Learning Starforged: Escaping the Caverns

At the suggestion of some helpful people on Mastodon, I've adjusted the vow to Kaisa to be getting her out of the caverns, and set it as Troublesome. Completing it will mark progress on the previous vow. Let's see how Spider is doing...

It was one thing swearing to get Kaisa out of here, but quite another to actually do it. Spider was unarmed, and worse still, unarmoured. She was locked in a cell with Kaisa, and given how different her behaviour was to the bar where they'd met, she was forced to assume the woman had been subjected to the local pharmaceuticals. Nothing about this was going to be easy.

First of all though, she needed to better understand her surroundings. The makeshift cell bars provided a view across the caverns, and she shuffled over to see what she could make out in the dim light.

Gather information: roll +wits
Strong hit
Discover something helpful and specific. The path is clear. +2 momentum

The cell was high up and near the back of the cavern, and nobody seemed to be paying it much attention. All the activity was near the front, where crates were being loaded and unloaded. Spider could see her hoverbike being dragged in, and winced at the thought of what that would do to the paintwork.

Priorities. First she had to get herself and Kaisa out of this cell. It wasn't exactly well constructed, so there had to be a weak spot. She remembered words of advice she'd been told years ago. No door is stronger than its hinges. Which meant if she pushed in just the right place...

Face danger: roll +iron
Weak hit
You succeed, but at a cost. Make a suffer move.

Lose momentum. -1 momentum for a minor setback

It was not the quick exit she'd been imagining. The hinges gave up just as she'd hoped, but she still ended up having to dismantle the door, piece by piece, expecting at any moment for one of the Wellspring residents to notice what was going on. But at last she'd made enough of a hole to squeeze herself and Kaisa through.

[Mark Progress: Get Kaisa out of the caves :3 boxes]

"Now what?"
"Now we have to be very quiet."

But quiet would only get them so far. At some point they were going to have to try to blend in if they were going to make it to the front entrance, and it was pretty obvious neither of them were dressed like locals. A change of clothes would give them a chance.

Secure an advantage: roll +wits
Strong hit
+2 Momentum, +1 on your next move

Laundry was another of those things that Wellspring liked to shove out of the way alone with their prisoners. The airing clothes weren't completely dry and felt unpleasantly cold, but at least the two of them could now plausibly pass as locals. Now they just had to make their way out.

Face danger: roll +shadow
Weak hit
You succeed, but at a cost. Make a suffer move.

Endure Stress. -1 spirit. roll +spirit
Miss
It's worse than you thought. -2 momentum

Spider was not enjoying this. She was not a natural at acting. Kaisa had the slightly off behaviour of a Wellspring local down pat, but was constantly swinging between excited giggles and clinging nervously to Spider. A few dubious glances were sent their way. But they made it to the entrance without being apprehended, and Spider started to feel a little more optimistic. Kaisa grew more excitable as they stepped out into the sunlight.

[Mark Progress: Get Kaisa out of the caves :6 boxes]

Except now they were standing outside with nothing but some slightly damp clothes and no actual way of getting away from here. There was no point trying to run. It was a long way back to Paxton. If she was going to get Kaisa back there, she was going to need her hoverbike.

"You need to hide," Spider told Kaisa. "Keep your head down and don't attract attention. I'll be back as soon as I can."

Spider made her way back to the loading area and joined in with the lifting.
"Nice hoverbike," she remarked to one of the others, with a nod in its direction. "I heard there was some other stuff too."
"Yeah." The man laughed. "Bounty hunter, wearing some sweet armour. Not that it did them much good."
"Show me?" She smiled as sweetly as she could manage.

Compel: roll +heart
Weak hit
They do what you want but with a demand or complication. +1 momentum

Randomly rolled complication: needed item or resource is unavailable

"Too late. Flint's already claimed all of it for himself. Says he deserves it. He was the one that caught her, after all. I can introduce you though."

Spider tried to protest that she didn't need accompanying and directions would be fine. Of all the people in Wellspring, Flint had to be the most likely to see through her disguise, and she really didn't want to encounter him, especially not with company. But the man insisted.

"Hey, Flint, this lady wants to take a look at that armour." Spider tried to keep her head down and look as unlike a bounty hunter as possible.

Face danger: roll +shadow
Strong hit
You are successful. +1 momentum

"Gorgeous, isn't it? Doesn't fit me though. Too small."
"Can I try? Please? It looks just about my size."

She was taking a huge risk here. Fitting the armour back on meant discarding pieces of her disguise as she went. At any moment he could figure out what was really happening here. She would have to be fast.

Face danger: roll +edge
Weak hit
You succeed but not without a cost. Make a suffer move.

Lose momentum. -1 momentum for a minor setback

"It does fit you." Spider was almost dressed, but without her helmet Flint could still lock eyes with her. He didn't need to say anything. She knew she'd been made even before he started reaching for his stun gun.

Enter the fray
Objective is to get past Flint and the other guy to make a run for it. Set rank of troublesome.
Facing off against the foe: roll +heart
Weak hit
You are in control

Gain Ground: roll +iron
Miss
You are in a bad spot and must pay the price.

Spider hurled herself at Flint, trying to snatch the stun gun out of his grip before he could turn it on her. Which might have worked, if there had only been one opponent, but instead she found herself in the other man's grip with Flint's stun gun pressed against her chest.

Endure Stress. -2 spirit. roll +spirit
Strong hit
Shake it off. +1 spirit

He'd caught her by surprise outside, but this time she was ready for him. People thought it was all about the armour, but really it was being able to react to changing circumstances. She didn't struggle against the man's grip, but simply went limp, letting the weight of the armour drag him down.

React under fire: roll +wits
Burn momentum to make it a strong hit
You succeed and are in control. +1 momentum.

The stun gun's blast took out the man holding her. There was a roar of rage from Flint as the body slumped to the floor, but she had the advantage now, going low to try to take him down.

Strike: roll +iron
Weak hit
Mark progress twice but expose yourself to danger. You are in a bad spot.

[Mark Progress: Fight with flint :3 boxes]
[Mark Progress: Fight with flint :6 boxes]

And with that suitably dramatic moment, I'll put Spider away again. I think I understand the basics of the game reasonably well now. Combat is proving interesting, with a whole set of different moves to get my head around, but I like the way it uses the same progress tracker as the iron vows.

Learning Starforged: The Search Begins

Right now Spider had one solid piece of information. Kaisa had been taken by raiders from Wellspring so either she was there, or someone there would know where she was. Hopefully some of the Paxton locals would be able to clue her in on what she was likely to find there.

Gather information: roll +wits
Weak hit
New insight but a complication. +1 momentum

Random rolled stuff for the Wellspring settlement:

• Lawless
• Built within terrain or asteroid
• Prominant emblems or signage
• Medical, environmentalism
• Mounting debt

It was easy enough to get people talking in the bar. Getting them to tell her useful things was more of a challenge, but soon she was starting to put together a coherent picture of Wellspring. Folks out in the rim didn't like being told what to do but this lot took it to extremes. They were a collective who'd declared independence not just from the Alliance but from their own planet. Their compound was inside a set of natural caves, surrounded by signposts warning visitors that they were about to step outside planetary jurisdiction.

Not that they were fully independent, of course. They still traded with the rest of the world, mostly pharmaceuticals from their underground mushroom farms. And that was the source of their ongoing conflict with Evenfall. Failure to meet the terms of their trading agreement.

And there Spider saw one small ray of hope. What if there was no ransom demand because the Wellspring raiders had mistaken Kaisa for someone from Evenfall and sent it to the wrong town? Maybe she could negotiage something with them?

That would mean getting into the place first though. Spider's bounty hunter license granted her access to a lot of places, but there was no way Wellspring was going to respect that. The barflies were quick to tell her what kind of people they were: paranoid, violent, off their heads on their own pharmaceuticals.

The Manta was far too conspicuous to take anywhere near the place. Spider mounted her hoverbike. Within an hour she was close enough to get the lie of the land. After that she'd have to continue on foot, but first she wanted to take a look at the place.

Check your gear: roll +supply
Strong hit
Spider has the long range scope she needs to check out this place from a distance.
+1 momentum

Secure an advantage: roll +wits
Miss
Pay the price

Spider watched the entrance through her scope. There seemed to be a lot of coming and going. No sign of Kaisa, but then she'd hardly expected that. She'd be locked up somewhere deep in the caves, most likely. Spider watched for a pattern in movement that would give her an opportunity to get inside unnoticed. She didn't notice the quiet footsteps behind her until it was too late, and the stun gun shocked her into unconciousness.

Endure harm: lose 1 health and roll +health
Strong hit
Take 1 health

When Spider woke up she was in near darkness, stripped of armour and weapons. What little light there was came through a makeshift set of bars that had been used to turn a small part of the cave into a cell. When her eyes adjusted to the gloom she realised she wasn't alone. Someone was lying close to her on a heap of straw.

"Kaisa?" It was hard to make out the woman's face in the dim light, but who else was it going to be?

"No...leave me alone...wait. You're not one of them. But I know your voice."

"It's Spider. We met in a bar..." But she didn't have to explain any further, as Kaisa had already thrown her arms around her.

"Oh thank god. Mother sent you, didn't she? I'm going to be OK! We're getting out of here and..." Then it seemed like reality was catching up with her and she stepped back again. "Except you're in here with me and I don't see any guns, which means they caught you too."

Kaisa sat back down on the straw and began quietly to cry. Spider sat down beside her.

"Kaisa, listen to me. I promised your mother I'd bring you home, and that's what I'm going to do. I know it looks bad right now, but I need you to trust me. Can you do that?"

Make a connection: roll +heart
Weak hit
Create a connection but it comes with a complication or cost.
Rank troublesome.

Kaisa shook her head. "That's not good enough! You could be working for Wellspring for all I know. Swear to me! Promise me you'll bring me home."

All her other gear was gone, but the poker chip in its hidden pocket was still there. Spider wrapped her fingers around it. "Kaisa, I swear I will bring you back to your mother."

Swear an iron vow: roll +heart +1 because she's swearing to a connection.
Weak hit. Right now there are more questions than answers. +1 Momentum
Not sure how to rank this as it's really just the same vow sworn to a different person.

[Mark Progress: Rescue Kaisa :2 boxes]

Learning Starforged: Prologue and the Iron Vow.

On the advice of more experienced players, I've upped each of Spider's stats by 1, which I'm told should give her a chance of surviving more than five minutes in solo play.

I'm using the Stargazer app to keep track of things.

The comms module on the Manta made its familiar irritating beep. A wave from Vesper Frost. Spider pressed the button to accept and Vesper's familiar steely features appeared.

"Hi, Vesper." Spider only said this to wind her up, but for once, there was no demand to refer to her properly as Mayor Frost.

"Skip the nicities, this isn't a social call. I'm hiring you."

Spider's eyebrows shot up. "Huh. Who do you need finding?"

"Kaisa. She's been taken."

It had been two days earlier that Spider had been sat in a spaceport bar drinking cheap liquor and discovering that the spacer she was talking to was actually Vesper Frost's daughter. She hadn't even known Vesper Frost had a daughter. That was because Kaisa hadn't been home in so many years, she wasn't even sure her mother would want to see her any more. Spider disagreed. Only a terrible mother wouldn't want to see her child, and Kaisa was quick to confirm that that wasn't the case.

And now something terrible had happened.

A cloud of dust blew up from under the Manta as Spider landed in the field that passed for a landing strip on the edge of Paxton.  She was expected. The gates opened as she approached them, and Vesper herself was waiting outside.

"Mayor Frost."

"Spider."

Vesper ran through the details in her office. A raiding party from Wellspring had been sighted and the usual security protocols put in place. Except Kaisa wasn't accounted for, and didn't know the signals, and when the raiders had arrived she was still outside. She'd been carried off alive, but if they'd planned to keep her that way, Vesper would have expected a ransom demand by now. There had been nothing.

Spider clutched her poker chip tightly in her hand. "Mayor Frost, I will find her. And I will bring her back to you."

Swear an iron vow: roll +heart +1 because she's swearing to a connection.

Strong hit! It's clear what to do. +2 Momentum

Rank of Dangerous.

Learning Starforged: Getting Started

I've played Starforged once and enjoyed it, but only recently picked up a copy myself. Chapter 2 -  Basics - seemed pretty complicated on a first read, but I remember that playing it felt pretty smooth. So clearly the way to go on this is to play a solo game and see how it goes. I'm going to work through this in blog form. So on to Chapter 2: launching your campaign.

First up is defining your campaign setting. This is a fairly large section with fourteen categories to define aspects of the setting. After a quick browse through these I've concluded this would be a lot more fun to do with a group. For my solo game I'm going to base things on a tried and tested setting that I've used in multiple game systems and always enjoy playing with: the Firefly Verse.

Character Creation

Now to make a character. I've got the asset cards ready, so I need to choose two paths. There's a table with some inspiration, and rather than roll, I've let my eyes be drawn to something that looks interesting. Fugutive hunter. That gets me the assets Armoured and Bounty Hunter.

Well I guess I'm playing the Mandalorian. That's cool.

Next is a backstory. Again there's a table of prompts. Rather than roll I've had a read, and several of them have sort of mashed together in my head. My character's family ran a successful business. I initially thought restaurant, but let's go upscale a bit and make it a casino. Then organised crime got involved, in the shape of Niska, and when her family refused to pay protection money, there was an attack. She escaped, but her family were killed and Niska now runs the casino. Her hatred of criminals lead her down the road of fugitive hunting.

And that leads me nicely onto the next step of writing her background vow. It's her primary motivation. I'll keep it simple. Destroy Niska.

Now I need a spaceship. I need a history for it, and one option in the table is stealing it from a notorious crime boss. So that was one of her early attacks on Niska's organisation, more a minor snub than actual harm, but it gives her satisfaction to know she's taken something from him. There's another table to give it some unique features, and this time I will roll. 39. It looks defenseless, but exterior panels open to reveal weapons. Perfect. Another roll. 16. Gravity generator is notoriously fickle. Yes, those weapons are an after-market add-on and whoever fitted them did a shoddy job with the wiring, meaning they keep pulling power from the gravity generator. A roll on the starship name generator gives me a name for it: Manta.

Now I need one more asset, and I'm going to go for a support vehicle so she can get around planetside. The hoverbike seems like a good choice for a solo bounty hunter.

Stats are next, and by now I think I know what sort of person she is, so here goes:

• Edge 2
• Heart 1
• Iron 2
• Shadow 1
• Wits 3

Just a few more details to add now. She's female but androgenous looking with short cropped hair, not that most people can tell that as she keeps her armour on most of the time. She acts aloof but that's got more to do with a fear of getting close to people in case they get hurt - or she has to hurt them. Rolling on the name generator gives me Yelena Pearson, callsign Spider. She prefers to use the callsign at all times, as her regular name reminds her too much of her past.

And finally, equipment. I don't have to go shopping! Wonderful. Yelena has all the normal weapons and stuff a bounty hunter would carry, and a small toolkit for hoverbike repairs. She needs an item for swearing iron vows upon, and obviously that has to be a poker chip with the name of her parents' casino.

Starting Sector

The book says this part can be skipped for a more freeform galaxy, but I want to engage with this a bit. I'm keeping it simple for now and just creating one settlement on a planet whose details I've made up myself. I'm going for a mix of rolling dice and picking interesting options.

Paxton is a small settlement engaged in agriculture and hunting. It would look like a rustic idyll, were it not for its defenses - the pallisade wall and watchtower are an intimidating sight as you approach the town. The town mayor keeps a firm grip on everything that goes on in town. Paxton is between two larger settlements that are constantly feuding, and is often caught in the crossfire. With that in mind, the defenses make more sense.

Now Spider needs a local connection. Leader is an option for their role, so let's make it the mayor. Vesper Frost is easy to underestimate at first sight, but she rules Paxton with an iron fist and is as ice cold as her name suggests. She's got enough power to make her dangerous.

Finally, a roll on the sector trouble table gives me a raider clan emerging as a dominant threat under a new leader.

Begin The Adventure

And so it's time to choose an inciting incident and set out on a sworn quest. I have something in mind now, based on what I've got so far. Paxton has once again found itself caught in the crossfire, but this time someone's been taken. Vesper has reached out to Spider for help bringing them back. But for this to be worth swearing an iron vow, it needs to be personal. The missing person is Vesper's daughter Kaisa. She's a spacer and hasn't been back to Paxton in years. Spider was the one who persuaded her she should visit her mother.

And with that, I'm ready to begin.

Serenity LRP event 19: Signal

"Welcome to event nineteen.  Of four."

Despite being intended as a short spin-off from a Stargate game, Serenity LRP has proved remarkably durable.  This event, 'Signal', was the 'season finale', where an ongoing plot that started at the event where I first started playing (which also happened to be the current plot writer's first event as plot writer) reached its climax.

At each event there has been a broadcast from a pirate radio station calling itself the Voice of Truth.  The setup for this event was that the Voice of Truth was asking for our help.  This saw us fly our ships down onto a cortex relay and fight our way through a multi-level complex before finally locating the Voice of Truth and enabling one crucial broadcast.  One that we, the players, do not yet know the contents of.

This game was pretty much a masterclass in how to run a larp.  If you know Firefly, you know the kind of characters people play, and it didn't matter if you were a fighter, mechanic, medic, cortexer, companion or pilot, there was something in this event that made your skills critical.  I did have moments of feeling rather bored, but this is entirely my own fault for making a character who can't do much besides fight, and each time it wasn't long before I got the chance to be useful again.

Set dressing is one of the stand-out features of Serenity LRP for me.  Games take place on scout campsites, usually ones I've been to many times before, so making me feel like I'm actually on another planet is going to be a challenge.

The main building played the part of each of the five floors of the underground complex.  Each time we changed floor, the sequence went:
All leave via door A.
Head down a tunnel (actually a series of tents and gazebos, all superbly set dressed as infirmaries, maintenance rooms, drug labs, etc.)
Walk through a large open space, beset by reavers/snipers/automatic laser weapons.
Reach the next lift (actually a gazebo)
Enter the building again via door B.

By which time, the building had had its level number signs changed and the furniture rearranged.

Some suspension of disbelief is always required, of course.  It rained quite a lot over the course of the weekend.  We, the players, put the fact that we were getting rather wet in the large open areas down to a faulty fire suppression system and condensation dripping from the ceiling.

Sunday morning was slightly delayed by outside circumstances.  Specifically, a group of cub scouts arriving on site ready to go on a hike, just at the point when the game team were trying to set up the horrific experimentation lab full of corpses and brains and other things that cubs themselves are probably OK with but which their parents might have objections to.  Someone had told them that since they weren't using the site itself, only meeting there, they didn't need to tell the site.  Someone is going to be getting a major chewing out for that one.

Once the site was free of impressionable young people who shouldn't be exposed to larpers with assault rifles, we were able to begin the final assault.  By this point in the event I'd already been shot, stabbed, gassed and irradiated.  I was now able to add 'fell off a bridge'.

If you've seen Serenity, and remember that bit near the end where Mal is racing the operative to Mr Universe's transmitter and there's that bridge with the massive fan spinning underneath?  That bridge.  Luckily my friends were able to pull me back up.

A fitting finale to an amazing season.  My character has been left with new traumas (fear of heights being the main one) but a sense of optimism, and I can't wait to see what Season 2 is going to bring.

Spaghetti ConJunction 3b

Was I in time for Spaghetti ConJunction 3b?  As I approached the Geek Retreat I saw a small crowd of obvious gamers outside.  Clearly I had not missed anything.

I paid the incredibly reasonable entry fee of £3 and dug out my sign up sheet.  Another outing for my Scum and Villainy scenario.  Would I get players this time?  I had a browse of the other sheets in case not.

I needn't have worried.  My game filled up.  Maybe it was my new and improved sign up sheet with appropriate logos and a slightly improved blurb.  Maybe there were just more Firefly enthusiasts.  Either way, with a full set of character archetypes, the crew set out to acquire a space ship and begin their journey to independence.

What I love about running this scenario is that I never know how it's going to go.  Even the very start of the game has ended up being different each time, with each group taking a different approach.

It occurs to me that it wouldn't be hard to change this adventure from its current slightly dark space western feel to full blown horror.  With more descriptive language and going into a lot more detail about certain things I could do some very different stuff with it.  But at the same time, while I maintain there's nothing wrong with including horror content in a Firefly game, if people have signed up for Firefly they're probably expecting more action adventure than horror.

But I've just acquired a copy of Coriolis, which has a similar feel to Firefly, but with a different setting where it's possible I could make it work.  Something to think about for future scenarios.

Anyway, the adventure went entertainingly as always.  I think I could have handled the end better, as it wasn't particularly exciting and cinematic and could have used a bit more tension, but otherwise I'm happy.  I'm going to take the suggestion I've seen to set silent alarms to go off at certain points during the session to help me keep the pacing and make sure things wrap up nicely at the right time.

One nice thing about playing at the Geek Retreat is that you can order your lunch at the bar and go back to your game and they'll bring it up to you.  The food is mostly burger and chips type stuff.  I had a chicken and bacon toastie with chips, which tasted great and was decent value as well.  (I would have liked some salad with it, but appreciate they probably don't have a particularly salad-friendly clientele.)  The coffee is excellent, and while my current calorie counting efforts meant I avoided the milkshake this time, they certainly looked as good as they did last time, as did the waffles and ice cream I saw other people eating.

There is the option to get food elsewhere, but given that the very low price of this event is partly due to the venue making money on food and drink sales, I'd rather spend my money there and have the convenience of table service.  And the coffee really is excellent.

In the break I decided to check out the raffle prizes.  I hadn't bought tickets on the way in, in order to help speed through the queue, but seeing there were two copies of Zweihander up for grabs I decided it was worth buying a few tickets for a shot at getting hold of one of them.

Zweihander, incidentally, is a very appropriately named game.  The book is of a size that should definitely allow it to be used as a weapon, but you will absolutely need two hands to wield it.

With a fairly huge number of raffle prizes and a limited number of people after a few of the morning crowd went home, I wasn't entirely surprised when more than one of my tickets got pulled.  I didn't get a copy of Zweihander, but I did come away with some Lovecraftian fiction from Chaosium, a Call of Cthulhu sourcebook about Arkham, and some kind of virtual Cyberpunk adventure that may never get played but I've no doubt I will enjoy reading.

Raffles can be quite tedious, but with Simon Burley in charge and determined to set a new speed record, we got through about thirty raffle prizes in just over three minutes.  Probably the most enjoyable raffle I've entered.

Afternoon sign up.  With smaller numbers but still seven games on offer, I didn't bother using the 'go first for having run a game' option, and just signed up when my number was called since I already knew it would be near the start.  I chose the Starfinder game.  Unfortunately nobody else did, so I had to scramble to find a game.  Fortunately there was one space left in The Outhere: The Storm and the Tower.

While the game blurb is my primary factor in choosing a convention game, seeing the name Christopher Dean did help push me towards this game as I'd previously encountered him running '28 Trains Later', the Thomas the Tank Engine survival horror game that I'd been wanting for some time.  This time he was running a playtest of The Outhere from Braincrack Games.

He had a set of pregen characters, but had edited them all to make them non-gender-specific, which I really appreciated.  As someone who prefers to play female characters, when there are gendered pregens I feel pushed into choosing a female one.  With no specified genders, I could pick a character that seemed interesting, in this case an antelope person with a focus on light magic.

An interesting system.  D6 dice pools, but you add the results then divide by 5 rather than counting successes, thus avoiding the irritating part of dice pool systems where you've rolled a bunch of very nearly successes, but have still completely failed.  Also reminicent of tagging aspects in Fate, as you can get extra dice by invoking your character details or making use of narrative details.  We managed to provide some useful feedback at the end of the game.

I enjoyed the setting.  A variation on the normal fantasy setting, with the non-human races being the aforementioned antelope people, fennec fox people, rhino people and golems.  An emphasis on exploring desert ruins.  It's definitely got potential and I'll be interested to see where it goes from here.

By the time we finished, the cafe was close to closing, so I gathered my bag of books and went home.

I like the spontanaeity of being able to just show up on the day for these one day conventions rather than having everything booked in advance.  I also like the sign up system with the random order, meaning that I don't have to fight my way to the table to sign up for things.  It means I sometimes don't get into my first choice of games, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to have a good game.  I didn't get my first choice yesterday (thanks to nobody else wanting to play it) but I did get into an excellent game all the same.  At the last Concrete Cow I didn't get my first choice for the same reason, but that meant I had a fantastic game of Delta Green instead.

I've never had a bad game at Concrete Cow or Spaghetti ConJunction, but I have had some games I would never have considered signing up for in advance, and still had a great time.

Gender diversity remains poor.  There was one other woman there (and we did have a nice chat while waiting for sign up to start) out of around 30-35 people.  But both of us were offering games in the morning, which isn't bad.  I hope more female GMs will help attract more female players.

Transport-wise, I really appreciate being able to park practically right behind the venue.  The last thing I want as a woman alone with a heavy bag is to be wandering the streets of a strange city after dark.  The short walk to the well lit car park is definitely a selling point for me, and at £5 for 12 hours, the price is quite reasonable.

Overall, a great day out and worth braving the M6 for.  I hope to be back at 4a in February.

Horror in Sci-fi

One of the players at the larp I was at last weekend has said that if you're going to introduce horror elements into a non-horror game it needs to be signposted and possibly have content warnings.  And she's right.  You should do this in any larp, regardless of genre.  Even horror games.  Especially horror games.  (This incident doesn't seem to have been anything more than a case of inadequate signposting, but does demonstrate how easily things can go wrong, even with well-intentioned refs who care about their players.)

But I'm going to disagree with the person who described introducing horror elements into this game - a sci-fi larp that cites Star Trek, Mass Effect and Firefly as major influences - as a genre switcheroo.

Sci-fi horror is obviously a thing.  As far as I'm concerned, three of the greatest haunted house horror movies ever made are Alien, Event Horizon and The Thing.  The body horror genre is full of sci-fi, with films like The Fly and Slither immediately coming to mind, where either weird science or aliens provide the impetus for the horror.

Then there's things that aren't explicitly billed as horror, but are nonetheless scary and full of horror elements.  Films like Super 8 and Cloverfield, or the biggest sci-fi influence on my childhood, The X-Files, have no shortage of scares.

And then there's sci-fi that's not intended to be scary, yet still brings the scares from time to time.  Star Trek has the Borg.  Even Red Dwarf has the polymorph.  (Anyone who's encountered mimics in D&D probably has the same reaction as me to a monster that can look like anything, even before we get to the emotion-sucking aspect.)

Sci-fi and horror simply go together.  Themes of weird science going wrong, hostile aliens and technological breakdown in the harshness of space are genre staples.  Sci-fi doesn't have to include horror - I can't think of anything horror-related in Star Wars, for example - but they are close enough that horror themes showing up in a sci-fi shouldn't be a complete surprise.

Which brings me to Firefly.

Firefly isn't a horror setting.  Space western is the normal description, and when I run a Firefly game, I aim for that vibe because if I signed up for a Firefly game I'd be hoping for something that would fit in on the show.

That said...

    "If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. And, if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order."
    ―Zoë

My convention scenario starts with the PCs going to investigate an abandoned ship, and I'd like to think that people who sign up for a Firefly game are going to be genre savvy enough to realise ships don't get abandoned for no reason.  What happens after that depends quite heavily on the players, but horror themes, particularly those that come up in the show, are always a possibility.  (With the exception of reavers doing the thing Zoe describes, for obvious reasons.)

It's not surprising to me that a larp that cites Firefly as one of its primary influences might include elements of horror.  The same goes for tabletop RPGs like Coriolis, which claims both Firefly and Alien as influences.

I've never really thought of myself as a horror fan, but I love sci-fi horror.  I hope to see more of it in both larp and tabletop.

Desperately Seeking Serenity

I love Firefly.  Nothing surprising there.  A lot of gamers love Firefly, as is obvious from the vast number of Firefly board games out there.  I own Firefly: The Game, and thematically it's one of the best games I own.  I've even gone to the trouble of replacing the cardboard dinosaur that comes in the box with a proper toy dinosaur.

Things aren't quite so rosy in RPG land though.

I own the Serenity RPG.  There's a fair amount to like about it, in particular useful resources like deck plans for Serenity itself, plus a few other spaceships, and information about the setting itself.  It's possible to play as the original characters in the show, but equally possible to create a cast of new and original PCs - and it includes a full crew of pre-gens to either play or to kick start your imagination in that direction.

Try getting anyone to play it though...

It's not that the system's particularly bad.  It's pretty similar to Savage Worlds really.  It's just extremely average, and beyond the setting there's nothing about it that makes me want to play.

Can we do better?

There's a Firefly RPG as well, from the same company, which seems to have improved somewhat on the original game.  Plus, being based on Firefly rather than Serenity it includes a bunch of stuff from the show that for licensing reasons couldn't be in a game based on the movie, which made some pages in the original game faintly ridiculous.

It also comes with a bunch of supplements, which include not only a set of adventures to play in the 'verse, but also a cut down version of the rules, meaning they can be played even if you don't have the core rule book.

All of which is pretty cool, and the kind of thing I'd be interested in picking up if I spot it on a trader's stall.  Because I've never actually seen any of it.  Despite having been out for five years, it's somehow managed to fly under the radar, at least as far as this browncoat is concerned.

What other options are there?

You can run Firefly in Traveller.  The original spacefaring RPG might not have been built with Firefly in mind, but it hits all the right points with technological disparity between planets, lack of FTL, a heavily stratified society and overall human behaviour.

The problem, of course, is that it's Traveller, and while there are plenty of people who love it, I'm not one of them.  It's one of those games that causes a certain type of gamer to start obsessively designing spaceships in a way that turns it into a game of Excel: The Spreadsheets, when what I really want is to be handed a Firefly deck plan and told to go and have an adventure.

(For those who don't know him, my husband is absolutely that kind of gamer.  We joke about his deep and abiding love of spreadsheets.)

At the other end of the scale there's the indie darling, Powered By The Apocalypse.  I first encountered this system last year and was pretty smitten.  So much so that faced with an upcoming Concrete Cow, I hacked together a basic set of playbooks for Firefly and ran an adventure.  It worked pretty well, and I was planning on continuing to work on it (in a serial numbers filed off way, of course).  I did do some more development, but it was about that time I started writing a novel so it stalled for a bit.

And then I got my hands on Scum and Villainy.

Scum and Villainy uses the Forged In The Dark system, the same as the even newer indie darling, Blades In The Dark.  My home group played BITD for a while, and I was even more smitten than I was with PBTA.  The way it throws you into the action with only the basic outline of a plan, depending on flashbacks to insert any necessary advance planning, makes for a game where every session feels like an episode of a TV show.

Which is, of course, perfect for a setting that actually comes from a TV show.

Scum and Villainy, despite some effectively filed off serial numbers, is pretty explicit about the three TV shows it attempts to recreate: Star Wars Rebels, Firefly and Cowboy Bebop.  And while I haven't tried the other two, it runs Firefly pretty much straight out of the box.

The one small tweak I make is that the Mystic playbook (clearly meant for playing Jedi) stays in the box.  For the short campaign I let one player who wanted to play a psychic swap out the initial special ability on his playbook for an appropriate one off the Mystic sheet.  For convention one-shots I don't use it at all.

Scum and Villainy is the system that I will be running Firefly games in for the foreseeable future.

What it lacks, though, is the kind of supplemental material that the licensed games come with.  And to my mind, one of the best add-ons for playing Firefly in Scum and Villainy is Firefly: The Game.

It's a pretty hefty purchase if you aren't already a board gamer, but if you can justify the expense it's a superb resource.  The main game comes with a fold-out map of the core and border planets (the White Sun, Red Sun and Georgia systems) and the expansions add the rim (Blue Sun and Kalidasa).  And it also comes with a giant stack of adventure seeds.  Grab a few cards off the Mission decks and you're sure to find a job for your crew.  A draw from the Misbehave deck should give you some ideas for the kind of challenges they need to overcome.  The planet decks are full of interesting NPCs and useful bits of equipment.

Since I found Scum and Villainy...
You can't take the sky from me.