcase full of ecstasy or you have something that requires you to go acquire wealth (like a mortgage or a sister who needs an organ transplant).
Social: You either have contacts and influence or you owe favors to someone else.
Capital: You either have factories or weaponry or you have some sort of job that eats up your time.
Physical: You can call upon real people for direct assistance or you have real enemies who want to fuck with you.

The Fey

2009-09-05T00:57:00.006-07:00

“I'll not rest till I have me gold. Curse this well that me soul shall dwell, till I find me magic that breaks me spell.”

Covetous and frightening, the Fey of the World of Darkness are a lot more like the Svartalfs than the pixies of a Disney cartoon. If they were from a Disney cartoon, it would probably be the Night on Bald Mountain segment from Fantasia.

Mirror Goblins
“Everything is a scam to you, isn't it?”
“Damn right it is.”

The Mirror Goblins are hideous and seemingly subhuman. They are small and mishapen, and they have hideous hooked teeth and claws. Mirror Goblins are a lot like the Black Isz from The Maxx or the Mumblers from Silent Hill. Left to their own devices, they mostly wander around Limbo gibbering and periodically eating each other. However, they are also oppressed by more powerful residents of the Dark Reflection. Whipped into shape by stronger creatures and groups they are used as disposable fodder and monsters of the week by The King With Three Shadows and other Infernal groups. Since they have always have a Potency of zero, a Mirror Goblin can pass through any portal to Limbo, which is where they get their name: literally goblins who come into the Mortal World through mirrors.

While Mirror Goblins have strange pacmanesque mouths and rarely stand much over a meter tall, their muppetlike visages seem to have little difficulty being understood in human languages. When combined with their ability to magically disguise themselves, Mirror Goblins can actually penetrate human society with tolerable ease. They dare not stay long in the Mortal World though, because their power ritual can only be performed in Limbo. Mirror Goblins are generally regarded as being less than fully trustworthy.

A Mirror Goblin was never human and has a nonstandard attribute array. They don't have a Potency rating, and their stats are:
S: 1/4 A: 2/7 I: 1/6 L: 1/5 W: 1/4 C: 1/6

A Mirror Goblin has an Infernal power source and a Ritual power schedule.

Mirror Goblin Starting Disciplines

Body Weaponry (Basic Protean)*
Quickness (Basic Celerity)
Mask of a Thousand Faces (Basic Obfuscation)
*: This Discipline is locked on and cannot be deactivated.

Spriggans
“Why there's nothing under this mask but a neck and some tendons!”

Spriggans are hideous worm eaten things scarcely larger than a Mirror Goblin who can draw upon Infernal power to become massive killing machines. These beings look like hunks of maggot infested meat in an only barely humanoid shape, and they are quite boneless until they invoke their Giant Size and War Form, which are always enacted together. At that point their worms and flesh are pulled tight over a scaffold of long wet bones that end in sharp points in many places.

A Spriggan was never human and has a nonstandard attribute array. Their stats are:
S: 1/4 A: 1/6 I: 2/7 L: 1/6 W: 1/6 C: 1/6

A Spiggan has an Infernal power source and a Ritual power schedule.

Spriggan Starting Disciplines

Feat of Strength (Basic Potence)
Body Weaponry (Basic Protean)
Small Witness (Basic Swarm Song)

-Advanced Disciplines -
Giant Size (Advanced Potence)
War Form (Advanced Protean)

Trolls
“Skin... Graaaaah.... Tasty.... ”

Within the prison world that is the Deep Reflection, hideous ogres prowl and punish or even murder those unlucky enough to fall into their clutches. But while they are the jailers of this foul realm, they are also its prisoners. Trolls spend almost every moment of their existence in agony and dejection, and eagerly take out their pains on others.

Hulking brutes with bulging musculature and an inhuman appearance, Trolls cannot actually turn their Giant Size off. These tortured giants of Limbo appear in literature as Tartarians and Pyramid Head. While they do eat people, they don't actually get anything for it except a meal. They rip the skin from their victims simply because they find enjoyment in doing so, not for the advancement of any mystical agenda.

Trolls have a fairly multivarious appearance, varying from merely oversized humans to lumpy stone skinned oni with tremendous tusks. These changes are generally speaking purely cosmetic. Trolls have no difficulty recognizing different Trolls as being the same as themselves.

Trolls have a nonstandard attribute array because they were never humans. Before their Potency modifier and their constant Giant Size, their attribute ranges are:
S: 5/10 A: 1/5 I: 1/5 L: 1/3 W: 3/8 C: 1/6

A Troll has an Infernal power source and a Continuous power schedule.

Troll Starting Disciplines

Vigor (Basic Potence)
Feat of Strength (Basic Potence)
Revive the Flesh (Basic Fortitude)
Patience of the Mountain (Basic Fortitude)

- Basic Disciplines -
Poison Heart (Basic Names of the Blasphemies)
Dread Gaze (Basic Presence)

-Advanced Disciplines -
Giant Size (Advanced Potence)
Devastation (Advanced Potence)
Restoration (Advanced Fortitude)

Revenants

2009-09-05T00:57:00.005-07:00

“The Living Dead and the dying living are all the same. Cut from the same cloth. But disposing of dead people is a public service, whereas you're in all sorts of trouble if you kill someone while they're still alive.”

The Revenant is the talkative wight from virtually every piece of fiction where a Zombie is a major character. Whether the lovely She from Cemetary Man, the creepy Shelly Winters from Scary Go Round or the villainous Dark Ash and Sheila from Army of Darkness, every Luminary who becomes a Zombie by whatever means becomes a Revenant. Revenancy is curable, as can be plainly seen from both Scary Go Round and Army of Darkness, and it is the only form of Zombieness that is. A Revenant appears much as it did in life, save for pale white skin and darkness around the eyes. Basically they look like someone who is wearing heavy goth makeup, save that there is something obviously unnatural about them that even the most casual observer can plainly see.

Revenants do not necessarily lose their reasoning faculties nor their personal moral compass. However, they do hunger for the brains of the living, and are doomed to gradually weaken and lose power until they devour such. Eating the brain of a human refreshes their Power batteries, but they don't have an unobtrusive or masquerade upholding alternative at their disposal. Sooner or later, they will be compelled to break open a human skull and feast on the morsels inside. It is for this reason that even the usually quite open minded supernatural societies generally want Revenants cured or destroyed – their mere presence endangers the masquerade more than most covenants are willing to condone.

A Revenant has their Strength, Intuition, and Willpower all increased by 1.

A Revenant has an Orphic power source and a Feeding power schedule.

Revenant Starting Disciplines

Patience of the Mountain (Basic Fortitude)
Revive the Flesh (Basic Fortitude)

- Basic Disciplines -
Compel Spirits (Basic Necromancy)
Nimble Feet (Basic Celerity)
Abyss of the Body (Basic Descent of Entropy)
Second Senses (Basic Auspex)
Feat of Strength (Basic Potence)

-Advanced Disciplines -
Indomitably (Advanced Fortitude)

Soulless

2009-09-05T00:57:00.003-07:00

“If you look at the whole life of the planet, we... you know, man, has only been around for a few blinks of an eye. So if the infection wipes us all out, that is a return to normality. ”

The Soulless are the lately fashionable “fast zombies” of more modern cinema such as 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake. Clearly distinct from Shamblers by their bright red eyes and relatively speedy disposition, the Soulless are neither plodding nor tireless. Possessed of more humanlike speeds and faculties, the Soulless are individually much more terrifying individually. While they are rarely spawned in the tremendous numbers of Shamblers, the fact that they can and do spread their affliction readily to the living means that their numbers can easily grow out of control if not checked by heroic intervention.

A Soulless loses their Charisma but not their Logic. Their Strength is increased by 1, but their Agility is unaffected. A Soulless is consumed by rage at all times to the point of complete irrationality, but they are not actually incapable of utilizing tools. While a Soulless will usually opt to empower a Feat of Strength to tear down a door rather than attempting to turn the knob, this is a result of their all consuming hatred rather than actual ineptitude on their part. The bite or even spit of the Soulless can corrupt and kill mortals, and the venom they are equipped with from their serpent's tongue ability is always a fatal one.

A Soulless has an Orphic power source and a Lunar power schedule.

Soulless Starting Disciplines

Feat of Strength (Basic Potence)
Nimble Feet (Basic Celerity)
Tongue of the Serpent (Basic Lure of Shadows)

Shamblers

2009-09-05T00:57:00.001-07:00

“When the dead rise, civilization will fall.”

Shamblers are the classic “slow zombies” from zombie movies from the eighties. They hunger for brains, but they are basically walking corpses who shamble around – hence the name. Shamblers are not individually particularly dangerous. But they are implacable and they can come in fairly large numbers. Created by Orphic sorcery or by leakage of power from Mictlan, Shamblers will thoughtlessly move toward humans and attempt to eat their brains. The opening up of a major Well to Mictlan is often accompanied by the mass animation of large numbers of corpses as Shamblers, leading to potentially terrifying armies of the things even in the face of the relative incompetence of any solitary Shambler.

A Shambler has no Charisma or Logic score and automatically fails any test it would be called upon to make. Upon creation, a Shambler's Agility is reduced by one (to a minimum of 1), and their Strength is increased by 1. A Shambler loses all of their skills, even combat skills. When not controlled magically, they really will simply walk over and relentlessly and unskillfully claw and bite at potential victims with their substantial but undirected strength. Shamblers are not specifically slower than a normal person, but they always move at the rate of a Careful Walk even when ordered to do otherwise. Only their literally endless endurance and willingness to travel unceasingly to find brains gives their aggregate daily travels a frightening total of up to 50 kilometers a day.

A Shambler has an Orphic power source but no power schedule or Power attribute.

Shambler Starting Disciplines

Patience of the Mountain (Basic Fortitude)

-Advanced Disciplines -
Indomitably (Advanced Fortitude)

Zombies

2009-09-05T00:56:00.003-07:00

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

Zombies are physical bodies without the benefit of life or human spirit who nonetheless move about and hunger for the brains of the living. They are not respected members of the supernatural community, but are instead treated as servitors and disposable soldiers by those with necromantic powers and a social problem by most everyone else. Zombies are not traditionally considered playable, but are instead most likely to appear as tools or independent menaces in a World of Darkness campaign.

All Zombies, regardless of strength have an Orphic power source. When an extra becomes a Zombie, they become a Shambler or a Soulless depending upon the circumstances of their transformation. When a Luminary becomes a Zombie, they become a Revenant in all cases. Unlike many unplayable types, a Zombie is made out of a human being and they are templated onto a normal human statline.

Tiered non-playables?

2009-09-05T00:56:00.001-07:00

OK, here's a big question: is it more useful or more confusing for the non-playables to come in tiers? Because it is both useful and confusing. The first thing is good, the second bad.

Here's the logic: when you come across non-playables, some of them are the supernatural equivalent of cars full of cops or even packs of dogs; others are player character equivalents or even boss monsters. The ability to visually identify that you are dealing with a shambling horde of inept walking corpses versus dealing with a powerful wight is useful to the players and it is useful to the verisimilitude of accompanying scenes. On the other hand, the distinctions are one more fucking thing to remember.

The untiered version is that when you make a powerful version of something, you simply jack its powers and/or Potency up and give it an Edge stat and call it a day. Even though a zombie starts at the level of a normal human or even slightly lower than that, if you bumped its stats up and gave it a bunch of disciplines it could potentially be a boss monster all its own. And while that fits in the framework of the rest of the game easily, it may cause cognitive dissonance when you run through twenty zombies as chainsaw heroes only to fight boss fight against a single zombie.

So for example, one could have a two fold or threefold cut of categories. Amongst the Fey the Mirror Goblins are pretty much human-level (or less) with a discipline or three, so they can show up in substantial numbers and still get taken down en masse by the PCs. However, a Spriggan or Troll would have a lot more powers at its disposal and would be expected to be the equal or more of a normal supernatural. You could look at a Mirror Goblin and know you were dealing with something that was bullshit on the scale of supernatural badassery and look at a Spriggan ad know that you were not. Similarly when you look at a Zombie: the shambling groaning corpse is just chainsaw bait but the dude with burning glowing eyes has player-challenging levels of bad assery.

So, is that helpful enough to be worth doing or is it burdensome on conceptual space enough to not be worth doing?

Maya: The Dreamlands

2009-09-05T00:55:00.003-07:00

“Everybody's got to dream, young girl. If you don't dream, ya go crazy.”
“Go crazy? Don't mind if I do!”

The Dreamlands are a wild and inhospitable place filled with fetid jungles and monstrous beasts. Overgrown with dreadful, implacable, and nightmarish life in all world correspondences – even those in the far north and south of the planet (though it still gets wicked cold at extreme latitudes). No one really knows if Maya is a construct of subconscious thought or the manifestation of a distant world that exists independently of our own. What is clear is that Maya is connected to the dreams of the frightened and the suffering. The goings on in this world seem somewhat unreal even for those who have traveled to it in the flesh, and the native inhabitants are strange and otherworldly even by the standards set by other supernatural creatures.

The Deep Maya does not even have climactic similarities with its Mortal World correspondences. It boasts floating rocks and sideways waterfalls. And monstrous beasts. And psychic plants. There are few reasons for the sane to want to go to the Deep Maya even though it is wondrous and beautiful in its alien and unforgiving fashion.

Getting to Maya
“If you die in your dreams, you make me a sandwich.”

Perhaps the easiest way to get to The Dreamlands is to go to sleep. While not even a small fraction of dreamers are transported across the barrier, it is nonetheless possible for virtually anyone to make the passage while they are sleeping. A dreamer's physical body remains where it is while the consciousness projects into Maya. If the person dies in the Dreamlands, the body dies as well. If the body dies, the dreamer is lost in Maya indefinitely and becomes a Jalus. There are places where the barrier between Maya and the sleeping mind is weaker. Generally speaking, places with horrible personal murders are more conducive to slipping people across into the nightmare realm. Impersonal deaths, such as natural disasters and battles make the barrier more difficult to cross. Physical gateways, though rare, also exist. They are always circles of something, and one crosses the boundary by entering and then exiting the circle. Circles of mushrooms or trees are fairly common as gateways go, but theoretically it could be a circle of anything. In any case, these gateways only function when the moon is visible. Sorcerous means of entering the Dreamlands are found in Astral Sorceries.

Things to do in The Dreamlands
“We shall build a tower that shall reach to the stars.”

The majority of inhabitants of Maya are neither human nor derived from human stock. Massive monsters stalk the lands and even the plants themselves chitter with an otherworldly malevolence. The Evil Plants mostly don't speak to travelers in Maya. They can speak telepathically, but they mostly choose not to do so. The Giant Animals mostly simply attempt to devour anything they come across. While delicious fruit and clearish water are available year round and in great quantity, The Dreamlands have the least expatriot civilization from the Mortal world of all the other worlds.

Not everything in this dimension is from another world however. Sometimes tribes of Jalus congregate together. And for reasons unknown The Marduk Society has been growing an Arcanotower in the Brasil Correspondence for some time. They patrol that area and keep it mostly clear of Giant Animals, but the Evil Plants seem to be allowed free reign to enter the compound.

The Gloom

2009-09-05T00:55:00.001-07:00

“Some people believe that when you die there is a wonderful light. As bright as the sun but it doesn't hurt to look into it. All the answers to all the questions you want to know are inside that light. Truth is... there is no light. Only darkness.”

The Gloom has been around forever. Some say that it is space itself and the big bang created the human world as a tiny mote within the gloom, while others say that the Gloom is the force of entropy to which all things shall return in The End. Whatever the case, The Gloom is supernaturally cold and dark. Nothing grows here and everything that lives within The Gloom is hungry all of the time. All the plants are carnivorous and all the insects are parasitic.

The Gloom is home to what the unenlightened would call ghosts, wendigos, and vampires. All of them endeavor to draw prey in from the human world where they may drain the blood, life, and warmth from it to feed their insatiable hungers. The true horror is that such victims do not rest in peace, but instead rise driven by the need to recover the blood, life and warmth that was taken from them - in an ever growing cycle of futility.

Getting to Mictlan
“Have you ever been killed before? I'll be back in a minute.”

Portals to The Gloom are called “wells” and each one is filled with darkness. The most effective portals are holes in the ground filled with shadow and water – literal wells. However in some cases a well will appear which is just a hole filled with water or shadow. In addition, pretty much everyone goes to Mictlan just by dying. Upon death, a person becomes a ghost, but n most cases they don't seem to last very long. While some ghosts (especially the ghosts of Luminaries) kick around pretty much indefinitely, this being the World of Darkness it seems most likely that ghosts simply unravel and fade into oblivion. The land of the dead is indeed a super depressing place. Sorcerous means of entering The Gloom are found in Orphic magic paths.

While in the Deeper Gloom, all Ghosts are solid, able to be seen and to exert force upon objects. In the Shallow Gloom and to an even greater extent in the mortal world this is not reliably true. So it is that many Ghosts essentially cannot get anything done in the mortal world even if they escape Mictlan through a Well. So while there is no barrier to exit The Gloom as there is for the Dark Reflection, the primary residents mostly do not leave even when they can.

Things to do in the Gloom
“It was their hands that built this city of ours, Father. But where do the hands belong in your scheme? ”
“In their proper place, the depths.”

Soulless bodies sink into Mictlan fairly regularly, whereupon they are animated by the hungry energies of The Gloom and become wandering zombies. The dusty plains of Mictlan are pretty dangerous for travelers because of this. The Gloom has been around for a long time, and walls erected don't seem to fall down often in the cold stillness of the land of eternal night. Over the millennia many people have found time to erect buildings and even cities. Many of these stand vacant, mute testament to the fact that long ago someone cared enough to build them. However, some are still in use. The Shattered Empire has several such cities, usually corresponding to places where no city or even point of interest stands in the Mortal World. Others are less ambitious, where the Giovanni have a castle in the Gloom Shadow of Venice.

There does not appear to be any specific fixed limit to how long a Ghost can persist in The Gloom. So even though most last only very short amounts of time, it is entirely possible that any particular historical figure still exists somewhere in Mictlan. Some Ghosts, unhappy with the idea of wandering through a frozen desert for all eternity have taken the time to put up buildings and even societies. The largest such Ancestor City is at about the same place as Beijing.

The Ventrue

2009-09-05T00:53:00.002-07:00

“There are far worse things awaiting man than death.”

Ventrue are inherently obsessive. They covet the life they once had, and hold an innate aversion for what they've become. As a result, Ventrues are unable to stand the sight of their own reflections. This gives them an aversion to mirrors of all kinds, including polished metal and still water. Ventrue will often display a strong aversion to certain things which remind them of their human lives, although such aversion is by no means consistent between individuals. Individual Ventrue usually display some other symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, such as counting, cleaning, and otherwise ritualizing their lives. This obsession is not without its benefits, and Ventrue notice details that might escape others.

A Ventrue must drink blood to maintain its appearance of life. As a Ventrue uses up its reserves of energy, it acquires a progressively more corpselike and sunken appearance, until feeding again restores the blush of life to its cheeks. A Ventrue starved for long enough is forced into a state of torpor and to all outward appearances is a wizened corpse. A Ventrue's bite is venomous, and causes amnesia and mild euphoria.

As they are dead, Ventrue are difficult to kill. With enough blood even terrible injuries can be repaired. Piercing a Ventrue though the heart will drain its blood supply and render it indefinitely incapacitated. Sunlight (and probably any sufficiently strong UV radiation) is harmful to Ventrue, and it renders their powers weak. As creatures drawing powers from Mictlan, their mere presence excites and offends natural animals. Cats hiss and dogs growl at their approach.

Ventrue are capable of turning living humans into Ventrue. This is accomplished by killing the victim via desanguination and then feeding it some of the Ventrue's own blood using their power of Blood Bondage. However, few individuals can survive the process without going completely insane, and none come out unscathed (as evidenced by the neuroticism of all Ventrue). A Ventrue unable to cope with the transformation becomes a violent, mindless creature, driven only by hunger – a Vampire Spawn. Many Ventrue are terribly disappointed when they try to "embrace" loved ones. Some use their powers of Mesmerism to cloud and dominate the minds of humans and other Ventrue, giving them the ability to control their spawn.

A Ventrue has an Orphic power source and a Feeding power schedule.

Ventrue Starting Disciplines

Patience of the Mountains (Basic Fortitude)
Revive the Flesh (Basic Fortitude)

- Basic Disciplines -
Vigor (Basic Potence)
Heightened Senses (Basic Auspex)
Blood Bondage (Basic Path of Blood)
Mesmerism (Basic Dominate)

-Advanced Disciplines -
Restoration (Advanced Fortitude)
Indomitably (Advanced Fortitude)

The Deep Ones: Scions of Dagon

2009-09-05T00:53:00.001-07:00

“Those horrible eyes. Unblinking and inhuman, twas like looking at fish more than a man.”

According to legend, Dagon was spawned when Tiamat mated with the Tigris River. He was a powerful and fish-like creature, and his progeny all carry fish traits about their being. Hailing from the oceans, a Deep One gradually becomes scaled and gilled as he ages. His eyes flatten and rarely blink, and the lure of the sea becomes harder to ignore. There are few who can stomach long departures from the coast, for in their mind they can always listen for the strange whispered yet incessant call of the ocean.

Deep Ones can breathe water as easily as air. The strange whispers they hear in their own minds can also be shared with anyone foolish enough to look a Deep One in their strangely opaque eyes.

A Deep One has an Astral power source and a Lunar power schedule.

Deep One Starting Disciplines

Aura Perception (Basic Auspex)
Heightened Senses (Basic Auspex)

- Basic Disciplines -
Body Weaponry (Basic Protean)
Patience of the Mountain (Basic Fortitude)
Command (Basic Dominate)
Rising Mists (Basic Chasing the Storm)

-Advanced Disciplines -
Telepathy (Advanced Auspex)
Conditioning (Advanced Dominate)

Androids: The Lover

2009-09-05T00:52:00.005-07:00

“How fully functional are you?”

Androids are made of steel rather than flesh and they are coldly perfect to behold. Whether man or woman, an android is beautiful beyond what normal humans are capable of. Unfortunately, the metallic perfection of their exterior belies a digital corsity that makes interpersonal relationships unsatisfactory. The emotions of an Android, though strongly felt, are simply too extreme and simple for others to relate to. The love of an Android is as off-putting as the hatred to a normal, nuanced individual. Androids do not, on initial inspection look anything other than human. However there is something distinctly “not right” about them which will creep out any normal human who interacts with them socially for long. They are beyond autistic, their emotions are simply ones and zeros.

Androids can be made of circuitry, gears, or simply polished marble. The key is that at the end of the procedure they are crafted to look more human than a human could possibly be.

An Android has an Infernal power source and a Ritual power schedule.

Vigor (Basic Potence)
Feat of Strength (Basic Potence)
Light of Ennui (Basic Descent of Entropy)
Awe (Basic Presence)
Patience of the Mountains (Basic Fortitude)
Howling Winds (Basic Chasing the Storm)
Devastation (Intermediate Potence)
Contradiction (Intermediate Descent of Entropy)

Story Inspiration: Pygmalion, Metropolis, Weird Science, Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?

Golems: The Servitor

2009-09-05T00:52:00.003-07:00

“Did I request thee, Maker from my clay
To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”

Created strong of body and unending in endurance, the Golem is made to do tasks that humans don't want to. Often these jobs are demeaning or dangerous, and it is no surprise that Golems rarely want to do the things that are asked of them. Golems appear crude and ogrish, having been initially created for physical functionality rather than social niceties. Generally a Golem is as capable of making human emotional connections and decisions as anyone, but their distinctly non-human, even non-living appearance makes that difficult.

A Golem has an Astral power source and a Continuous power schedule.

Vigor (Basic Potence)
Feat of Strength (Basic Potence)
Fire Walking (Basic Walk of Flame)
Hide From Notice (Basic Obfuscation)
Patience of the Mountains (Basic Fortitude)
Summon Spirit (Basic Necromancy)
Devastation (Intermediate Potence)
Touch of Shadow (Intermediate Obfuscation)

Story Inspiration: Rabbi Loew, R.U.R., Short Circuit, Talos

Frankensteins: The Creature

2009-09-05T00:52:00.001-07:00

“My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.”

Frankensteins are crafted to be literally new living things. They are essentially people, albeit designed rather than evolved. Unfortunately, the creators of these new creatures almost never take to their assumed role as parent, because the Frankenstein is never truly a baby and never truly a human. Propelled into existence with a grown human's size and facilities, they nonetheless suffer from having missed the opportunities to be juvenile.

Like a man who has been inducted as a child soldier or a woman married at first blood, a Frankenstein's life will always have deeply painful emotional issues. They will always be childlike in some aspects of their existence, even if they live to be hundreds of years old.

A Frankenstein has a Death power source and a Continuous power schedule.

Vigor (Basic Potence)
Feat of Strength (Basic Potence)
Nimble Feet (Basic Celerity)
Dread Gaze (Basic Presence)
Patience of the Mountains (Basic Fortitude)
Heightened Senses (Basic Auspex)
Devastation (Intermediate Potence)
Quicken Sight (Intermediate Celerity)

Story Inspiration: Frankenstein, Pinocchio, Edward Scissorhands, Subject Two, Herbert West: Reanimator

Nosferatu: A Reimagination

2009-09-05T00:48:00.000-07:00

"I'm gonna mongle your cock!"

These are the vampires that no one likes to think about, because they're ugly. Or at least terrifying. They originate from the old, old myths about vampires, the ones which didn't talk about the vampire as a creature of romance, but instead insinuated that they were slain werewolves, or just revenant corpses, who returned to the grave each night. The fact that many seem to look like tuberculosis victims, or rather, the corpses thereof, is not accidental. They are still lords of darkness in their own way, but it is in the most raw, terrifying manner possible. This is Count Orlok, from the movie Nosferatu itself.

The most seemly of these creatures still looks the most like a corpse, even amongst beings that are walking corpses. The rest are often bestial... not animalistic in a kind, gentle way, but rather possessed of abominations of traits seen elsewhere. Some lose any hair they had, and instead grow a greasy or even lurid green mat over the rest of their form. All radiate a disconcerting mien, for they are unable to entirely conceal the Beast's hunger within them, and even when they manage to hide it in appearance, it often shines through in their demeanor.

Because of their strong affinity with the monster inside them and its feral qualities, they can also communicate with less undead beasts well, and even assume their forms with a certain readiness. There are legends, after all, of vampires rising from the corpses of werewolves who were not properly disposed of. As far as the Nosferatu of today, know, however, they're only legends, confused ramblings, and you would be best off ignoring Elder Uncle Smashface. The Nosferatu prefer Protean and Animalism, though they're by no means the only practitioners thereof. They also typically master Obfuscation in order to conceal their horrific miens... or just ambush prey.

As a consequence of the grisly metamorphosis that the Embrace of the Nosferatu introduces, all Nosferatu, including their Spawn, acquire the Basic Protean ability of Body Weaponry, often as it rips through their flesh, their teeth lengthen into a bloody maw of fangs, and claws sprout from their digits. Often Nosferatu find the more challenging lesson is how to retract these and look relatively normal again. All Illuminated Nosferatu also possess a stronger personality. When making an attempt to intimidate or terrify someone, they may add 3 dice. This explicitly may apply to uses of Animalism which cow or terrifying beast, but not soothe or merely interact, and likewise to any hunting-related rolls where the Nosferatu is stalking and harrying prey into terror and exhaustion. After using this advantage, however, a Nosferatu subtracts 3 dice from any attempt to make them appear polite, friendly, or otherwise anything but the horrific monster they just revealed themselves to be.

Limbo: The Dark Reflection

2009-09-05T00:46:00.001-07:00

“You can go to hell!”
“We can't. Not alone...”

A long time ago, some people fucked up really bad and parts of the human world started to fall into the fires of The Dark Reflection. Nobody's quite sure exactly when or what - some say that it was the cinders of the atomic fires of Oklo, while others say it is the ancient truth contained in the myth of Prometheus and the Scriptural references to Gehenna; some that men merely merely opened the doorway into the world of ashes; others say that it was men that started the unquenchable fire that begat The Dark Reflection.

Practically everything found in Limbo was first wrought by humans, and then destroyed by fire. Everywhere in the Dark Reflection there are always remnants of human habitation, and everywhere in the dark reflection, there are always smoke and ashes. Yet it is exceedingly rare to encounter men still living nor open flames still burning. The ground is littered with sooty broken glass: smashed bottles, shattered windows, and shards of obsidian lie on every surface. The dusty surfaces seem dull, and rarely cast a reflection. When they do, they seem more of a window back to the mortal realm, a cruel reminder of where the onlooker is and where they could be.

The Dark Reflection is home to what the unenlightened would call demons, ifrit and shinma. All of them endeavor merely to survive long enough to escape. Survival is a brutal matter of scavenging amongst the cinders and preying upon the weaker residents. Escape is more difficult, never more than a temporary respite: for each of the dwellers of The Dark Reflection carry the seed of the unquenchable fire within them, and any who escape are doomed to one day start a blaze which will drag another piece of the human world back into The Dark Reflection.

Getting to the Dark Reflection
“Fire doesn't cleanse, it blackens.”

Natural passage in and out of the Dark Reflection is almost always through fires or mirrored surfaces, and it is the latter possibility that gives it its name. Sometimes when something is burned, a rend between the mortal world and the Dark Reflection is left in its place. This is most likely to happen when the burnt thing in question was a source of security such as the wall of a family home or school, or a child's blanket. Once a character has been to the Dark Reflection even once, these portals appear far more commonly in their presence for the rest of their lives. Those who have been to the Dark Reflection often find themselves avoiding mirrors for fear that they will find the profane staring back at them.

Sorcerous means to enter and escape the Dark Reflection can be found in most Infernal paths. Leaving the Dark Reflection is difficult for magical creatures. Whether traveling by sorcery or through a gateway, moving from the Deep to the Shallow or from the Shallow to the Mortal World requires one to make a make a Resistance Test (Social if attempting to traverse a summoning, Mental if attempting to pass through a mirror gate, or Physical if attempting to navigate a burnt rend in space) with a Threshold equal to their own Potency. If returning to a known place, the storyteller may award a bonus of 1-5 dice to the escape attempt depending upon how familiar one is with the location. Summoning rituals and special gate preparations can add additional bonus dice in addition to allowing for an Escape Test at all. This can render the Dark Reflection a near inescapable prison for the very powerful. For example, The King With Three Shadows has a Potency of 10 and suffers from a name binding that further raises his escape threshold to 15. The locations of truly epic firestorms have left certain portals that waive these restrictions for supernatural creatures of a Potency equal to or less than their Rating.

Things to do in Limbo
“It's being invaded by the Otherworld. By a world of someone's nightmarish delusions come to life.”

The majority of natives of the Dark Reflection are Fey and Demons. These beings are generally pretty uncooperative and rarely are on good terms with any of the major covenants. The King of Three Shadows has a strong presence in Limbo, and his covenant has substantially more territory than any other there. World War II created copies virtually intact of several cities in Limbo, and many of them are used by one or more supernatural groups as bases of operation. The firestorms of Dresden created a dusty and scorched copy of that place in the Dark Reflection which is even now used by members of the Sabbat who refused to accept the defeat of the Axis as a base of operation to train a demon army to someday retake the human world. The Rape of Nanking left a level 5 portal to a reflection of the city of Nanjing that is mostly used as a smuggling port by the World Crime League.

Not everything in Limbo is a supernatural creature. There are some real humans there, and they are sad people. Food is scarce in the Dark Reflection, and the nightmarish imagery is usually enough to drive those who fall into Limbo to madness and depravity. Most become demonic pawns. However, demonic pawn or not, a human has no Potency and can pass through the narrowest of portals. All too often, by the time they reach an egress they are already committed to serving dark lords by kidnapping other humans from the mortal world and then returning to the land of their torment.

Mages/Sorcerers & Transhumans & more! (Remix)

2009-09-05T00:43:00.000-07:00

Witches

Bubble Bubble.

The Mummy

Bubba Hotep

The Mummy's Ghost

The Mummy's Curse

Exemplars:

So this is where things get difficult. The Gloom magic people are probably gong to be African serpent themed and be called the Khaibit. The Dark Reflection infernalism magic people are going to be fire themed and probably be called either the Baali or the Nephandus. And the Dreamlands magicians are going to be? I don't really know. Void Engineers is a possibility, as are the plant controlling Athaqui or even the bluntly obvious Dream Speakers or Verbana from old Mage.

Transhuman

Just a scientific experiment. To do something no other man in the world had done.

less

flame of life

Exemplars:

The groups are The Fallen (Limbo, mostly East Asian influenced) who get exposed to magical radiation from an event or artifact and are then magical beings; The Returned (Gloom, mostly South Asian influenced) who are reincarnates; and The Children of Aether (Maya, modernist sci fi) who have big dreams and kooky scientific theories.

Leviathan

His face was fish-like.

watched

Exemplars:

Again, here's where we have some iffishness. We're pretty settled on Deep Ones (Limbo, Greek) and Troglodytes (Mictlan, African). But the third group is some kind of insect people. Are we talking Ant people? Be people? Mantis ladies? Beetlefolk? Spiderpeople? Locustpeople?

Are our bug people skin bags full of bugs like the Worm that Walks or are they giant bugs that take the forms of humans like Metamorphosis and Meet the Applegates? Or humans with bug traits like Genestealers and Spiderman? And what part of the world are we hearkening our bug folk too? No easy answers there.

Vampires & Prometheans (Remix)

2009-09-05T00:42:00.001-07:00

Vampires

An eternity of melancholy and betrayal is, after all, an eternity.

Exemplars:

Dracula

Blade

Buffy

Now the type lists for these guys are pretty confined. We got Ventrue, who are pretty much Dracula, and we have Nosferatu who are pretty much Nosferatu - from the movie Nosferatu. Our third group was the Daeva, who are based on more modern vampire stuff like Darkstalkers, Underworld, and Bloody Roar. But the thing is that those vampires are actually throwbacks to the Central American Onaqui. So the Daeva may as well get a bunch of Aztec stuff. The whole vampire bat thing is American, since that's where real vampire bats come from. So there's a lot of room for vampire stuff with central american themes.

Prometheans

Once created, a work has a life of its own.

Exemplars:

These guys are self explanatory. There are Androids based on Limbo powers and Metropolis (and other modernist science fiction), there are corpse men held together with Mictlan powers based on Frankenstein, and there are statues animated by dreams based on Hebrew folklore.

The Four Worlds

2009-09-05T00:40:00.000-07:00

“Things are crawling in all over the place these days.”

A very common trope in horror is the inclusion of additional worlds that are full of terror and danger. This is very useful, since of course having an extra world around allows you to fit things into the narrative that would be otherwise very difficult to fit into the Earth. Demon armies, forgotten cities, and strange and deadly plants can be piled to the sky and beyond without otherwise upsetting the world provided that they were never in the world in the first place. Furthermore, the idea that monsters can come in sideways is by itself a wonderfully useful notion for the horror genre, because it severely undermines the concept of safety in a fortress or locked room.

That being said, it is also true that there are a lot of alternate worlds to be had in various stories. Too many alternate worlds to be anything vaguely approaching something workable. And so it is that as a compromise we have cut things down to three alternate realities:

Limbo: The Dark Reflection The best rendition of the Dark Reflection is probably in Silent Hill. It's a world very much like our own but scoured with demonic powers. Ash falls from the sky like rain and everything looks abandoned or scorched. Demons prowl the Dark Reflection.
Mictlan: The Gloom The best rendition of the Gloom is of course in Nightwatch, which even calls the place that. It's a cold and oppressive world where darkness presses insistently upon the light and heat of travelers. Powers of death leak in from every crevice and extinguish fires and the lives of small animals. Blood hungering insects and ghosts scour the Gloom.
Maya: The Dreamlands Think of a combination of the deadly dreamworlds of Nightmare on Elm Street and the fantastic realms of Narnia. This is where dreams and fairies go, but since this is the World of Darkness the dreams are often as not inspired by Freddy and the fairies are more likely to be Warwick Davis than Tumnus.

Each of these worlds have two levels. One can go to the first level where interaction with the mortal realm is still possible, and one can go to the deeper level where it is not. In short, like in Silent Hill it is possible to straddle the worlds where you can still open and close the door of your house and see what's on the stove but demons from the Dark Reflection can attack you. It's also possible to be all the way in the Dark Reflection, where things are a terrifying hellscape and nothing makes any sense.

Pathfinder: The Lowdown

2009-09-05T00:35:00.000-07:00

So there's a fair amount of discussion about Paizo, because they are the only major publisher who is still putting out new 3rd edition compatible stuff, their art is good, and they are shifting everything over to "Pathfinder" which makes people wonder if they should switch their games over to Pathfinder as well. As it happens, they should not. But there's no shame in asking why. So to act as a sort of "go to" thread about why you should not make the switch to Pathfinder, we're making an FAQ of sorts. Common questions can be integrated into it and given coherent answers with a minimum of hyperbole.

I heard that Pathfinder is compatible with 3rd edition rules. As such, does it really make any difference if I use Pathfinder or not?

Unfortunately, it does. Pathfinder makes a lot of minor rules modifications that really add up to being quite confusing. It even calculates defenses and hit points slightly differently so that monsters out of the monster manual are not usable as-is. With almost inconsequential changes to almost every spell as well as the basic monster combat routines, you'll be running into something you have to look up almost every combat round - and that seriously slows down play. Pathfinder is less compatible with 3.5 rules than 3rd edition sourcebooks or d20 modern sourcebooks are. Quite a (negative) achievement for something for which compatibility was supposed to be a life goal.

Didn't Pathfinder do the biggest open RPG playtest in history? Doesn't that mean they solved all of D&D's problems?

No. In this case, the "playtest" was a lie. Destructive playtesting was not only not encouraged, it was actively and specifically rejected. The Paizo leadership only wanted to hear about whether people had fun or not. Which means that the most pried playtest reports were seriously ones in which the players spent all night in immersive roleplaying or where the fun centered around "awesome" artifacts that broke the rules. In short - things that didn't use the rules at all and didn't demonstrate anything. People who actually ran apples to apples comparisons, same game tests, or repeated experiments to get controlled results or regressed bugs were not only ignored, they were banned from their forums.

Their playtest was a marketing ploy and nothing more. It was never intended to uncover problems or produce real results.

Doesn't Paizo's system address some of the most broken parts of D&D?

Not really, no. If you talk to 95% of the D&D players who are aware of balance issues in the D&D game who don't eat paste they will probably describe the most central issue as either "Fighters suck" or "Spellcasters are broken" - these statements are mostly speaking logically equivalent in terms of central balance issues because they both describe the relationship Wizards > Fighters. So to make D&D less unbalanced, it would be logical to either make spellcasters less powerful or sword wielders more powerful. Pathfinder does the opposite, and mysteriously makes spellcasters more powerful and fighters less powerful. Thus, it's more unbalanced.

How are spellcasters more powerful? Aren't a bunch of spells nerfed?

First of all, nerfing "a spell" doesn't actually do anything to spellcasters in terms of overall power as long as there is still at least one spell that still makes them win at the same level. It makes spellcasters less interesting to have less spells they want to use, but it doesn't make them any worse to use spell X to win instead of spell Y. While many staples of the wizard arsenal (like Glitterdust) have gotten nerfed to make them severely less good, and the literal death spells have been reduced to inconsequential damage dealers, there are still spells that remove enemies from combat at every level. The fine folks at Paizo even added some.

OK fine, I understand that spellcasters aren't any less powerful casting ghoulish hunger instead of finger of death, but you said they were more powerful. How can that be?

Well, Pathfinder gives out more feats (which helps caster DCs), gives everyone a +2 to a mental stat (which means higher caster DCs), gives single classed characters (like spellcasters) bonus hit points or skill point for no reason, raises the hit points of the caster classes, and gives spellcasters bonus free class features to "encourage them to not take prestige classes" - except that these class features start at level 1 so you get bonus free swag even if you jump ship for a PrC at the first possible opportunity. Also all the changes seem to miraculously benefit spellcasters. Specialist wizards can now use wands and scrolls out of their "banned" schools, and even make those items without penalty. Specialist wizards essentially don't even have spell selection limits anymore, but they still have bonuses. It's good to be the king.

More feats? Doesn't that help warriors too?

Not really. Anything you'd want to do with combat feats costs more feats now. The +4 bonus from Improved Disarm has been divided into two feats, for example. Spell Focus is unchanged of course.

What? Tell me more about how warriors got the bad touch? Improved Disarm sucks and it's difficult for me to imagine that being two feats.

Well part of that is the decision to "streamline" all the optional combat maneuvers into "not working." Apparently, someone at Paizo really doesn't like trip fighters, grapplemancers, or dungeoncrashers. I'm not super clear why, since by most accounts those represent rather limited but at least functional warrior characters in 3rd edition rules. A Tripstar may be boring, but he's no more boring than Sir Chargealot and at least he's differently viable. No more in Pathfinder. The core is that instead of rolling against an opposed roll, you now roll against a static number that happens to be what you'd need to have rolled if your opponent rolled a 15. Also, all the things that gave you +4 on these tests give you a +2 instead. Also the rules on trip, grapple, disarm, and bullrush have been changed slightly so that that they aren't as penalizing for the character it happens to, further disenfranchising the maneuver specialists.

Ouch. What if I wanted to make a "does big damage Fighter" like the Sir Chargealot that you mentioned instead of one of the maneuver specialists? I mean, that is also a standard character in 3.5 and it can work OK. I heard they gave Fighters bonus damage and AC or something?

Well, they nerfed Power Attack.

What?

Yeah. Power Attack, they nerfed it. Also, Cleave was apparently too powerful. You can kind of keep up on the damage train as specifically an archer, because like everyone else who ever wrote up a bunch of combat feats they couldn't resist the siren's song of adding extra feats that boost your rate of fire, and like all the others they all stack and you do get more feats. But the lancer and the grinder suffer big time. They need more feats sunk into doing more damage just to keep up with their old damage. More extra sunk feats than they get extra feats. Did I mention how it hoses multiclass characters (like, you know, warriors)? Yeah, it does that.

Are things at least clearer?

Oh heavens no. Not only are the rules specifically in a state of flux, with Jason going in and rewriting stuff with and without blog messages to that effect all the time, but a lot of the stuff that just makes no sense. I can't tell you how grappling works in pathfinder either, but it seems to actually be a super bad plan for the grappler.

So why would I use Paizo's rules?

I can't answer everything man.

How does Pathfinder address bookkeeping? Bookkeeping is annoying and I don't want to do it.

Pathfinder likes to force people to keep tracks of rounds per day. Seriously. Bards and Barbarians have to keep track of individual rounds of power usage. Also, a lot of things have very short and even nonstandard durations. How do you feel about tracking a 3 round buff? How about a seven minute buff?

So are Bards somehow more weak sauce than they were before? Is that even possible?

Well, kind of. Yeah. They are a lot more annoying, and they basically can't give their skill songs for a take 20 anymore because they have a limited number of rounds worth of singing for the whole day. Boosting someone while they take 20 on a task runs you through 20 rounds, and you have to be a seriously buff dude to have that many rounds of song. But the real meat of the matter is that bards were already a really weird case where in order to be an effective bard you had to eventually choose a direction to go with it and take one of the bard paths like Snowflake Wardancer or Sublime Chord that sacrificed attempting to compete in one or more of the many areas that Bards gradually lost level appropriateness in exchange for being level appropriate in one or two fields. Those options don't seem to exist in Pathfinder, so every Bard is doomed to gradually lose ground to mediocrity and finally obscurity in all fields and never justify their existence or regain the spotlight in anything.

Is Polymorph Fixed Yet?

No.

I hear great things about the skill system. What's up with that?

Well, the condensed some skills. Some of that goes too far and some of it doesn't go far enough. Gather Information is now part of Diplomancy, but Spellcraft and Knowledge Arcana are still different skills. Whatever. The big deal is that they took away the class skill/nonclass skill difference in rank price and gave people a +3 bonus on all trained skills that are class skills for any of your levels. That means that they can and do drop the stupid 4x skill ranks at first level, so over all it's an improvement. It's not original and they handle it kind of clumsily (there is no difference between putting a skill as a permanent class skill and having it be a class skill for one measly level and there are no synergy bonuses anymore), but it is probably a net gain over using the 3.5 skills out of the box.

You mention Diplomacy, is it fixed?

No. It's still broken, it just also gives you the kinds of plot exposition that you used to get from Gather Information. Paladins come with spy networks now.

Are Sorcerers still getting it in the earhole?

Well, yes. All the spellcasters get class features to go with their bonus save DCs, bonus hit points, free ranks in Concentration, and so on and so forth. This is supposedly to encourage them to not take PrCs. Protip: you still take PrCs, you just also get some bonus class features. Wizards get fat bonuses to various cool shit and Sorcerers get a blood line. Yeah, you get to celebrate your extraplanar bad touch by getting special powers related to your power source. These have a tendency to be shit like demon claws that are frankly really lame. So while the Necromancer wizard gets a free doubled control pool on his skeleton horde, the Sorcerer gets his choice of a wide variety of flavors of bullshit melee combat schticks that he will literally never us because he's still a fucking arcane spellcaster.

Monster Levels? Is that fixed?

No. Like pretty much anything else that you'd really want someone to do a giant overhaul on because the original system didn't work and no one uses it or integrates it into other subsystems, Jason pretty much ignores it. He's too busy nerfing rogues.

What?

Yeah. He went off on this big rant about how it was broken that rogues in the 8th-10th level range were investing in rings of blink and sneak attacking at range. Apparently if you do anything other than tumble into position to deliver a flanking dagger sneak attack you are being "cheesy." The Pathfinder Rogue is outdamaged at high levels by evoker wizards. True story.

Many things in D&D are broken on the face of it. Like rolling for hit points or having different definitions of "day" for purposes of recovering spell slots. Is any of that addressed?

Not really, no.

So my Cleric of Pelor still prepares spells at dawn and my Cleric of Lolth still prepares spells at dusk?

Don't be silly, those gods are copyrighted. Pathfinder has a whole slew of new gods that you don't give a fuck about. But don't worry, they aren't just different in when their priests prepare spells - they have concrete and distinct easter egg bonuses for you to collect. If you're a Dread Necromancer you can cast remove disease spontaneously if you happen to worship that goddess whose name starts with U - so all of them presumably do. It's all written by Sean K Reynolds, the man who has never written a balanced or decent book in his whole life, so you know it's totally fucking unfair and inexplicable at every damn turn.

When Online RPG Boards Attack!

2009-09-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

Ok, it's not so much an attack as attention giving. They're good at it, I'm good at soaking it up. Love the spotlight, at least socially.

Thoughts on interactivity & playing

2009-07-31T17:52:00.000-07:00

You'll notice in a previous post I talked about Birds of War, a project of mine that I felt was dying (Or already dead). Turns out I was being far too worried over nothing as the game seems to have bounded back into activity. It's not exactly where I want it, player levels fluctuate between 6 active and 18 active, but it's still stable. One of the things I've noticed about players is that they lack the initial desire to do anything. At first glance many administrators take this to mean that players want to be spoon fed play. If staff try to spoon feed the players then they will be active, which seems to prove the staffers theory correct.

In the last few days I have taken a different approach. I will do the following:

@dol lwho()=page ##=Sup, was thinking maybe you'd like to get in on some fun? How about I help you GM something, yeah? Dreadfully easy.

In most cases 10 to 30% of those targeted respond back positively, where positive responses are those that lead to GMing. 20 to 40% are neutral responses, where neutral responses are ones that later in time lead to GMing, and the rest are negative responses, or those that don't lead to GMing.

The Endless Orc War

2009-07-20T21:05:00.001-07:00

Orcs are the product of a generations-long war against the other races. Unfortunately, they haven’t realized that they’ve lost this war. Why the war starts is simple: orcs are, as a race, stupid, ugly, and weak willed, but very strong. Being stupid, ugly and weak willed means that other races tend to always get the upper hand on them and tend to always get the better end of any deal, and other races also tend to not want Orcs around. Orc goods are always a little worse than goods produced by other races, and orcs are generally a little rowdier and less pleasant to be around.

At some point the orcs realize that they are much better in battle than other races, and they decide to fight for a little respect and fair treatment. Then the war is on. The only problem is that orcs win battles, but lose wars. Other races have natural advantages or just greater intelligence, so any war tends to go badly for the orcs in the long run. Powerful melee combat ability doesn’t mean much when elves attack from the bushes with longbows and then run way and all the races have superior battle plans and ability to lead their troops.

Once the war has been decisively won, the orcs are driven out of their lands and pushed into some badland, hinterland, or some other undesirable terrain far away from trade routes and civilization and usually full of monsters. The other races then go back to their lives, but here’s the trick: the orcs don’t. As far as the orcs are concerned, the war is still on because the orcs are still stuck in the worst land in their area, scraping by in the wilderness with minimal natural resources and almost no access to the products of civilization like arable farmlands, centuries-old cities, and trade goods like the products of skilled craftsmen from other lands (which can include magic items).

All of orc culture comes back to this issue. Orcs are constantly warring on other races not out of innate need for violence or evil inclinations, but because they are fighting for their survival as a race in lands considered undesirable by every other major race. Orc raids are not only for food and booty, but for all the things that orc culture cannot produce like tools and weapons. Without these things they cannot survive in the wilderness, and they cannot produce them in the wilderness living as nomads who hunt and gather for survival.

Orc hordes are not an indication of warlike racial tendencies, but of population issues. Once the orcish population in the badlands grows too large to be supportable, they must conquer new lands or else face death by famine and disease. Hordes are formed of “excess” young males that are sent off to carve out new lands or die trying…. both results ease the burden on the few resources in the badlands.

The fact that orcs are constantly in a war footing means that they easily offend other races with their tactics. Rather than fight elven guerilla fighters who sap their resources and manpower, they’ll burn the forest down, and rather than fight dwarves in their millennia-old and heavily entrenched deepnesses filled with traps, the orcs will collapse the tunnels and dig the booty out of the rubble. The fact that most races fight defensively means that orcs only gain tactical advantage by being extremely offensively-minded. The fact that orcs do not have supplies coming from the badlands means that while they have no supply trains to cut, they must conduct blitzkrieg-style war or face starvation, and they cannot afford to hold troops in reserve. They often just don’t have the resources needed to conduct honorable or civilized war, and their attacks seldom have finesse or timing on their side, meaning that they only win battles through overwhelming force. Night raids are their specialty, as they have darkvision and are sensitive to light.

Hormigans

2009-07-20T19:45:00.001-07:00

“A place for everything, and everything in its place.”

Let's talk about Zerg. Or really any hive oriented creatures. Mammals can and do form hives (see the mole rats), and many would say that humanity is at its most effective when it most closely approximates that lifestyle choice. Unlike science fiction B movies there is nothing innately horrifying about being a member of a hive and hive members have no special incentive to force other beings to join their hive, and even if they did that really wouldn't be a subject for cosmic horror anyway. Eusociality is merely the highest level of social organization, and for those living in it the experience is at least as comforting as patriotism or familial piety.

But nonetheless, arthropodal species of sapients hold a weird fascination for us all. They have something approximating bone on the outside, and though they would definitely need to have some sort of internal scaffold as well to achieve human-like size, that still looks both creepy and awesome. Free of the tyranny of upright posture, four limbs, and such a bug person can look like anything. In fact, with the race having a reproductive division of labor and probably a functional (rather than merely social) caste system for its members, there is no reason that every member of the species has to have the same morphology. It's a way to go ape shit with gender and caste multimorphism. Size, shape, and function can all vary wildly within different groups of the same species.

At the minimum, the hormigan species will have four castes: Drones, Workers, Soldiers, Queens. As sapients however, there is no need for there to be an established constant social order within that. It is an absolute fact that only a relatively small number of people need become mothers to spawn a new generation, and that those who will become mothers must be selected and groomed for this role years in advance. Whether these prospective mothers are imprisoned or taught bureaucracy and government during their transformation is a socially defined accident of history that will doubtless vary from hive to hive.

Physically the hormigans resemble humans the least, and so it is important to not just check every box that would make them more alien and harder to identify with. Each individual hormigan is still able to learn and speak and act on their own. The fact that society as a whole has requirements of many members to persist generation to generation does not put any constraints on the individual (unless they have been selected for motherhood, in which case it does). Whether a hormigan is a soldier with blade arms in addition to manipulative digits or a worker with chemical excretory abilities, there is really nothing to necessitate them staying in the hive and whiling away their lives without adventure.

Remember that being an individual hormigan is like being a Eunuch who is related to a government official. From an evolutionary standpoint, there is no amount of personal success that really matters if the hive does not succeed. There is no personal sacrifice which will have any real cost in two generations, and so extreme patriotism is pretty common. It is therefore reasonable to guess that hormigans developed cities and nationhood much faster than other races – indeed these things come very naturally to them.

Orcs

2009-07-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

The idea of a race which is more “savage” than humans are of course has a lot of traction. It's something to be afraid of and also to feel superior to, and I don't think that needs a whole lot of explanation. But racially speaking, a sapient race is not “savage” or “civilized” except as a group. And even then we're talking about individual tribal groups rather than racial collectivism. For every Isaac Newton you care to name, there's a Timur the Lame out there to make you feel bad about your species all anew.

That being said, our closest living relatives on Earth are indeed pretty well described as being savage. The Chimp is named pan troglodyte by scientists and they are not kidding. They have stronger musculature (but less endurance), have a more difficult time with communication, inherently rely on themselves more and help one another less, and are both easier to offend and more likely to fight than flee when startled. The chimpanzee thusly manages to take its relatively small differences from a human and become something that has never developed technology more advanced than the spear. One which has developed war and trade but not agriculture or government. To my knowledge, no chimp tribe has ever changed government because of elections, but always instead by combat or betrayal.

These traits though are frankly too much for a fantasy race that is expected to be of much threat in any circumstance other than “It's jumping at you out of a tree, what the blargh!” which of course is also a circumstance in which leopards and jaguars have been terrorizing humanity for millennia. For a race to be really meaningful in a magical world they have to be making some of that magic. Magic of sword making. Making of setting shit on fire. Magic of killing fools in their sleep. That sort of thing.

The less technically competent hominids were all still hominids. They imitated well. Even when the Neanderthals went a hundred thousand years without seemingly changing their construction techniques or creating different material culture (at least, of that material culture which survived the eons to be found by our archaeologists), they still adopted any technical developments that humans showed up with quickly enough that it doesn't even show up as time in the archaeological record. And so it is that a race of monstrous humanoids would still be capable of using any magic and any tool that they were exposed to if they were to be called humanoids at all.

So what do the orcs do? Well, first of all they've been around longer than humans have. Secondly, they are physically stronger than humans are. They have sharp teeth and are therefore carnivores, complete with having the shorter intestinal system that carnivores are saddled with. They have less endurance and less patience than humans do. Backstory wise, this means that they came up with a lot of simple magics long before humans even existed, but that their more complicated magics were invented by humans and then the orcs learned them from teachers.

Culturally? Whatever they want to do. Orcs still have children and parents and language and knowledge and so on and so forth. Their biological demands make civilization very different for orcs than for humans, because they don't benefit from agriculture directly. They literally had to skip the entire period of human agriculture where we lived on grain and onions, because they can't do that. Those orcish societies which have taken to living in cities surrounded by fields have to have done so after humans did because it requires an extra step for them. A field of oats is of no use to the orcs unless they then take those oats to a feed lot and grow some other kind of animal on it and then eat them. While an urban environment can sustain a huntable population of pigeons and rats for a carnivore to eat, the number of such carnivores can't be very large. Indeed, most areas can't contain very many carnivores before they run out of food. So most orcish societies are either based on very small numbers, or larger groups that move around a lot. The advent of stable cities that use agricultural techniques to create large amounts of food for stationary herds is incredibly new, an adaptation of human techniques, and presumably highly controversial. Orcs never had a conflict between Horus and Set (nor the blatant rip-off story of Cain and Abel), because orcs never had an agricultural option. The historical orcish dilemma is between pastoralist nomads who domesticate animals and hunters who don't. They also have a secondary historical dilemma between smaller groups who stay in one place (and either hunt and fish or keep herds) and larger groups that wander around (either taking their herds with them or eating whatever happens to live there).

So you can see why orcish traditionalists might be pretty offended with the new innovation of making a really big city, having orcs grow food crops, taking the food crops back to domesticated animals, and moving on. That's appalling to many orcs who frankly aren't used to doing much work. And orcs are generally a fairly spiritual people because they don't have very much patience.

Character Backgrounds

2009-06-26T19:35:00.000-07:00

"I… I'm a fighter. I stab people. In the face."

D&D is a cooperative storytelling game, and we would hope that the stories it generates will be worth retelling again and again. In the interest of that actually happening, it is imperative that each and every point of view character in the story (that is, the Player Characters) be interesting. To be interesting, a fictional character really only has to have three things: An interesting motivation, an interesting schtick, and an interesting set of adventures. The schtick of the character is generally going to be handled by a character's class levels and equipment and is really up to the game mechanics themselves to generate – ideally the classes contained in this writing will cover that. Interesting adventures are the game itself and hopefully involve challenges only barely overcome and dastardly deeds thwarted in the nick of time – and this falls largely upon the DM to properly gauge the talents of the PCs and provide challenges that can be bested by the skin of the teeth. But the character's motivation, their backstory, really comes from the player's own mind. That's something that the player really needs to bring to the table on his own lookout.

A character with an interesting backstory is fundamentally better for the story than one without. And while it is true that the DM's world is going to highly flavor it (sorry, there are no elven maidens in those mountains!) the fact remains that the player is pretty much going to get what he puts into this. And yet, while the story is frankly going to be somewhat uninteresting if the players don't put some effort into their backstories, putting effort into anything is… well… effort. If people don't get some tangible effect from putting in that effort, they are quite likely to just not do it at all.

So here's what we're going to do: we're going to make some minor character advantages accessible only by writing yourself a character background. Then, when your character has a simple set-piece introduction, you get a tangible bonus that isn't especially game breaking. Note that we don't expect, or even want your character's background to be 7 pages of narrow font before the beginning of the first game. In fact, we probably want it to never get that long. This is a cooperative storytelling game, in D&D you tell the story with the input of the other players and the DM. If you just want to write the story of an awesome character without the input of other players – don't play D&D at all. You really can just type up a story and either submit it for publication or hide it in your diary all emo style as your relative shyness dictates. So no, we want your character's background to be short, but we need it to be there. The kind of thing that a character might actually be able to relate in a one-paragraph info-dump in a book without causing the reader to skim. Normally, a character gets one background. This is as much to keep character background from filling up the world as anything else.

War Profiteer
The War came… and that spells P-R-O-F-I-T. Hoo boy! Maybe you just came from a Goblin family and you really like this sort of thing, maybe you consider yourself a visionary who can see through to a new economic theory based less on gold and more on value. Whatever, you've sold people daggers to cut themselves out of snare traps, and you're proud of it.
Effect: Appraise and Search are class skills for you no matter what you do. Also, you're a jerk. Your personal weapons and armor start masterwork at no cost.

Veteran of The War
There was a great and terrible war that wracked the lands, and you fought on one or more sides of it.
Effect: Veterans have proficiency with 3 Martial weapons and one armor type. Veterans who belong to a class that already has martial weapon proficiency begin play with proficiency in 3 Exotic weapons appropriate to the lands upon which the battles raged. Veterans also have nightmares sometimes and talk about The War more than is perhaps strictly required.

Street Rat
You grew up on the hard end of the streets. The part where kids are total jerks and sometimes the wererats just make one of your friends disappear, and noone else seems to care. You had to lie and steal just to survive, man.
Effect: You have Bluff and Sleight of Hand as class skills no matter what you do. You don't catch normal diseases because you've already had them all. You get a +2 bonus on handle animal checks with street animals like dogs, rats, and pigeons. Also, you have a small shell that a girl gave you when you were twelve. You think she's dead, but really she's been turned into a wererat, so when eventually you meet again it'll be traumatic and you might have to kill her. Or maybe you'll be able to convince her to turn away from Team Monster and live happily ever after.

Slave of the Hobgoblin Clans
The Hobgoblin Clans take slaves every generation, and the children of those slaves are also slaves, but also members of the clans, and they can potentially be promoted within the clan to the point where they aren't even a slave anymore. You may have done that. Or you may have simply run away and escaped Hobgoblin society to become an adventurer.
Effect: You speak Goblin. You also speak any other language you know with a Goblin Accent that makes Dwarves distrust you. If you ran away from the Hobgoblins, there may be a group of them out looking for you who will start adventures for you. If not, then you are still part of the Hobgoblin clans and there will be Hobgoblin plothooks that will draw you into adventures. Of more importance, perhaps, is the fact that you've grown up your whole life among Hobgoblins, and have a +2 racial bonus to Move Silently (yes, that's a racial bonus, so it doesn't stack with the racial bonus you get from actually being a Hobgoblin). Also, Listen is a class skill for you no matter what you do.

Royalty of a Fallen Nation
Welcome to the harsh realities of the Iron Age. If the last hard core member of a noble house dies, there is nothing keeping people from arbitrarily taking all their lands and gold away. Such was apparently the case with your family. When you were young, the last powerful Fighter (or Wizard, or whatever) in your family was slain, and now the only people left in your family with more than a level or two have aristocrat levels. Needless to say, more powerful characters came and took all your stuff. Now you wander the land attempting to gain power and secure your revenge.
Effect: People believe in you for no good reason. Some ancestor of yours was awesome, and people just assume that you'll get the band back together. You get free drinks when people know who you are, and your Leadership value is increased by +2. People will also offer you assistance and otherwise try to get on your good side. Of course, your family's enemies will send ninja and assassins to finish off your line (note: this may seem like a disadvantage, but it's really not – you're a D&D character so you are going to get into fights all the time, the fact that it's ninja attempting to erase your family name is just flavor). And of course, not everyone liked the way your family did things, so sometimes people are going to spit on your horse or in your burritos.

The Resistance
Your nation got overrun by someone you didn't like. And those Halfling oppressors (or whatever) went way too far. You were in a cell of revolutionaries dedicated to removing the foreign devils from the lands of your people.
Effect: Those who spent time in The Resistance have a number of contacts and can easily make contacts in new areas. Essentially this means that they get a +2 bonus on Gather Information checks. Members of The Resistance can make disguises out of substandard materials and suffer no penalties while doing so. Of course, The Resistance is a downright cannibalistic organization what with all the time all of the members spend betraying people. Every even modestly successful member is certain to have a wide variety of enemies, and not just from the oppressors they are fighting! Of course, it would be folly to claim that having large numbers of enemies is much of a disadvantage for a D&D character. I'm more concerned about the fact that you can never really be sure about the loyalty of another person. Not enough to risk sleeping with them anyway.

Refugee from The War
When the big war came, not everyone was old enough or brave enough to fight in it, and your character was in one of those categories and fled to a new land. The people already living in the new land treated your people poorly and made them live in ghettos with little food and poor access to magical healing. You spent several years living as a pawn in someone else's lands and all you got was a disease. Now you're adventuring, to find a new place where you fit in and possibly get a little vengeance on all those peoples who took time out of their day to screw your people.
Effects: Refugees are exposed to a wide variety of places, dangers, diseases, and people that those who live relatively comfortable lives will never know. In essence, they can be thought of as adventurers already, though they rarely get any rewards out of the deal. A refugee begins play knowing one additional language, and this language need not be an available bonus language for her race. In addition, a refugee may consider Knowledge (Geography) and Sense Motive as class skills for the rest of their lives. A refugee character is missing teeth or has the distinctive circular scars of having survived The Pox.

Raised by Owlbears
Tarzan was raised by an ape, Mowgli was raised by a bear, Romulus was raised by a wolf, and in the D&D world your character can be raised by creatures much more exotic. The sky is really the limit here: simply pick some improbable beast and your character was protected and fed as a small child by that beast after she was orphaned or abandoned in the wilderness. While I'd like to think that we've all read enough Burroughs that this story pretty much tells itself, the truth is even more astonishing. This character background has become cliché and we're totally fine with that. You can really have an interesting and memorable character with a clichéd backstory and a three sentence intro that ends with "And then I came to this village to reclaim my birthright as a gnome."
Effect: Characters who were raised by Girallon (or whatever) are arbitrarily able to talk to magical beasts and animals as if they shared a language. Noone knows how they do it, but they do. Unfortunately, such characters didn't grow up surrounded by humanoid languages, and your only starting language is Common no matter what your Intelligence is.

Moil Wrought
Every setting has some horribly tainted land filled with necromantic power. People who live there become tainted with necromantic power and grow up twisted and evil more often than not. You grew up there too, which means that either you grew up all evil, or you grew up tragically misunderstood, which makes you Good and totally awesome.
Effect: You are damaged by Positive Energy as if you were undead. You are also healed by negative energy as if you were undead. Also, some people find you really creepy and you have a tendency to talk in flat affect like the girl in Aliens.

Hero of the Peasants
You're the third son of a poor woodcutter or something. Maybe your father remarried and your new mother hates you. Whatever. The point is that you come from an exceedingly poor background, and your plucky spirit and do-gooder nature propels you forward to make a difference in the world.
Effect: It's not that you're too lazy to pick starting equipment it's that… OK, you're too lazy to pick out starting equipment. Believe me, I understand. A Hero of the Peasants character begins play practically naked. Leather armor or functional clothing, a sling, a quarterstaff, 10 copper pieces, and some bread. Have fun with that. But you're just generally kind of awesome. You get a +2 bonus on Survival, Handle Animal, and Sense Motive checks for no reason. And don't forget that you probably have a destiny of some sort, which means that periodically the DM will go off on a tirade about your destiny (this is worth nothing, all D&D characters have a destiny).

Experimental Stock
You, or your parents, were experimented upon by one of the many mad arcanists that dot the D&D landscape. Maybe they were members of the dreaded Mad Wizards Guild that claims responsibility for Gulguthhydras and Perytons. Maybe it was another group. You might not even know.
Effect: You have a positive, if really messed up looking trait grafted into you. You either have a natural weapon, or your natural armor bonus is increased by 1, or you have low light vision. But you also have some bad trait, like a 5' reduction in speed, or a flipper hand, or a -2 to initiative checks. Also, in polite company you might want to cover up your eyestalk. The ladies do not find it your most attractive feature.

Apprenticed
You learned from the best. Or maybe not the best. But you learned from a successful adventurer, and that's pretty good. Maybe they were your parents, maybe your parents saw fit to hire you on to a master wizard.
Effect: Hide, Spot, and Spellcraft are class skills for you. That's how people stay alive in the adventuring business, after all. You probably know some adventurers, and that means that they'll show you all the tricks like how to identify objects or scribe spells for free, how to turn artifacts into artifacts you want, and how to spend planar currency.

Amnesia
Sometimes a player is really lazy or cannot think of a backstory.
Effect: None. If you're too lazy to think of a damned backstory, you get nothing at all. If the DM is feeling generous or vindictive, she can have things gradually get surreal on you like a David Lynch extravaganza. In doing so, you'll gradually find out that you actually have a backstory, and all the perks and flaws of whatever it is.

Unusual Races

2009-06-26T18:06:00.000-07:00

For a long time, there has been a definite pro-prettiness bias in the rules of D&D. That is, elves (who are pretty) get a much better deal as player characters than do hobgoblins (who are ugly). This dates back to when races had mandatory alignments and people wanted to discourage Evil player characters from coming in and ruining games (which let's face it, a lot of evil PCs do). And while this has had the desired effect of keeping the number of orc player characters down and their impact minimal, it hasn't been good for game balance at all. Some people really want to be a gray skinned dude with shark's teeth, and they'll play whatever game mechanics are given to them. These players will be playing at the same level as other characters, and that means that they should be playing at the same power level! Really, all the unusual races are optional, so there's no purpose served in screwing them over. In the past, many races have simply been given insufficient goodies to be worth playing (Half-Orcs), or were given good enough abilities but then over-charged in levels for them so horribly as to make the character unplayable (Hobgoblins). We don't hold with that at all. If you don't want someone to play an ogre or goblin in your game, just don't let them play one. It's seriously not even a deal.

Furthermore, for some reason there has been a massive fear of giving straight statistic enhancements to characters without a level adjustment. I don't even understand that, because Halflings already get all that and more. Really, a character who gets +2 to two attributes and a total of +4 to skills and darkvision isn't even impressive compared to a Deep Halfling, so the ginormous fear that people have of letting Hobgoblins and Aasimar into games is perplexing.

War in D&D

2009-06-26T18:04:00.000-07:00

"War is not about who is right, but who is left."

D&D is a game about stabbing people in the face, rifling through their pockets and/or home, and then going back to your own home where the beer is cold and the woman are warm and waiting for the next foolio to present himself for stabbing (and rifling). That being said, war is the same thing, but writ large.

War in the DnD universe is very nasty, very brutal, and very short. It all comes down to the question "who's got the bigger heroes?" Peasant uprisings of plucky farmers just don't happen in a world where a 1st level mage with a Wand of Fireballs and a decent Hide check can set an army of thousands on fire, and the bravest and best trained units of knights just aren't going to conquer the land/government that has a guy chain-binding vrocks to serve as elite terror squads to kill every peasant in a hundred mile radius of your capital.

If you have the bigger heroes, they knock down any smaller heroes, then walk up to the Kingdom of Good King Draxall … yada yada yada…and hear the lamentation of his womenfolk. It doesn't really matter if King Draxall's castle is now full of lava because the attackers opened a gate to a volcano in his throne room or if they went all Die Hard on the King's personal guard and gutted the bunch….the truly important troops (i.e. heroes) traveled at least as fast as griffonback and smashed the Kingdom while the King was still training his peasants on which end of a spear to poke people with.

That doesn't mean that armies don't have a place in DnD. Once the important business of nailing enemy heroes to a tree is done, someone has to pacify the new populous, enslave them to work the salt mines, collect taxes, and generally put down any rebellions or resistance movements of local yahoos (which might be gnoll bandits, a wandering ankheg, or other unimportant challenge for our heros). Heroes are generally more concerned with bigger and more rewarding problems like the undead pouring out of the newly discovered (ie unlooted) ruins in Moil than the fact that the peasants of the former King Draxell are up in arms over the latest taxes on grain.

But occasionally, someone does attempt a military victory. It might be an aristocrat with more gold than sense or a necromancer with an animation fixation, but troops will be secretly trained, mercenaries will be hired, and cadres of spies will pour into the prospective target land. Sometimes this crap works, as the relevant heroes who might defend the land might be bribed to stand aside, assassinated with extreme prejudice, or just be on another plane at the time, and then it’s the Wytch King's skeletal footman vs. King Draxall's Knights of the Holy Relic for real old-timey war on respectable battlefields.

The problem is that this kind of thing is that it generally doesn't last. Once the local hero population replenishes itself, those guys will become the local rulers by default, even if they only pay lip service to King Draxall in public. Empires lasting thousands of years are not products of military might, but a good PR department with an eye for finding up-and-coming heroes who are smart enough to maintain the fiction of a stable society rather than upset the peasants by reminding them that they live and die by the whims of guys who think that summoning angels from heaven to set off dungeon traps is an acceptable practice.

A Brief History of Fighting Men

2009-06-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

In its origins, D&D was a wargame like Warmachine or Warhammer. You had a field filled with tiny men, and they fought each other with swords and bows. Eventually, someone got really lazy, and wanted to replace a large number of fighting men with heroic fighting men who would be easier to paint because there were much less of them. And that, right there, is the origins of DnD. The smaller number of better Fighting Men would be your "army" and eventually people started playing magical teaparty with their fighting men, and it turned into a roleplaying game. So it isn't surprising that at first you "roleplayed" a small group of heroic fighting men.

When the new classes (such as "Magic User" and eventually "Thief" and "Cleric") were introduced, they were intended to be better than the Fighting Men. And, well, they totally were. Indeed, players still controlled lots of characters, and it was deemed impractical for more than one or two of those characters to be any good or in any fashion important. So you rolled up stats for each guy, and if you rolled well enough on a guy he could be something other than a Fighting Man, and the rest of your guys were basically just speed bumps whose lot in life was to stand between the monsters and the Magic Users so that the real characters could survive to another day.

Well, that isn't how things work anymore. Now every character is supposed to be individually important and have some background and so on and so forth. No longer are we allowing our Fighting Men to go without a last name unless and until they get to fourth level without being eaten by an owlbear. And so we really need Fighting Men to be a lot more interesting and effective than they are in the rules. The basic setup of the game has changed a lot, but Fighters have changed only a little. In a very real way, the Player's Handbook hands us Fighting Men who would be better suited to appear in groups of 3 per player than to stand alone. And really, that has got to stop.

People in Horror: Extras and Luminaries

2009-06-26T17:21:00.001-07:00

“Do not run upstairs! There is no exit upstairs!”

Remember that in horror movies there are a lot of people who serve no real purpose save to be eaten by the monsters. We call them Extras even if they happen to get some lines. These people may be strong, or smart, or beautiful, but ultimately they are doomed. If they get bitten by a zombie they will turn into one of the shambling hordes that our heroes must eventually chop through with a chain saw. They will not get cured and will not turn into leaders of the walking dead. Game mechanically, these people have no Edge score. If they turn into a supernatural creature of some kind they will become a Spawn. These hapless victims will not become the next Dracula, they will always be the horde vampires in From Dusk til Dawn. They will not become Shelly Winters or Sheila, they will join the hordes of deadites and get cleaved through with fire.

On the other side of the coin, there are people in the horror genre who rise to the occasion. Whether they are introduced as bad ass adventurers like Van Helsing or Rick O'Connell, or are “normal people” who rise to the occasion like Meg Penny or Ash, these people have a certain spark of bad assery in them regardless of what they happen to be doing. They are Luminaries, and they have Edge. If they become Supernaturals they become the real deal. They may turn evil but they will still have lines and character development.

This is why characters will occasionally fight their way through a horde of zombies (who are of course all ex-humans) just to try to get a cure for one woman who happens to have been turned into a zombie. It isn't that they've completely lost perspective, it's that the transformation into a monster is a one way trip for absolutely everyone except a reasonably small number of luminaries. You actually can “save” Alice, Shelly, or Sheila if they get transformed into the living dead. There's literally nothing you can do for the rest of the people except shoot them in the face.

Lycanthropy: Ruled by Rage

2009-06-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

A man may live for forty years, and a wolf only seven. But at the end of their lives, which one knows more of the tundra?

The man and the wolf know the same.

Lycanthropy is a disease that passes from lycanthropes to people that are nearly killed at their jaws. All that is necessary to become a lycanthrope is to be bitten, nearly die, and yet survive the ordeal. It's like rabies. Only your heart has to stop at least for a little while.

Once afflicted, a newly created Lycanthrope will find their wounds closing rapidly. The essentially deadly injuries suffered in the initial attack heal without leaving a scar or discoloration to mark their passing. The victim will feel feverish to the touch and chilled in the chest – a condition which will follow them until the end of their days.

Lycanthropic Culture: There really isn't any ancient lycanthrope culture. For the vast majority of time a lycanthrope would come into being only by surviving an attack by another lycanthrope. As such, most lycanthropes came into the world with their creator either defeated or hostile. The vast majority of lycanthropes either learned the ins and outs of their condition on their own or had it explained to them by someone else in the know (usually another supernatural). So it is quite common for lycanthropes to be adapted into the cultures of other supernatural creatures. A werewolf who was taken in by gypsy witches would generally have the same traditions and prejudices as those gypsy witches, not those of whatever werewolf tore into him with its fangs and left him for dead.

An exception to that generalization can be found in small family groups. Lycanthropes often go all crazy with rage and are a severe danger to their families and friends. A loved one pushed nearly to death by the rampages of a wererat is rather likely to spurn the creature which transformed it, running off and ultimately forming a new “culture” of one. However it is not unheard of for such a victim to stay on and create a pack of lycanthropes. These groups tend to avoid contact with humans and supernaturals alike and have strange views.

Therianthropes? Fuck that noise!

or other beast

not English

you are not an ancient Greek

The Get of Fenris
The better to eat you with, my dear.

Somewhere in the howling wilderness of Scandinavia a “wolf warrior” of the North became darkly fused with a wolf pelt he was wearing while fighting the Huns – an event which places the creation of the Werewolf at approximately 600 CE. Passed from warrior to enemy warrior and conquered victims, the curse spread throughout the lands of Europe and beyond along the warpaths of the Huns and later the Vikings. In later nights, it spread itself throughout the world on the backs of European conquistadors and imperial marines.

Werewolves are instilled with a love of combat and destruction even in their human forms. In their monstrous forms they take the shape of awkwardly toothy man-wolves. Glistening with drool and usually fast covered with speckles of blood, the claws and fangs of a monstrous formed werewolf are a terror.

Werewolves have an Astral power source and a Lunar power schedule.

Werewolf Starting Disciplines

Vigor (Basic Potence)
Feat of Strength (Basic Potence)

- Basic Disciplines -
Revive the Flesh (Basic Fortitude)
Feral Whispers (Basic Animalism)
Quickness (Basic Celerity)
Dread Gaze (Basic Presence)

-Advanced Disciplines -
War Form (Celerity / Potence Devotion)
The Beckoning (Advanced Animalism)

Story Inspiration: Larry Talbot, Ginger Snaps, Dog Soldiers

The Nezumi: Plague on the world of Men
“Tear him up.”

The most frequently told story of the origins of the plague of the Nezumi is that originally someone turned their back on the teachings of the Buddha and was cursed with reincarnating in a lower form during their own life. If even partially true, this would mean that the plague started no earlier than about 500 BCE. Once afflicted, a Nezumi Lycanthrope begins to twitch their nose like Elizabeth Montgomery and click their tongues nervously.

A Nezumi's animal form is that of a large rat. Nezumi are immune to the effects of diseases, but carry virtually every disease they come into contact with. Unlike other lycanthropes, Nezumi in have no monstrous war form. While Nezumi lack the brutal jaws or rending claws of other lycanthropes, their bites are still often quite deadly because of the pestilence they carry.

A Nezumi has an Infernal power source and a Lunar power schedule.

Nezumi Starting Disciplines

Beast Form (Basic Animalism)
Feral Whispers (Basic Animalism)

- Basic Disciplines -
Abyss of the Body (Basic Descent of Entropy)
Hide From Notice (Basic Obfuscate)
Quickness (Basic Celerity)
Revive the Flesh (Basic Fortitude)

-Advanced Disciplines -
Vanish From the Mind's Eye (Advanced Obfuscate)
The Beckoning (Advanced Animalism)

Story Inspiration: Willard, Torment

The Bagheera: The Lady or the Tiger
“You can fool everybody, but landie. Dearie me, you can't fool a cat. They seem to know who's not right.”

The origins of the Bagheera are confused. The legends say that the Bagheera were formed when a Bengali priestess refused to abandon her gods and goddesses when the Mughals took control of the province and banned idolatry, calling upon Shiva for a mighty boon. And yet the legends also say that the Bagheera were formed first by a jaguar warrior pledged to Huitzilopochtli fighting against Cortez, an event which would necessarily push the formation of the line over fifty years back. When consulted on the subject directly, the Stellar Oracles enigmatically state that both stories are true. Regardless, once infected a Bagheera is a creature of Death and finds that her mere presence alarms and angers animals of all types, especially cats.

A Bagheera's War Form is that of great and ghostly cat. Perhaps a tiger, jaguar, or leopard.

A Bagheera has an Orphic power source and a Lunar power schedule.

Bagheera Starting Disciplines

Quickness (Basic Celerity)
Nimble Feet (Basic Celerity)

- Basic Disciplines -
Vigor (Basic Potence)
Hide From Notice (Basic Obfuscate)
Touch of Darkness (Basic Lure of Destruction)
Revive the Flesh (Basic Fortitude)

-Advanced Disciplines -
War Form (Celerity / Potence Devotion)
Alacrity (Advanced Celerity)

Story Inspiration: Cat People, The Cat and the Canary

Failed Design: Skill Challenges

2009-06-26T16:44:00.000-07:00

So as we know there are many different design goals you can have in making a rule or a subsystem. And as such it can be difficult to determine if a rule is functioning correctly. When a halfling slinger throws a rock at an ogre's head, is the rule functioning right when the ogre goes down or when the ogre stays up? That depends on what your goals are. And yet, we know that 4e Skill challenges are a failure. Not just subjectively, but objectively. How do we know that?

Well it goes back to design goals. And for that, we're going to take relentless Skill Challenge booster and designers Bill Slavicsek and Mike Mearls' actual word for it. see, skill challenges are something that really excite him, and considering how infectious that excitement is, it seems that his stated design goals probably have a fair amount of resonance.

Bill Slavicsek wrote:

From the first discussions about D&D 4th Edition, we knew that we wanted a mechanical subsystem as robust as combat that could handle the other things PCs do in an adventure—namely, social encounters and challenge encounters. We didn’t want a system that reduced all the intricacies of a situation to a single die roll; we also didn’t want a system that failed to add to the fun of an adventure. What we did want, for the situations that called for it, was a system full of tension, drama, and risk… the very essence of any D&D encounter.

Get everyone involved!
The first goal of the Skill Challenges is to keep people from feeling that their characters have nothing to contribute. That is, to get everyone trying to do something every round of the challenge rather than just sitting back and eating Doritos while the Diplomancer talks. Again.

A worthy goal. But wait a minute, Skill Challenges don't do that, do they? Indeed, since any failure on the team counts against the team's failure numbers, anyone who isn't the half elf diplomancer or bullysaurus who so much as opens their mouth during a social encounter to let words out instead of filling it with Doritos is actively hurting the team's chances. Each roll has a chance to add to the failure quote, so if you don't have the bet roll the entire team is better off with you not rolling at all. That's bad, but it's actually worse than that, because in addition to relegating the rest of the team to Doritos munching, they take longer to resolve than the old system. So not only has the core objective of pulling the excluded players into the game not been achieved, the excluded characters are actually excluded for longer in real time.

What to do instead:

Be Dynamic!
The second goal of the skill challenge was to get people to throw around different techniques round after round. "Each skill check in a challenge should grant the players a tangible repercussion for the check's success or failure, one that influences their subsequent decisions." In short, people shouldn't just spam their best skill, they should be responding to the tests tactically, making different choices each round and over the course of the challenge the results of their actions should "Introduce a new option that the PCs can pursue, a path to success they didn't know existed."

Cool concept, right? Doing all kinds of different stuff on a round by round basis. Why doesn't it work out? Well, he reason that never happens is because the difference in a Bullysaurus' Intimidate bonus and his Heal check is generally more than +/-10. That means that even if next round you find out that another skill is two steps easier than your focus skill (and remember kids: there are only three difficulty steps), you're still better off just using your focus skill again. It's not even a question. If your focus skill could work at all, you just use it next round without fail.

What to do instead:

couldn't

eventually

End Binary!
The third goal is to keep things from being a boring and static binary choice of success or failure. No longer are things just a die roll to see whether you succeed or not, there's... stuff.

Another worthy goal. But um... it totally is binary. As things stand, it's even more binary than rolling a d20 because you can't do degrees of success. The challenge ends the moment you get sufficient successes, so there's really no possible way to get more than the minimum success. Really, for all the stuff where you go round by round and make all kinds of rolls, you still only get 2 end results: success or failure. And there is nothing in there to allow you to get a better success or a worse failure.

What to do instead:

Other Difficulties

The Difficulty level has been discussed Extensively. With charts. A key portion of any mechanic would be to make it so that the results weren't mathematically untenable.

It is highly problematic to call success on an individual die roll "success" while success on the overall challenge is also called "success." The fact that "failure" has the exact same confusing double meaning is equally bad. The part and the whole need to have distinct terminology so that we can talk about them. The individual die rolls could create "steps and setbacks" I don't even care. It just has to have a different name from the result that comes from tallying all the rolls together.

And finally, for goodness sake, whatever your system is, actually use it. When Mike Mearls describes using skill challenges, he says stuff like this:

Mearls wrote:

As the characters travel through town, it is important that they all make an effort to keep a low profile. When the PCs take one of the actions above, each PC in the group must make a separate skill check. The group, as a whole, must have more successes than failures in order to succeed overall. Otherwise, the group fails (including on a tie).

The PCs can each use a different skill, provided each skill is allowable for that action. Each PC can also aid one other PC. One PC can receive aid from more than one ally.

I man seriously, what the heck is that? It's not recognizable as a skill challenge out of the book. Which basically tells us what we've always known: that the designers just did random stuff and never even paid lip service to the skill challenge rules they were actually writing down. Don't do that. If you come up with something that seems to work better than the original methods, you should write that one down. You should not publish something that has little or no relation to the rules you actually use in your game that seem to be working.

C.O.P.S.: the Co-Op Plot System

2009-06-26T12:37:00.000-07:00

This piece was written here by corleyj.

COPS: the Co-Op Plot System

The Dilemma

One of the biggest challenges facing superhero MU*s is the "We want to play, but nobody wants to emit a scene!" syndrome. One solution is social scenes, and being a Marvel Universe MUX, we're well-stocked with interesting characters who can be thrown into a situation together and interact in interesting ways. Another solution is to have staff members who work up plots and run scenes. I'm one of those! We're definitely going to do that! But I can't be on all the time and sometimes when I'm on I'm not going to feel like running a scene any more than you are! Further, comic books are equal parts soap opera and super-high-budget action flick, so the social scenes solution can take you only so far.

But there's a whole raft of assumptions in the "nobody wants to emit" syndrome that ain't necessarily so. By playing with these assumptions, we can open up a lot of possibilities that we couldn't before. For example, typically on MUXs, if there's a mystery plot, there's someone who's running the mystery - scenes and investigations go through that person. In that way the players have the thrill of discovery, and the plot has the advantage of being very consistent, but it's somewhat slaved to the schedule of the person who "owns" it.

We're never going to get away from the need to emit the rest of the world for our characters, particularly not on a crimefighting-oriented supers MUX. And it's one of the least favorite things for MU*ers to do. Thus, the goal of this, and other, systems on Marvel Knights MUX is to make this task as painless as possible.

Cooperative Plots

If we separate the responsibility for "owning" a plot from running scenes, it makes it much easier to jump in. You don't need to know the whole story when there is no "whole story"!

Here's how it works.

Brainstorm a scene attached to a new plot, or an existing one. We have some brainstorming tools, such as +crime, coded in. Hit +crime a few times and pick the elements you like (and which fits the tone of the scene you want to run). Alternately, go to where people have posted their own cooperative plots and pick out something that sparks the interest of you and the people you want to scene with. The web forum has a whole section set aside just for this purpose.
Decide what you want to add to the plot. It can be simple: someone is killed. Thugs beat up someone. A clue is found. Or it can be complex: an extensive conversation between two conspirators. A solution to a baffling mystery. What you should do is look at your skills, and look at what's been developed about the plot so far (if anything), and see what might be cool for the characters in the scene to contribute. If you're a physical investigator, you might find a previously-overlooked piece of physical evidence. If your character lives and dies by their contacts, perhaps you are able to shake down someone for information. If you have powers, perhaps you are faced with a powered opponent who holds the key to the mystery. Help the other people in your scene do the same.
Divide the scene responsibilities. In general these are: A) setting the scene, B) playing the NPCs (you may want to divide the responsibility for different NPCs among different players in the scene), C) doing the ending pose, if you want to have a special ending pose, D) writing up what happened for the forum, E) logging (if you want to log).
Play the scene! Try not to think about the scene too much before you jump into it. How many times have comic book characters been put into situations where the writers didn't think it all the way through? How many times on TV? ("Agent Scully, aren't you a doctor??") If you get a vague idea for the above, GO. Don't try to work out every detail in advance - who cares after all? Just make it up in the moment.
Post a summary of the scene for others to get ideas from. This doesn't have to be a full listing of everything that happened in the scene, just what you established about the plot. If, for example, a suspect has an alibi that your character discovered, mention that. That way, when someone decides they finally want to end the plot, they don't make that guy the perpetrator (or they make him have an evil clone or something.)
Enjoy life.

Uncooperative Plots

Don't forget, not all plots have to be done this way. What this method gives up is the feeling that you, the player, are uncovering a mystery alongside your character. With this method, there is no mystery for you, the player, to uncover. If you have a cool mystery idea, feel free to run the whole thing in the "traditional" manner. You may want to use the forum to help yourself keep track of what's happened and what's yet to happen, but there's no requirement to. And of course I (and other staffers) will be running our own plots at various times, in the traditional way.

How You Can Use This Method To Cheat

The great thing about having improvised plots is that you don't have to worry about specialized knowledge of your character. If you or I were faced with a crime scene and given a bag full of CSI junk, we would have absolutely no idea what to do. If there's a "mystery to be uncovered" there, we wouldn't have the first clue about how to go about finding any, well, clues. But with this system, anyone can play a CSI technician, a computer hacker, or a Mob money-launderer without knowing anything more about the specialized information than we might get from TV, movies or comic books. Remember, it doesn't matter what your character does - it matters what you the player want your character to accomplish. So if you want your character to get a piece of DNA evidence that turns out to be damaged, or maybe discover from footprints that the killer is over six feet tall, then you can just make up whatever CSI-type stuff you want to get to those results. If you remember something cool from a comic, police procedural or movie that you want to rip off, that's awesome. And if you want your character to run into a dead end, that's great too - they can list off all the stuff they "tried" and how it got them nowhere. The important thing is that you, the player, don't really have to have all the knowledge that your character would have.

Ready?! Fight!

2009-06-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

准备好了吗？战斗！(Ready? Fight!)

“Stop trying to hit me and hit me!”

Nearly every popular (Defined by product sales) table-top roleplaying game on the market has a very similar feature that we as roleplaying gamers have to recognize as a big part of gaming: Combat rules. These rules govern the feel and flavor of the game as much as the setting does. For instance, in Shadowrun 4 ranged weapons (Such as pistols and rifles) have large advantage and are relatively cheap. This means that more characters made in the Shadowrun 4 game are going to be able to use ranged weapons and that makes the game have a modern or futuristic feel to it.

One of the problems with combat is in previous generations things tried to be a little too realistic. You might wonder why this is a problem and the answer is pretty complicated but I'll try to sum it down: A action movie about Joe the Plumber (before the McCain Straight Talk Express) is going to be pretty damn boring. When roleplayers sit down at a table to crawl dungeons, manipulate lords and vampire elders, or solve arcane traps set by madmen (There is no cake!) we don't want to be shackled by reality.

This brings us to the first rule of roleplaying game combat:

Is it Cinematic?

“Welcome to the desert of the real.”

When a person goes to the movie theater, specially to see an action flick, most of the time they aren't looking to see realistic combat. Real world combative situations are: Short, uneventful, and not exactly flowing. When two combative people engage in close combat it's going to be sloppy or quick, depending on the situation and the level of expertise. I once watched two Aikido black belts enter a tournament ring. Since Aikido teaches first defensive posture and second reaction, it was quite a boring show. They each would engage the other and then try to predict and prevent attacks. Problem is, the other was too busy being defensive and reactionary to actually make an attack.

That said what we really want to see is two people doing various actiony things to each other. Punch, kick, deflect, grapple, stab, shoot! The action has to keep us waiting for every blow. This is what Roleplaying game combat must, I repeat, must mimic. Without this element your players are: ( a ) Likely to avoid the pain of combat, ( b ) quickly grow uninterested in the situation at hand, or ( c ) start to not like the game all together.

How do I capture cinematic combat? Generally this is something that is either handled at the beginning (Combat rules) or at the end (The GM's storytelling). If you're working with some of the more modern game mechanics out there (Shadowrun 4, Fate 3, Dungeons and Dragons 4, New World of Darkness) then you've got half the battle down: A linear and short path from Action to Result. If you're not, however, then the GM is going to have to make some on the fly changes to how things work or take advantage of prep time to pregenerate some of the sequencing.

Is it simple?

“Never send a human to do a machine's job.”

Like all things that involve the words “fun” and “work” combat rules that require mental effort beyond basic math and planning things are going to fucking suck. The language may be harsh, but this is something I've come up against time and time again. It needs to stop. When I sit down to play Monopoly I shouldn't have to fill out a W-2 before the banker gives me the pretend cash. If I'm loading up Jedi Unleashed and using the force requires more than 3 buttons I'm going use my one finger to show my disapproval. Only in rare instances is this actually acceptable (See Rappa or Guitar Hero).

Unlike reality (there's that reality spur again) “work” does not equate to “reward”. Spending an hour flipping through a book for page references, arcane backward rules, and modifications does not mean that you'll get an equal reward of fun. Here's a scenario you might consider:

Game Master: You enter a hallway inside of the MercioPaz Incorporated building. The floor looks strange, you see the reflection of barely visible laser sensors! Beyond that there are two drones.

Player 1: Damn, that sucks, alright I'm going to see if I can't maybe I can maneuver between the lasers and then fire my bolter

Game Master: Crap, alright hold on, can you pass me the Sleuths and Spies book? I think there's a chapter on movement and trip wires. I guess I can use that. Oh, and then we need the main book for the Fire and Move modifiers, I think there's a table or two about it.

Player 1: Really? Er, alright.

(Time passes, pages are flipped)

Game Master: Ok, first you need to make a perception test...

Player 1: Wait, what's perception again?

(More flipping pages)...

You get the picture, and yes, that's exactly what I've seen happen. When you take gaming online as well (Via text games or IRC) you can predictably add at least double the time required to do things in combat. Now these two fellows might actually enjoy the book flipping and that's OK but most players aren't going to like that style and that's what we're focusing on.

Is it (optionally) complex?

“This is a sparring program, similar to the programmed reality of the Matrix. It has the same basic rules, rules like gravity. What you must learn is these rules are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken.”

Oh, a twist! Yes, I did just state that things need to be simple and that remains true, but like all good things in life getting a little complex, when it's wanted, can be quite tasty. The most common victory condition in combat rules is to reduce the target to 0 Health. While this is simple it can also be incredibly boring after a while. Thus enter the “Three States of”:

Three States of Attack: Unarmed, Armed (Melee), Armed (Ranged)

The three states of attack are pretty simple to understand and are present in almost all combat rule systems. If you're using a part of your body then you're Unarmed, if you've got a club in your hand then you consider yourself to be Armed (Melee), and so on. Obviously there are states of combination that some games seem to forget (Looking at you, nWoD and D&D4e): Such as when your Police Investigator has a revolver in his right hand and a fist in the other. By definition he is each state and yet you will have an exceedingly hard time finding a game that will allow this character to use all three in combat and still remain viable.

Don't bring a knife to a gun fight...Lets be clear here, there's a clear chain of command when it comes to combat. Heavy Weapons (Machine guns) trump guns, guns trump knives, and knives trump unarmed. This chain is allowed to get mangled when we talk about gaming. If your Hong Kong Action Flick's martial arts hero gets bested by a pistol something is seriously wrong with the script writer. Still want to keep the chain of command? That's fine, but if you let your self stick to that type of ziggurat of power don't be surprised if your players never ever use those Martial Art rules you wrote/bought.

It becomes a problem, however, when someone in combat wants to at any point mimic action flicks, for instance, in Shadowrun 4e you are allowed 2 Simple Actions or 1 Complex action. Melee Combat is categorized under Complex Action so any sort of Martial arts or action film moves where the Hero (That's you, and don't you forget it) slices with his katana and then fires a burst of lead you have to take two complete initiative passes. By then the field of combat has changed twice over, lord forbid if the passes actually take long enough that you and the audience (that's you as well) forget what cool ass move you were trying accomplish.

Three States of Defense: Dodging, Unarmed, Armed (Melee)

The game designers of modern RPG's seem to have a special fetish for making the player pick between getting a stomach full of bullets or being able to fire back. In real life gun battles last from four to eight seconds. A single bullet will most likely disable an opponent (if non-lethal and the opponent is untrained or a single lethal shot if the opponent is trained) and as we've discussed before this is nether “fun” or “cinematic”. Gun fights in action flicks however can last up to a full five minutes on screen.

3 Types of Gaming: Expanded

2009-06-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

In the gaming industry three basic types of role-playing games exist that are unique in their definition:

The Robot
The Ocean
The Maze

In this article I will try to convince the reader that some of these types are at a base level better than others. I will try to convince the reader that certain categories have design flaws that come with them and that placing their game in that category will without a doubt bring that flaw out.

The Robot is the first category to go under inspection as it has the least amount of games that fit. Specific Robot-type games include classics like FUDGE, GURPS, Rifts, Basic Roleplaying Game, Tri-Stat, Unistat, End All, Be All, and D20. They have no disconcerting genre, background, or focus attached. The GameMaster is encouraged, or rather forced, to come up with “skins” to put the Robot into, like a mechanical doll. The end doesn't come out right and most of the time it stutters but for all intensive analysis the right parts are there, if the GM had the time to build the Robot right. These machines tend to lack in specific areas, despite claiming to be universal. GURPS isn't made or very good at being a Superhero, D20 doesn't capture gritty realism, and so on.

Follow Up: Skillz

2009-06-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a really simple list of skills I've come up with for Physical and Social Conflicts:

1. Personal Melee
2. Extended Melee
3. Small Arms
4. Automatics
5. Longarms
6. Heavy Weapons
7. Acrobatics
8. Athletics
-
1. Intimidate
2. Leadership
3. Deception
4. Seduction
5. Negotiate
6. Persuasion
7. Empathy
8. Insight

I intend on expanding this list later on.

Social Conflict: What do you want to do?

2009-06-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

Social Conflict is a weird sort of thing. No RPG gets it JUST right, and Spirit of the Century/FATE3/KARMA pretty much make it exactly like Physical Conflict. Which is fine, really, for lite games but many want something more.

Here's some notes about Social Conflict:

Modify the targets emotions:

Make someone feel bad (Intimidate)
Make someone feel good (Leadership)

Modify the targets thinking (Split into two groups: High Risk & High Gain and Low Risk & Low Gain):

Make someone do something (Seduction, Persuasion)
Make someone stop doing things (Deception, Negotiate)

Understand the targets:

Understand the targets emotions (Empathy)
Understand the targets thinking (Insight)

Failed Design: World of Darkness

2009-06-26T10:32:00.001-07:00

As part of this series on failed design we are going to talk about World of Darkness. This means, specifically, that we are talking about Vampire: The Requiem because any discussion about Werewolf: The Forsaken or Mage: The Awakening boils down to Cat Duck Reviews. Those games are the Matrix: Reloaded of World of Darkness and they have two key parts:

None of the conflicts matter.
None of the conflicts solve any problem.

Characters are better off just leaving rather than interacting with the plot on any level. (More on this later)

Who cares, though? People don't buy about the World of Darkness because of Werewolf or Mage, they care about it because they've played Vampire with every single woman they've had sex with - and they're not alone. So the, very real, problems that the World of Darkness has in its non-Vampire spin-offs will have to be reviewed elsewhere because the World of Darkness sinks or swims on the merits of its Vampire line alone.

Pro-Hint: The World of Darkness is sinking.

Not in a manner in which you expect; Where the imaginary world is going to hell in a hand basket but rather the publishing line has become a wet paper bag. Stores don't order new White Wolf material, hell no one fucking notices. You don't know what the latest White Wolf release was and neither do I. White Wolf doesn't release specific sales figures, but at one point proudly claimed they had over 5.5 million total book sales (as in, ever) when New World of Darkness released to the public. Now they claim over seven million total sales, nearly five years later. Which puts New World of Darkness sales at over a quarter of what the Old World of Darkness sales. Further, they also claim over a million sales last year (2007), meaning that either they stopped updating their home page or the numbers are that bad. At the end of Old World of Darkness's print run they confidently claimed a a 26% market share of the RPG industry, now they don't mention their market share at all. How did this happen? How did World of Darkness fail so badly? Let's look at their design goals, as explained by Justin Achilli:

Clean Up the World!

This is a goal even a die hard True Brujah would grudgingly admit had to be done. Old World of Darkness was too complicated and had far too much supernatural crap. I mean, did you know that it had dragons, manticores, and harpies in it? Secret manticores. I don't know how that works! Even worse, they had to retcon out an entire book because a secret society of assassins inside a slightly less secret society of assassins inside a secret vampire cult dedicated to ending the secrecy of vampire cults that was secretly run by an evil ancient sleeping vampire god in a secret city in the land of the dead who was in turn the pawn of a secret alien space virus was apparently going too far (see: Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand ). It didn't help that literally four of those secret organizations were called "The Black Hand."

But the result wasn't clean and, more importantly, it wasn't interesting. They failed to live up to the promise of no secret vampire assassin cults led by a secret evil space virus (see: VII). While the prospect of Bloodline Bloat is actually easier to take than Clan bloat, a Bloodline could be six total vampires rather than a new secret clan structure every time you visit a new town and meet a guy with a new power - the fact remains that the very instant that you have a bloodline composed of just Vampire Prostitutes who make Vampire Perfume your setting has exploded the fucking fridge. The part that really sucks is the new setting gives no reason to give a shit about any of it. With the removal of the metaplot (unless you count the space virus thing) came a rudderless existence.

The introduction of the new rule, "vampires fight like Vulcans in heat when they meet in person" (Keep reading), meant that, not only had the designers left the game without any fucking political disagreements that you knew or cared about the designers actually made it so that Vampires couldn't engage in politics of any kind without just stabbing each other. If four PC Vampires walk into a room with four NPC Vampires in it all four PCs and all four NPCs have to make a Resolve Check to keep from flipping out for each vampire in the other group. That is thirty-two rolls just to determine if your audience with a minor functionary and his pals turns into a blood bath. Not only is the Coterie unlikely to able to have a chat with any other Vampires without bloodshed but any tension has been bled out of the scene like black bile from a stone while the Storyteller rolls die roll after die roll. Combine this with Aura Reading now a secret discipline (Auspex) the supposed restrictions on diablerie don't come into play much and you have got a recipe for mindless hack and slash because there is nothing else to do with the story pull gone. Sure hope the combat system is sound.

(WIP)

Playing Without Game Rewards

2009-06-26T10:16:00.001-07:00

So one of the big things Birds of War does is that there are no "advancement Points" to garner. Player A will always have the same amount of skills in the same amount of slots, same amount of stunts and aspects. The only thing that can change is if you become a Villain, then you gain one extra stunt and two skills get decreased.

That said, players have been totally fine with this! I was a bit shocked at first and in fact I had programmed this Badge system with Medals and Points (Fluff, basically) but barely has it come into use.

Players, it seems, are just fine moving attributes around instead of gaining more.

That's K.A.R.M.A. bitch!

2009-06-26T09:26:00.000-07:00

What is KARMA?
Well first of all, KARMA stands for Kick-Ass Rapid Movement Adventures. It's a play off the EvilHat production FATE, or Fantastic Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment.

Karma, the word, is defined as "the effects of a person's actions that determine his destiny in his next incarnation" and I think this plays a big role in gaming.

The name is not the only thing that is a play on EvilHat's FATE, it literally is a fork from the game FATE 3.

Why did you fork?
Some of the people in the FATE3 production are a little hard headed. Most of them were fine, but those few people that were impossible to work with made it unsustainable for me to suggest changes.

That said, I've always wanted to work on a project of my own and this is a good chance to do so.

What changes are there?
Would you believe not that many? Good! In fact most of the core principles are still there. The thing that does change is how the manual reads. A lot of the text is mangled or ESL-esque, very hard to parse. I've rewritten parts to have the same effect but read easier.

The second thing I've done is re-write some of the stunts and the rules, the major ones, at this time are: Prop-Type Stunts and the Initiative rule. On a online game you can't pick "the most right person" so I changed the tie breaker to a simple roll.

Want to know more?

I return

2009-06-26T09:14:00.000-07:00

Man, so long since I've posted anything here. Geeze. I think I'm going to devote this to completely to game design now.

One of the things I've been doing lately is running new game I created about two weeks and two days. It only required me to frantically work for a total of 4 days and spattering amounts after that.

All in all I think it's a great success! I'm not entirely happy with all of it but I've most certainly hit a lot of my goals. Here are a few details about the game:

It's using a tabletop game called Spirit Of The Century.
It's in a setting heavily influenced by Crimson Skies.
It uses an old technology to play, called MUSHing.

I can't really think right now, still early morning, but I promise to update more.

Where Am I Now?

2009-05-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, Insanejournal, Deadjournal, Blogger, Orkut, Tumblr, and LinkedIn.

Ready? Set! Scene.

2009-04-29T20:52:00.001-07:00

There are two types of role-playing games published in the industry:

A) Drop & Plot
B) Point & Plot

Drop & Plot types are your Whitewolf productions like Vampire: The Requiem or Mage: The Awakening (The exception being Werewolf: The Forsaken, which is a Point & Plot) or the more free type of games like Story of the Century or End All, Be All. These are games where the characters (And by large the game runners) are dropped into a world that has Things Going On and the group is supposed to react.

For instance in Mage: The Awakening the group is dropped into a setting that has godlike opponents from ages past, destructive cults, and god knows what else. The Storyteller is supposed to take those elements and bring them together for a story. Now that seems to be a rather OK thing but it can be a real hassle without layers and layers of planning by the Storyteller. Some people aren't made for that and this can lead to disillusion. Worse is that Mage: The Awakening provides nothing direct for the players to do. It's like Morrowind for the tabletop, your players are given so much freedom they grow annoyed and go play Guitar Hero, which does tell them what to do: Mash buttons in rhythm.

Point & Plot material however has a different focus. There are less Things Going On and more Background Noise. Notable examples include Catalyst/FASA/FanPro's Shadowrun line, Wizard Of the Coast's Dungeons and Dragons line, Green Ronin's Spycraft, and Fantasy Flight Games' Dark Heresy. The group is given a focus to work on, lets use Dungeon and Dragon's dungeon crawling, and the GM is given Background Noise, for instance the Shadowrun Dystopia Corpacracy. This works out well because your players know exactly what is expected of them. When you sit down at a Spycraft Mission Briefing you know one of two things: Shit is going to get disguised and infiltrated or shit is going to get shot to hell in an epic firefight. The players know their place in the world and they can do their part to help the game run.

This lets the Gm focus on the story side and really take control of the Background Noise and turn it into something awesome. So what you have in Point & Plot material is a skeleton framework that has a muscle (Background noise) web and a flesh (GM's touch) coating. A fully working body of gaming.

Magic Cadaver RISE!

2009-04-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

I used to play the Collectible Card Game Magic the Gathering a lot as a kid and teenager. My sisters 3rd husband Chris Branen introduced me to the game with his old set, it was pretty large, and my Nephew and I started playing around. I eventually found my best friends Brandon and Joe. With them I got catapulted into the fucking Pro-Tours America.

I was pretty good in my hey-day, I could pop a deck and grab 1st place without much trouble. My love life though remained with building decks. I had a hero, I guess you could say, and his name was Gabriel Nassif. He was a French player who won the Pro-Tours a couple of times. He never ran with popular decks, just kind of went with the flow.

Lately I've been getting the itch to get back in. I used to spend a lot of money on a box with Joe and Brandon, I don't have that kind of money anymore. Something to look forward too, I guess, have disposable cash to put into things that I enjoy and love.

Fate Fantasy?

2009-04-29T12:40:00.000-07:00

It's a big question and the shoes are about to be filled.

For those of you who don't know FATE is a role-playing game system by EvilHat (I actually know Fred Hicks via a friend of a friend). The strange and nuance thing making FATE an interesting game is that, hold your breath, there is no book/srd/pdf. That's right, there is a game without game information. The Fate RPG comes from Fudge, a free and open source game, and the last edition of Fate was 2. But they weren't happy with that, no sir. See EvilHat were a devious bunch, they released a role-playing game set in the Pulp Action Era of World War 2 and it's called Spirit of the Century. Now Spirit of the Century (Called SotC) is based off the (non-existent) Fate 3e rules set. So they've only written the rules by proxy. Catchy, huh?

Well SotC took off like a rocket and boy did it shine.

Here's what they did right:
1. It was open source under the OGL from Wizards of the Cost.
2. The open source version was made into a (poorly done) HTML 1 page "wiki" System Reference Document.
3. They managed to wrangle some pretty good free work done in PDFs producing 3 different versions of the SRD.
4. The game aptly matches it's goals. This is my main contention with the new World of Darkness product. It tries to focus on storytelling drama, but the system is clearly made for combat. Social tests are limp at best.
5. The book was well done, too. The PDF came free with the purchase.

What did they do wrong?
1. The SRD wiki? Horrible to read and navigate, just freaking unbearable. This is why I started this site.
2. The wikidot SRD (Which I found out about after already getting 50% done on my site)? Horribly designed and ill-focused.
3. Their behavior on the Yahoo Groups was...atrocious. Some of these guys would NOT let it go that I had done my own site. It wasn't that they were complaining about it, it's that they couldn't understand that I WOULD NOT want to work on their:
a. Less finished site.
b. Site that hasn't been touched in /months/.
c. Would need a lot overhaul.
4. They used Yahoo Groups. There's a reason Yahoo isn't doing well right now.

Now, how can I possibly get FATE3 from just one game? You can't which is why I'm also watching their next project: The Dresden Files.

I'll post some of my results later.