North Star 2021

As a fan of sci-fi games, what could be better than an entire weekend of sci-fi games?

Game 1: Tales from the Loop

Four kids dealing with serious problems at home went out on Boxing Day 1984 for a snowball fight with their friends, and somehow ended up getting recruited as Time Police, helping prevent an incursion of killer robots from the future that strangely didn't look anything like the killer robots from the future in that new movie that none of us were allowed to see because we were only thirteen.

I was lucky enough to get into another game with the same GM I played with at ConTingency.  My previous choices of Bookworm and Computer Geek had already been claimed, so concluding we could probably use a character with social skills, I went for the Rocker.  A quick google told me that Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry had come out in 1984, and she was ready to use inspirational quotes from the lyrics in the cassette liner at any moment.

The 1980s is always a slightly weird era for me to game in, since I technically lived through it, but don't actually remember very much.  Fortunately the internet is there to fill in some of the details, and the GM's liberal use of handouts does the rest.

The most notable thing about this game though, is that we used Roll20 for the A/V and it actually worked!  I can no longer claim a 0% success rate.

Fair use, Link

Game 2: Alien

My own adventure, CSI:Weyland Yutani, has been a long time in the writing but I managed to push myself to get it finished (even if that did mean I was still tweaking character sheets between the morning and evening game slots.)  As the name suggests, a murder mystery, although of course it also included the kind of body horror that an Alien game calls for.

With this being the first outing for this particular adventure, I wasn't sure how it was going to go.  My three act structure was a bit off, with act 1 going on significantly longer than planned and acts 2 and 3 blending together, so possibly I need to tweak the agendas to fit with that.  The players were also reasonably lucky with their panic rolls, meaning the panic spiral never really kicked off.

That said, while I don't think it delivered quite as much horror as I'd hoped for, the mystery solving aspect seems to have landed really well.  Clues unfolded at a reasonable rate, and when the team departed, all rather surprisingly alive, they'd got the answers they were looking for.

I put some extra work into the Roll20 implementation for this adventure, using a base map I made on Dungeon Scrawl and implementing a card deck to use for initiative and a rollable table for the monster's attacks.  The thing I had most trouble with was the card deck, which kept telling me that I didn't have enough cards to deal to everyone despite the fact that I clearly did.  Adding people to the turn tracker was also not particularly fun, and I guess I need to figure out if there's a way to streamline that (although I did appreciate being able to add the monster in more than once to allow for its multiple attacks.)

The work in running an Alien scenario is extremely front-loaded, so now I've got the adventure and VTT set up all sorted out, it should be fairly simple to run it again once I've figured out how I want to tweak it.

This is fine.

Game 3: Mothership

I'd never really thought of Mothership as a comedy game before, but thanks to the Scott Vanden Bosch artwork the GM was using, I wasn't surprised when it turned out that way.  The general incompetence of Mothership characters ended up contributing admirably to the slapstick tone.

In addition to the random output of the character generator, the GM also gave us a few character details.  My character, Magdalena, had a general disatisfaction with the way guns don't make cool noises in the vacuum of space.  So when the adventure started with us visiting a clinic to get cyberware installed, I naturally had her pick the 'Loudmouth' - an internal recording and playback device that can be used at high volume to stun people, but more importantly, could be used to record a variety of music, sound effects and so on, which could then be played back throughout the mission.  Team members hearing gunfire could feel reassured that the fight had gone OK when they heard Magdalena's victory music playing.

I don't like Mothership for space horror as much as I like Alien, because I think the randomness gets in the way sometimes, and the low skills mean people who should know what they're doing are frequently highly ineffective.  But it turns out all of that makes it pretty much spot on for space horror comedy.

pic.twitter.com/IdkzuRotS5

— Scott Vanden Bosch (@scott_v_b) May 5, 2021

Game 4: Hammerheads

My first time playing Cortex Prime.  Like SWADE, this seems to be the latest iteration of a game I previously disliked, but which has now sorted itself out and become fun.  While I don't think I completely grasped the rules, the basic concept of assembling a dice pool and choosing two results to keep wasn't too complicated, and with a skilled GM to keep us on track, things went pretty smoothly.

Smoothly mechanically, anyway.  With a game inspired by Thunderbirds, we were obviously going to be dealing with some kind of disaster, and the adventure's description involving 'Prehistoric Park' was all the motivation I needed to give it a go, as we found ourselves faced with not only hoards of angry dinosaurs but a significant number of disgruntled humans and a malfunctioning time portal, all of which we had to find a way to deal with.

By the end of the adventure we'd killed significantly more dinosaurs than my character had been planning on, discovered the many uses of an ice cream van and its contents, and even slightly expanded our knowledge of paleontology as we found ourselves pursued by what another player described as 'badger pigeons'.

How exactly Cortex Prime works for adventures whose premise is not Thunderbirds + disaster movie, I don't know, but for this it works well and makes for a very funny adventure, full of surprises.

Playing Cortex Prime for the first time with a bit of help from @AllRolledUpUK bit trays. pic.twitter.com/xK6XWAMvG8

— SavageSpiel (@SavageSpiel) May 9, 2021

Reflections

This time last year I thought we'd be playing in person again long before now.  I'm glad the Garrison conventions have managed to adapt, but I still hope that next year we really will be playing in person.  I've met so many lovely people at these events, and North Star feels a bit extra special because of that unique sci-fi focus.  I hope I feel ready when it's time to step out into that brave new world.

RPGaDay: Push

I'm running Alien tonight, so I guess I'm going to talk push mechanics.

Most of the games I've played don't have them, so I first encountered the idea in Coriolis.  The idea that if you didn't like the result of your dice roll you could just roll again was a tough one to get used to.  In Coriolis, pushing a roll means the GM gets a darkness point that they can use to make things difficult at a later point.  They function rather like the destiny points in FFG Star Wars from the GM's end.  Thematically I like it a lot - you're asking the Icons for help now but you'll have to pay for it later.  It does rather put pressure on the GM to make use of them, although at the same time it's quite a scary prospect knowing the GM has a giant pile of darkness that could be unleashed at any moment.

Since then I've played a few more of Fria Ligan's Year Zero Engine games, and what really impressed me is that the push mechanic is different depending on what game you're playing, and serves to support the theme of the game.

The original Mutant: Year Zero has a lot going on dice-wise, but pushing a roll means you risk (or if you've already rolled badly, guarantee) either temporary stat damage or gear damage.  It really emphasises what a dangerous world this is; your equipment is built from scrap and could disintegrate at any moment, while the most resilient of bodies and minds can easily be brought down if pushed too far.

At the other end of the scale is Tales From The Loop.  This world is scary and upsetting, and as a kid, these are the things that are a threat to you, hindering you in everything you do.  But ultimately you're going to survive, because that's what kids do.

But my favourite is Alien.

Unlike most YZE games where pushing is likely to result in you having fewer dice to spend on future rolls, in Alien you get more.  Each time you push, your stress increases by 1, and each point of stress adds to your dice pool.  Stress gives you an edge, as the adrenaline pumping through your system makes you stronger, faster and sharper.

The trade-off is that as your stress level goes up, so does your risk of panic, and the likely severity of that panic.  High stress means your chances of shooting that monster are much higher, but so are the chances that instead of the short controlled bursts you were supposed to be using, you empty your entire magazine into the thing while screaming your head off.

The end result is tension in every dice roll, as success or failure takes second stage to control or panic.  And that's why it's my favourite push mechanic - because it's both supportive of the game's mood and themes, and so thoroughly tied into the game mechanics as a whole.

Alien RPG - First Look

We're playing a two session game of Fria Ligan's Alien RPG, using the Chariot of the Gods scenario.

Like every Fria Ligan game I've encountered, Alien uses the Year Zero engine, once again modified to suit the specific game.  Four attributes, each with three associated skills, makes for a solid base and also makes every attribute equally valuable.  (Compare with Coriolis, where Wits has significantly more associated skills than Strength.)  The skills make sense for the setting, with Heavy Machinery being the one that most stands out to me - it's not one that shows up in most games, but you know in Alien that at some point you're going to want to get in an power loader.

Besides the skill and attribute sitting in the middle of the character sheet, there's various other bits and pieces going on around the edge.  One of them is resources - air, water, power, food.  Irrelevant when you're on your own ship but absolutely critical as you explore a derelict vessel in your exo suit.  Rather than any kind of tedious resource management, it uses a variation on the innovative system from the Black Hack - roll a number of dice equal to your current rating, and subtract any 1s.  There's also a system for tracking radiation exposure, similar to the one in Coriolis.

Stress is probably the mechanic we were most aware of in the game.  Any time you make a skill roll, you add additional stress dice to your dice pool, equal to your current stress rating.  This means that a bit of stress makes you more likely to succeed in whatever you're doing.  It also means you're more likely to panic, because rolling a 1 on a stress die is a bad thing.  The official dice illustrate this nicely by putting a picture of a facehugger on the 1 face of the stress dice.

A panic roll is a d6 plus your current stress, and a table tells the GM what the result means.  As yet nobody has rolled particularly high on the panic table, with the highest results merely resulting in us spreading our stress to other nearby party members.  However, by the end of the session, my character was a 5 stress.  That means any time I make a roll, we don't know if she's going to be hyper-competant or completely freak out.  Things could get interesting next week.

There was a little concern that things might be a bit predictable.  We were all familiar with Alien and Aliens, and some of us had seen the other movies.  (I haven't, as it's one of those franchises where I'm reliably informed that any movie after the second can be safely ignored.)  We made a conscious effort to avoid metagaming and have our characters act like people who are only vaguely aware of rumours that there might be alien life out there, rather than our own instinct to expect facehuggers at any moment.

And of course we did encounter an alien, but not a xenomorph, facehugger, or anything else we remembered from the movies.  While we're only halfway through the adventure, it feels like it's an original story, not just a rehash of one of the Alien franchise movies.  While this adventure is intended as a one-off (we've already had one PC death and I'll be surprised if the rest of us all make it to the end) I can see this game working for a campaign.

Sci-fi horror is absolutely my favourite kind of horror, and I'm really excited about how well this game handles it.  While there's a limit to how much I can tell from a single session, at this point it's looking really really good.