We didn't fight the remorhaz in the end. We left Tonk and Taint to keep an eye on things, and the enchantress teleported the rest of us back into the city for the wedding.
I got given all these flowers to wear. They're lovely, aren't they? Although they won't last long. And I got a little gift bag with some strange sweets inside. Some people got better gift bags though, with silver rings inside. Aunold and me checked one out, and it was definitely magic. Abduration, so probably some kind of protection. We assumed we would find out what soon enough.
The bride and groom appeared, but didn't touch each other. They didn't even kiss, which seemed odd for a wedding. We started up a chant in the crowd, but couldn't persuade them. We weren't surprised when we found out that it wasn't them at all, but a projection of them. The actual bride and groom were still inside the brothel.
So definitely a witch.
Then these two dragons showed up, both about the size of a horse, and froze everything. Lots of people died, although not the people wearing the silver rings so they must have been for protection from cold. We could use a few of those on winter nights, although they don't seem to be very well made and probably won't last to the next day.
Aunold and me tried to save people by herding them into the brothel, and while the guards were reluctant, we did manage to save some of them while Turgut and Vared killed the dragons (which may have actually been frost drakes, now I come to think of it - not enough legs.)
Amazingly enough, the drakes managed to kill just enough members of the city council for Lord Vexil to be able to be in control. This seems like a terrible way to run anything, let alone a city. But I don't understand how it works. Lord Vexil is also claiming that Ralsoth the warlord is massing an army to march on Gallia, which we're pretty certain is not the case. What would we want with this stupid city when we have the Greenwood? But then, maybe Lord Vexil wants the Greenwood?
All this politics stuff is making my head hurt, especially since it's all being talked about in Common, which I've only just learned to speak. At least Mittens understands me.
Sunday, 5 January 2020
Saturday, 4 January 2020
Ramos Reportage, episode 2: Taking On Trinity
The team decided they needed to do something about Trinity, the organisation who were trying to kidnap/brainwash/murder their netrunner. They came up with a plan to discredit the organisation's leader. Marlon Brandroid used his impressive disguise skills to dress up as the leader, and Rolando filmed a fake candid recording of him saying all kinds of insulting things. Then, of course, they had to actually get the recording out to Trinity's followers. Their own pirate station was not going to cut it. They concluded the only solution was to break into Trinity's local HQ and broadcast it from there.
Leaving Virtue behind to handle the remote disabling of the security systems, Requiem drove everyone to the HQ. They entered through the fire escape by leaping from the neighbouring building (a fairly easy feat when 3/5 team members were wearing MA16 Corvette cyber legs) and found themselves in the staff kitchen.
Requiem ventured out first, finding a single security guard who was easily intimidated with an Arno to the back of his head. She waved in the rest of the team, who began breaking into the broadcasting studio. Then the guard started trying to attract help by making noise, and Requiem decided if he was going to make noise then she might as well also make noise and shot him in the head.
Rolando and Marlon (who for reasons best known to himself had decided to be Ping the Merciless for this particular raid) took out the staff in the studio and got started on their broadcast. Quinton and Requiem headed for the stairs and took out the remaining guards as they attempted to climb the stairs (with Requiem taking full autofire but surviving thanks to metal gear).
Virtue warned the team that trauma team cards had been activated and they should get out fast. With the broadcast complete, Rolando grabbed some useful looking equipment and they all left via the fire escape.
Requiem drove them away in a civilised and non-dramatic fashion. Nevertheless, they were still stopped at a police checkpoint. Fortunately Ricky was in the passenger seat (Requiem liked him sitting there because he made the cab smell nice) and he had no problem charming the police officer into letting them go about their business after giving her his ICQ number.
Leaving Virtue behind to handle the remote disabling of the security systems, Requiem drove everyone to the HQ. They entered through the fire escape by leaping from the neighbouring building (a fairly easy feat when 3/5 team members were wearing MA16 Corvette cyber legs) and found themselves in the staff kitchen.
Requiem ventured out first, finding a single security guard who was easily intimidated with an Arno to the back of his head. She waved in the rest of the team, who began breaking into the broadcasting studio. Then the guard started trying to attract help by making noise, and Requiem decided if he was going to make noise then she might as well also make noise and shot him in the head.
Rolando and Marlon (who for reasons best known to himself had decided to be Ping the Merciless for this particular raid) took out the staff in the studio and got started on their broadcast. Quinton and Requiem headed for the stairs and took out the remaining guards as they attempted to climb the stairs (with Requiem taking full autofire but surviving thanks to metal gear).
Virtue warned the team that trauma team cards had been activated and they should get out fast. With the broadcast complete, Rolando grabbed some useful looking equipment and they all left via the fire escape.
Requiem drove them away in a civilised and non-dramatic fashion. Nevertheless, they were still stopped at a police checkpoint. Fortunately Ricky was in the passenger seat (Requiem liked him sitting there because he made the cab smell nice) and he had no problem charming the police officer into letting them go about their business after giving her his ICQ number.
Wednesday, 1 January 2020
Ramos Reportage, episode 1: A New Story
What better way to start 2020 than with the write-ups of our last game of Cyberpunk 2020?
A couple of points to note about this campaign:
Some of the group have owned this game for a very long time. They know how to min-max. Accordingly, all of these characters are heavily min-maxed.
We have a house rule where if you roll a critical, or see someone else roll a critical, whether it's a hit or a miss, you gain improvement points equal to the level of the crit. Bear in mind that roughly one in five rolls result in some kind of critical - especially where fight scenes are concerned.
The cast:
Together they run a pirate radio station in Night City, with Rolando providing the credibility and Ricky and Marlon doing the more presentation type stuff, while Quinton and Requiem do their best to keep everyone alive. The team mascot is Tiny, Quinton's pet chihuahua, who's been heavily cyber enhanced to allow him to carry a shoulder mounted minigun.
The team were hired by a man called Michael Weathers to take their pirate radio station into an area on the edge of the combat zone and start reporting on the city's seedy underbelly to try to bring more police presence into the area. They were supplied with a base (an old garage), a netrunner called Virtue, and the necessary broadcasting equipment to get their stories out there.
The team had settled into their new home with only a few hiccups (Ricky had a pheromone implant that made him even sexier than usual, leading to some incidents) and were starting to look into the local gangs in search of a story when there was a knock on the door. A group of religious types who hated cyberware and the net, who were there for Virtue who had previously been part of their organisation.
They were armed. Requiem only had one response for people showing up at her house armed and trying to hurt her people and it involved two Arnos.
The resulting fight was...embarrassing. Sure, the gang of religious weirdos were dispatched fairly quickly and did very little damage to anyone. However, by the end of the fight, Marlon had shot Rolando in the face, and Requiem had shot both Ricky and herself.
Everyone learned a lot about how not to use handguns that day.
A couple of points to note about this campaign:
Some of the group have owned this game for a very long time. They know how to min-max. Accordingly, all of these characters are heavily min-maxed.
We have a house rule where if you roll a critical, or see someone else roll a critical, whether it's a hit or a miss, you gain improvement points equal to the level of the crit. Bear in mind that roughly one in five rolls result in some kind of critical - especially where fight scenes are concerned.
The cast:
- Ricky Six (Rocker) - celebrity podcaster, naturally handsome and charismatic, has devoted most of his cyberware to looking cool.
- Quinton Smith (Medtech) - a borg doctor whose ambition is to eventually replace the entire team's body parts with cyberware.
- Requiem (Solo) - equipped with pretty much every piece of defensive cyberware possible, dual wielding Arno handguns.
- Marlon Brandroid (Nomad) - an actor committed to taking on a new role every few days. Very much a method actor.
- Rolando Ramos (Media) - a news anchor more interested in getting a good story out there and fully willing to make up that good story if necessary.
Together they run a pirate radio station in Night City, with Rolando providing the credibility and Ricky and Marlon doing the more presentation type stuff, while Quinton and Requiem do their best to keep everyone alive. The team mascot is Tiny, Quinton's pet chihuahua, who's been heavily cyber enhanced to allow him to carry a shoulder mounted minigun.
The team were hired by a man called Michael Weathers to take their pirate radio station into an area on the edge of the combat zone and start reporting on the city's seedy underbelly to try to bring more police presence into the area. They were supplied with a base (an old garage), a netrunner called Virtue, and the necessary broadcasting equipment to get their stories out there.
The team had settled into their new home with only a few hiccups (Ricky had a pheromone implant that made him even sexier than usual, leading to some incidents) and were starting to look into the local gangs in search of a story when there was a knock on the door. A group of religious types who hated cyberware and the net, who were there for Virtue who had previously been part of their organisation.
They were armed. Requiem only had one response for people showing up at her house armed and trying to hurt her people and it involved two Arnos.
The resulting fight was...embarrassing. Sure, the gang of religious weirdos were dispatched fairly quickly and did very little damage to anyone. However, by the end of the fight, Marlon had shot Rolando in the face, and Requiem had shot both Ricky and herself.
Everyone learned a lot about how not to use handguns that day.
Monday, 30 December 2019
An unusually epic game
Yesterday I played a nine-hour game of D&D 5e with eight players.
It's part of an ongoing campaign with very irregular meet-ups. This was my second session. My character is an arcane tricker rogue forest gnome called Marian - I believe I was thinking about Maid Marian and her Merry Men when I created her.
Rather than a full write-up, I've just done some edited highlights...
What impressed me most is that D&D 5e can actually handle an 8 player game. Part of it is the highly structured combat, combined with the GM using combat order markers on the GM screen, which meant we could not only see whose turn it was but also see how many people there were to go before our next turn so we could be prepared. I thoroughly recommend these for any game using initiative order, even if it's just slips of paper with the character names hung off the GM screen. Every game I've played with them has been better for it.
It's part of an ongoing campaign with very irregular meet-ups. This was my second session. My character is an arcane tricker rogue forest gnome called Marian - I believe I was thinking about Maid Marian and her Merry Men when I created her.
Rather than a full write-up, I've just done some edited highlights...
D&D 5e game about to start. 8 players. No idea who anyone is, IC or OC. Should we do name badges?
My character sheet has gone missing but fortunately I have a copy on my phone. Fifth edition character app is excellent. But you can't write the other characters' names on the back.
Currently rolling to see what happened on the journey to our current location. Thanks to a number of failed rolls we have visited an orc brothel, got on the wrong side of an elf gang, and are being pursued by an angry badger.
The badger has caught up with us. It's an angry MUTANT badger. It's trying to eat me! It's fine. The dragonborn has my back.
Now engaged in an epic battle with some giant crabs, unhappy that we ate their friends for breakfast. I am now using one of the half orcs as an artillery platform, having remembered that I can cast fire bolt.
This boat has a safety rail. I find this immensely suspicious. Since when has anything health and safety related existed in D&D? The wizard is making friends with the boat. It's working better than I expected.
I'm starting to think this boat is evil. Just saved a half orc from sirens with a minor illusion. Now back to the orc brothel for a long rest. I hope they'll accept the loan of an unseen servant and some prestidigitation as payment. Bast is not impressed with our performance.
"Oi, Fenris! Fetch!" We are now on driftwood, floating towards some rocks, where a bunch of sirens are waiting. Damn.
What impressed me most is that D&D 5e can actually handle an 8 player game. Part of it is the highly structured combat, combined with the GM using combat order markers on the GM screen, which meant we could not only see whose turn it was but also see how many people there were to go before our next turn so we could be prepared. I thoroughly recommend these for any game using initiative order, even if it's just slips of paper with the character names hung off the GM screen. Every game I've played with them has been better for it.
Thursday, 26 December 2019
The Everlasting Reviewed
Generally I'd like to play a game before I review it, but realistically this one's never getting to the table. So here goes.
I've recently been introduced to the concept of heartbreaker RPGs. Games that were clearly a labour of love by someone trying to improve on some aspect of their favourite game.
I suspect most people who've played World of Darkness games will at some point have had the same thought: since all these games have the same setting and system, could we combine them all together to make one great big awesome game with vampires, werewolves, mages and changelings all together.
Those who've tried it will know that the answer to this is no. Changeling magic is embarrassingly underpowered compared to mages. Vampires are completely incapable of getting along with werewolves. I've played in an online chat and forum based game that wasn't a disaster, but only because the four games were ultimately kept pretty distinct with only minimal crossover.
The Everlasting is a heartbreaker intended to fix this. While it's split into four individual games, each of them is compatible with all the others by design, while at the same time still working as a standalone. The setting is the Secret World, parallel to the real world but full of magic and supernatural beings. It's pretty similar to the World of Darkness, obviously, but the wider variety of player character types forces it to expand further.
The four books each focus on a specific area of the Secret World. The Book of the Unliving has the vampires you'd expect, subdivided into different types depending on bloodline. What's particularly interesting here is that the author has done his research, and the bloodlines are all based on different vampire myths from around the world. It gives them a grounding in the real world that I found was missing from Vampire: The Masquerade.
As well as vampires, this book also has revenants and ghuls, again based on real world mythology, and giving a bit of variety to the creation of your undead horror-hunger character as you find yourself needing to feed on human flesh or human life force rather than blood.
The Book of the Light introduces a variety of divine character types. You can play an angel, a minor deity called a daeva, or a grail knight, which brings in Christian theology, a whole bunch of Pagan mythology and the legends of King Arthur. For some reason this book also includes werewolves, which stick rather closer to traditional tales than the complexity of the WoD werewolf.
The Book of the Spirits provides options for sin-eating gargoyles, Native American inspired manitou, and spirit possessed people. The Book of the Fantastical has the faeries, dwarves and orcs you'd expect.
The meta-fiction doesn't get in the way too much, just stating that a recent event called the death-knell (which coincides with the Chernobyl incident) has released a bunch of demons onto the earth. From there you're pretty much free to create your own story. Or rather to...no, we'll come to that later. For now, I'll just note that as modern fantasy settings go, this one is incredibly detailed and very well researched. It's obvious how much love the author put into this, and it's got loads of potential for telling interesting stories.
For this section I'll be primarily looking at The Book of the Undead, as a lot of this is repeated pretty much verbatim in each book.
It starts out well enough. You've got attributes and skills, which determine how many dice you have in your dice pool...
Wait.
This game doesn't have one system. It has five.
System 1 is your standard WoD style dice pool. Roll x dice, count successes, ones cancel out successes. The biggest problem here is that it uses d12s. As any RPG enthusiast will know, dice come in standard sets. The 7 dice polyhedral set, blocks of twelve standard or thirty-six small d6s, or a set of ten d10s. d12s just aren't something your average gamer owns in significant quantities, unless it's part of a truly massive set of dice. I've been a gamer for about 15 years now, and I have a whole bag of d6s and d10s, a bunch of specialist dice like fate dice, but only four d12s because they're part of the polyhedral sets I own. Sorting out dice for this game is going to mean having to buy a bunch of individual dice.
Not that this matters, though, because the system that the author actually wants you to use is card draws. Never mind that drawing 5 cards from a deck has radically different probabilities than rolling 5d12, plus there's a whole different thing that happens if you draw a King. Still, you probably own a standard deck of playing cards, so there's that.
There are also rules for using percentile dice, because that's totally comparable to a dice pool, and for complete freeform with no dice or cards, simply comparing your combined stat to a difficulty modifier to see how plausible something is.
And then there's tarot, which is pretty much the same as the standard card draw except you all have to have your own deck because you're going to start by drawing three of the major arcana and use them over the course of the game to steer events. This I actually like, as it gives the potential for narratively interesting things. The bit where it tells you the proper uses for the cards, and how players should be punished or shut down for using them in other ways, not so much.
So this is all completely bonkers. You're being clearly pushed in the direction of card draws over dice, but at the same time it says that each player can use whichever system they prefer. So it's entirely possible to end up with all five going on at the same table.
The game is trying to be all things to all players. As a result it's just an incoherent mess.
But leaving that aside, we have character creation.
Here the book does something right. A brief, step by step summary of character creation, with chapter references for the different 'races' within the game. It's succinct, easy to follow, and should have been front and centre instead of being inexplicably relegated to a set of sidebars, but nevertheless it's excellent.
Characters are built on a point-buy system, except when they're not. Number of points are given for each section, but there's also an option to do a card draw, do some maths with the result, and use that instead, should you want to make things considerably more difficult for yourself and run the risk of wildly imbalanced PCs, which given that the whole point of this game is to create a set of PCs that don't have the wild power imbalances of the different WoD games seems like a strange approach to take.
Card draws aside, the character creation is really focussed on creating a character who's more than just a set of stats, giving you a set of questions to consider, and a selection of example beliefs, outlooks, passions and other aspects to really flesh them out. It fits the kind of game this is intended to be.
One thing that's pretty innovative for a game that originally came out in 1997 is the destiny and backlash points. Destiny points work like fate points in Fate or bennies in Savage Worlds. They can be awarded for good roleplaying, and are used to improve rolls or alter events in the PC's favour. Backlash points are used by the GM to turn successes into failures or cause trouble, and are awarded when the PCs do evil things with magic. There's a certain amount of accountancy required, as each PC has their own individual pool of backlash points, but it's a workable system.
Things turn wonky again when we get to the combat system. Every character has a speed rating. This does not determine initiative order, however, but tells you which turns within a combat round you can act upon. A round has 10 turns, and a character with, e.g. speed 4, can act on turns 3, 5, 8 and 10. Which could be just about bearable, if it wasn't for the fact that different actions take different numbers of turns. Then there's opposed roles, difficulty modifiers (just in case you really need to have a sword fight while swimming) and a set of base difficulties for different weapon types, because if you thought this was going to be like WoD with a set target number to beat on your dice pool, you are sorely mistaken.
Naturally there is also a page of rules for freeform combat, plus instructions on how to make this involve far more maths than necessary. At this point, I've had enough.
Physically, The Everlasting is in standard large RPG size. Unusually for large books, they're all paperbacks (although I understand later editions were available in hardback). The covers have nicely detailed colour paintings. The internal art is all black and white line art, nothing special but all perfectly servicable and quite respectable for something this old. All except the Book of the Fantastical have nicely decorated page borders (and that book is a bit of an oddity, having basically been produced as a fan project when for some reason it wasn't going to get released).
But now we get to the actual text. And if you thought the rules were kind of nutty, this is the point where the game goes totally off the rails.
I have a pet peeve in RPGs, and it's games that use their own terminology instead of industry standard terms. Everyone knows that unless you're playing D&D (in which case you have the DM or dungeon master), the person running the game is the GM, or game master. There's no need to mess with that. And yet many games do, whether it's World of Darkness with Storyteller, Call of Cthulhu with Keeper, or Apocalypse World with MC.
And yet, while I don't like it, I can see why they did it. WoD was trying to demonstrate that it was a different type of game to D&D, one focussed more on stories than killing monsters. CoC, which also renamed PCs to Investigators, was trying to tell you something about what kind of character and story the game involved. AW was trying to indicate how the GM plays a rather different role in that game to what they do in a more conventional RPG.
The Everlasting, however, has absolutely no excuse for what it does with standard RPG terminology. The GM is now a Guide, and the PCs are Protagonists and that's only the start of it, because this game doesn't have rules, it has guidelines, it doesn't have campaigns, it has Odysseys, and lest you were thinking this is some kind of game you're playing, it's not an RPG, it's an interactive legendmaking experience.
Mind you, to know what you're in for on this front, you only have to look at the credits page. Rather than the usual writers, artists and designers, you will instead find credits for things like Limner of Tome Cover, Illumination Administers, and Wise and Noble Oracles.
At this point you won't be surprised to find that each book contains multiple lexicons: a general one, one for the rules (sorry, guidelines), and one for each different type of character, erm, protagonist, as apparently absolutely nobody in the Secret World can just use normal words for anything.
And it spells magick with a k.
There's a few pages of fiction at the start of each book, and as game fiction goes it's OK - although somehow I thought that the one from the Book of the Unliving might actually be about unliving characters, rather than focussing mostly on daevas.
Credit where credit's due, there is a nice section about how to construct stories which translates pretty well to any RPG. In accordance with how this book normally works, it's relegated to a sidebar.
And finally, the bit where the game, OK, legendmaking experience isn't just off the rails, it's off the cliff and into the sea. Chapter 13: Legendmaking.
To truly do justice to how completely batshit this chapter is, I'd have to reproduce the entire thing. As it is, I'll just share a couple of things.
Multiple pages are given over to the subject of lucid dreaming, with explanations of why you should, and instructions on how to achieve it. All this is somehow supposed to help you...honestly I'm not sure. I think you're supposed to do your own story in your sleep? It doesn't seem to have any link to the rest of the book.
And then there's the ritual. This game genuinely includes an opening and closing ceremony for game...legendmaking sessions. Everyone has lines to say, and significantly coloured candles are to be lit. A sample:
Guide:
Let us walk now, past the shadows of the flame that cast upon the cave's wall, beyond our mundane world. Our protagonists shall be our representatives. They shall symbolize a deeper truth than our everyday activities. Let us close our eyes.
There is more to reality than what we see. More than what we hear. Can feel it? Look with your imagination. Listen for the spirits in the air.
Any Single Participant:
And so it begins.
If I tried this with my regular gaming group, I think I'd be eaten along with the takeaway.
There are some great ideas in this game. The setting is exceptionally well researched and full of potential. But the whole thing is so bogged down by both its desperate attempts to appeal to everyone and the layers upon layers of jargon, mysticism and overall pretentiousness that the idea of actually taking it off the shelf and playing it is unthinkable.
Someone liked it, enough to get the Book of the Fantastical out there when it wasn't going to happen, plus the two add-on books that I don't own. The setting has enough going for it that you could probably extract the character types and import them into a different game engine and end up with a half decent game.
But as it is, it will remain, forever, a heartbreaker.
Although doubtless it would have its own word for that.
Setting
I've recently been introduced to the concept of heartbreaker RPGs. Games that were clearly a labour of love by someone trying to improve on some aspect of their favourite game.
I suspect most people who've played World of Darkness games will at some point have had the same thought: since all these games have the same setting and system, could we combine them all together to make one great big awesome game with vampires, werewolves, mages and changelings all together.
Those who've tried it will know that the answer to this is no. Changeling magic is embarrassingly underpowered compared to mages. Vampires are completely incapable of getting along with werewolves. I've played in an online chat and forum based game that wasn't a disaster, but only because the four games were ultimately kept pretty distinct with only minimal crossover.
The Everlasting is a heartbreaker intended to fix this. While it's split into four individual games, each of them is compatible with all the others by design, while at the same time still working as a standalone. The setting is the Secret World, parallel to the real world but full of magic and supernatural beings. It's pretty similar to the World of Darkness, obviously, but the wider variety of player character types forces it to expand further.
The four books each focus on a specific area of the Secret World. The Book of the Unliving has the vampires you'd expect, subdivided into different types depending on bloodline. What's particularly interesting here is that the author has done his research, and the bloodlines are all based on different vampire myths from around the world. It gives them a grounding in the real world that I found was missing from Vampire: The Masquerade.
As well as vampires, this book also has revenants and ghuls, again based on real world mythology, and giving a bit of variety to the creation of your undead horror-hunger character as you find yourself needing to feed on human flesh or human life force rather than blood.
The Book of the Light introduces a variety of divine character types. You can play an angel, a minor deity called a daeva, or a grail knight, which brings in Christian theology, a whole bunch of Pagan mythology and the legends of King Arthur. For some reason this book also includes werewolves, which stick rather closer to traditional tales than the complexity of the WoD werewolf.
The Book of the Spirits provides options for sin-eating gargoyles, Native American inspired manitou, and spirit possessed people. The Book of the Fantastical has the faeries, dwarves and orcs you'd expect.
The meta-fiction doesn't get in the way too much, just stating that a recent event called the death-knell (which coincides with the Chernobyl incident) has released a bunch of demons onto the earth. From there you're pretty much free to create your own story. Or rather to...no, we'll come to that later. For now, I'll just note that as modern fantasy settings go, this one is incredibly detailed and very well researched. It's obvious how much love the author put into this, and it's got loads of potential for telling interesting stories.
System
For this section I'll be primarily looking at The Book of the Undead, as a lot of this is repeated pretty much verbatim in each book.
It starts out well enough. You've got attributes and skills, which determine how many dice you have in your dice pool...
Wait.
This game doesn't have one system. It has five.
System 1 is your standard WoD style dice pool. Roll x dice, count successes, ones cancel out successes. The biggest problem here is that it uses d12s. As any RPG enthusiast will know, dice come in standard sets. The 7 dice polyhedral set, blocks of twelve standard or thirty-six small d6s, or a set of ten d10s. d12s just aren't something your average gamer owns in significant quantities, unless it's part of a truly massive set of dice. I've been a gamer for about 15 years now, and I have a whole bag of d6s and d10s, a bunch of specialist dice like fate dice, but only four d12s because they're part of the polyhedral sets I own. Sorting out dice for this game is going to mean having to buy a bunch of individual dice.
Not that this matters, though, because the system that the author actually wants you to use is card draws. Never mind that drawing 5 cards from a deck has radically different probabilities than rolling 5d12, plus there's a whole different thing that happens if you draw a King. Still, you probably own a standard deck of playing cards, so there's that.
There are also rules for using percentile dice, because that's totally comparable to a dice pool, and for complete freeform with no dice or cards, simply comparing your combined stat to a difficulty modifier to see how plausible something is.
And then there's tarot, which is pretty much the same as the standard card draw except you all have to have your own deck because you're going to start by drawing three of the major arcana and use them over the course of the game to steer events. This I actually like, as it gives the potential for narratively interesting things. The bit where it tells you the proper uses for the cards, and how players should be punished or shut down for using them in other ways, not so much.
So this is all completely bonkers. You're being clearly pushed in the direction of card draws over dice, but at the same time it says that each player can use whichever system they prefer. So it's entirely possible to end up with all five going on at the same table.
The game is trying to be all things to all players. As a result it's just an incoherent mess.
But leaving that aside, we have character creation.
Here the book does something right. A brief, step by step summary of character creation, with chapter references for the different 'races' within the game. It's succinct, easy to follow, and should have been front and centre instead of being inexplicably relegated to a set of sidebars, but nevertheless it's excellent.
Characters are built on a point-buy system, except when they're not. Number of points are given for each section, but there's also an option to do a card draw, do some maths with the result, and use that instead, should you want to make things considerably more difficult for yourself and run the risk of wildly imbalanced PCs, which given that the whole point of this game is to create a set of PCs that don't have the wild power imbalances of the different WoD games seems like a strange approach to take.
Card draws aside, the character creation is really focussed on creating a character who's more than just a set of stats, giving you a set of questions to consider, and a selection of example beliefs, outlooks, passions and other aspects to really flesh them out. It fits the kind of game this is intended to be.
One thing that's pretty innovative for a game that originally came out in 1997 is the destiny and backlash points. Destiny points work like fate points in Fate or bennies in Savage Worlds. They can be awarded for good roleplaying, and are used to improve rolls or alter events in the PC's favour. Backlash points are used by the GM to turn successes into failures or cause trouble, and are awarded when the PCs do evil things with magic. There's a certain amount of accountancy required, as each PC has their own individual pool of backlash points, but it's a workable system.
Things turn wonky again when we get to the combat system. Every character has a speed rating. This does not determine initiative order, however, but tells you which turns within a combat round you can act upon. A round has 10 turns, and a character with, e.g. speed 4, can act on turns 3, 5, 8 and 10. Which could be just about bearable, if it wasn't for the fact that different actions take different numbers of turns. Then there's opposed roles, difficulty modifiers (just in case you really need to have a sword fight while swimming) and a set of base difficulties for different weapon types, because if you thought this was going to be like WoD with a set target number to beat on your dice pool, you are sorely mistaken.
Naturally there is also a page of rules for freeform combat, plus instructions on how to make this involve far more maths than necessary. At this point, I've had enough.
Style and Substance
Physically, The Everlasting is in standard large RPG size. Unusually for large books, they're all paperbacks (although I understand later editions were available in hardback). The covers have nicely detailed colour paintings. The internal art is all black and white line art, nothing special but all perfectly servicable and quite respectable for something this old. All except the Book of the Fantastical have nicely decorated page borders (and that book is a bit of an oddity, having basically been produced as a fan project when for some reason it wasn't going to get released).
But now we get to the actual text. And if you thought the rules were kind of nutty, this is the point where the game goes totally off the rails.
I have a pet peeve in RPGs, and it's games that use their own terminology instead of industry standard terms. Everyone knows that unless you're playing D&D (in which case you have the DM or dungeon master), the person running the game is the GM, or game master. There's no need to mess with that. And yet many games do, whether it's World of Darkness with Storyteller, Call of Cthulhu with Keeper, or Apocalypse World with MC.
And yet, while I don't like it, I can see why they did it. WoD was trying to demonstrate that it was a different type of game to D&D, one focussed more on stories than killing monsters. CoC, which also renamed PCs to Investigators, was trying to tell you something about what kind of character and story the game involved. AW was trying to indicate how the GM plays a rather different role in that game to what they do in a more conventional RPG.
The Everlasting, however, has absolutely no excuse for what it does with standard RPG terminology. The GM is now a Guide, and the PCs are Protagonists and that's only the start of it, because this game doesn't have rules, it has guidelines, it doesn't have campaigns, it has Odysseys, and lest you were thinking this is some kind of game you're playing, it's not an RPG, it's an interactive legendmaking experience.
Mind you, to know what you're in for on this front, you only have to look at the credits page. Rather than the usual writers, artists and designers, you will instead find credits for things like Limner of Tome Cover, Illumination Administers, and Wise and Noble Oracles.
At this point you won't be surprised to find that each book contains multiple lexicons: a general one, one for the rules (sorry, guidelines), and one for each different type of character, erm, protagonist, as apparently absolutely nobody in the Secret World can just use normal words for anything.
And it spells magick with a k.
There's a few pages of fiction at the start of each book, and as game fiction goes it's OK - although somehow I thought that the one from the Book of the Unliving might actually be about unliving characters, rather than focussing mostly on daevas.
Credit where credit's due, there is a nice section about how to construct stories which translates pretty well to any RPG. In accordance with how this book normally works, it's relegated to a sidebar.
And finally, the bit where the game, OK, legendmaking experience isn't just off the rails, it's off the cliff and into the sea. Chapter 13: Legendmaking.
To truly do justice to how completely batshit this chapter is, I'd have to reproduce the entire thing. As it is, I'll just share a couple of things.
Multiple pages are given over to the subject of lucid dreaming, with explanations of why you should, and instructions on how to achieve it. All this is somehow supposed to help you...honestly I'm not sure. I think you're supposed to do your own story in your sleep? It doesn't seem to have any link to the rest of the book.
And then there's the ritual. This game genuinely includes an opening and closing ceremony for game...legendmaking sessions. Everyone has lines to say, and significantly coloured candles are to be lit. A sample:
Guide:
Let us walk now, past the shadows of the flame that cast upon the cave's wall, beyond our mundane world. Our protagonists shall be our representatives. They shall symbolize a deeper truth than our everyday activities. Let us close our eyes.
There is more to reality than what we see. More than what we hear. Can feel it? Look with your imagination. Listen for the spirits in the air.
Any Single Participant:
And so it begins.
If I tried this with my regular gaming group, I think I'd be eaten along with the takeaway.
Summary
There are some great ideas in this game. The setting is exceptionally well researched and full of potential. But the whole thing is so bogged down by both its desperate attempts to appeal to everyone and the layers upon layers of jargon, mysticism and overall pretentiousness that the idea of actually taking it off the shelf and playing it is unthinkable.
Someone liked it, enough to get the Book of the Fantastical out there when it wasn't going to happen, plus the two add-on books that I don't own. The setting has enough going for it that you could probably extract the character types and import them into a different game engine and end up with a half decent game.
But as it is, it will remain, forever, a heartbreaker.
Although doubtless it would have its own word for that.
Tuesday, 24 December 2019
Playing Delta Green
Last night I played a playtest of a new Delta Green adventure, Black Thumb. Some thoughts:
Less great is the AV. We all logged in with our headsets, and in every case except mine, cameras. I could see and hear only one person. I was not the only one having problems. We rapidly gave up and switched to Google Hangouts for the AV, while still using Roll20 for everything else.
So my preference for online play remains Discord with a dice roller bot, unless you actually need a battle board.
I've only played it as one-offs, but would like to do a longer campaign some time. While its stats and skills system is nothing unusual, what really interests me is the bonds, and how you can lean on them to hold off insanity. The gradual damage you do to your relationships to try to keep your mind together is one of the most interesting parts of the game to me, and not one that you can do much with in a one-shot.
Not that that's made the one-shots any less fun. Delta Green remains my favourite Lovecraftian horror game. It takes the brilliant Call of Cthulhu and adds in a whole extra layer of conspiracies with a different style of characters.
(I also have an interest in serial killers, but my reading has been almost exclusively on British ones, who tend to be a bit different to American ones. Interesting stuff to compare.)
Not much else I can say without massive spoilers, but I did enjoy the way things built up to a climax, and the moments of humour especially earlier on before the real horror took hold. And I particularly liked the moment when [redacted] and the answers to a bunch of questions suddenly slotted into place, but at a moment when my character was absolutely unable to deal with any of that.
I lost seventeen sanity points over the course of the adventure, which I consider a win.
A Monday night well spent, and many thanks to Bud's RPG review for taking a chance on a random Twitter person he'd never met.
Roll20
I've never used Roll20 before. It seems to have the basics down - the screen where you can drop pictures, draw things, have a battle map, etc. all seems excellent, and the built in dice roller is great too.Less great is the AV. We all logged in with our headsets, and in every case except mine, cameras. I could see and hear only one person. I was not the only one having problems. We rapidly gave up and switched to Google Hangouts for the AV, while still using Roll20 for everything else.
So my preference for online play remains Discord with a dice roller bot, unless you actually need a battle board.
Delta Green
I absolutely love Delta Green. I grew up watching The X-Files, and while Delta Green's alien threat isn't quite the same, it brings me the same kind of joy.I've only played it as one-offs, but would like to do a longer campaign some time. While its stats and skills system is nothing unusual, what really interests me is the bonds, and how you can lean on them to hold off insanity. The gradual damage you do to your relationships to try to keep your mind together is one of the most interesting parts of the game to me, and not one that you can do much with in a one-shot.
Not that that's made the one-shots any less fun. Delta Green remains my favourite Lovecraftian horror game. It takes the brilliant Call of Cthulhu and adds in a whole extra layer of conspiracies with a different style of characters.
The Game
There's nothing like basing your scenario on something real to make it particularly uncomfortable. Serial killers and the Highway of Tears in Canada made for a great set-up, especially with a GM with a fascination with serial killers who knows how to make them feel authentic.(I also have an interest in serial killers, but my reading has been almost exclusively on British ones, who tend to be a bit different to American ones. Interesting stuff to compare.)
Not much else I can say without massive spoilers, but I did enjoy the way things built up to a climax, and the moments of humour especially earlier on before the real horror took hold. And I particularly liked the moment when [redacted] and the answers to a bunch of questions suddenly slotted into place, but at a moment when my character was absolutely unable to deal with any of that.
I lost seventeen sanity points over the course of the adventure, which I consider a win.
A Monday night well spent, and many thanks to Bud's RPG review for taking a chance on a random Twitter person he'd never met.
Monday, 23 December 2019
A Year in Gaming
2019 was the year when I decided that one weekly game was not enough. I joined the MK RPG club, went to three game days, played a couple of one-off games with the lovely people behind Pear of Geeks, and ran my first online game.
And there's still a week of the year to go so I might be able to fit one more in there.
To anyone suggesting that I have no life, I would counter that I've had at least twenty-one this year, and that's not counting the eight different LARP characters.
Run some Delta Green. The home group are deeply embedded in Pathfinder 2e right now, but hopefully they'll be up for a few weeks of X-files style investigation between campaigns.
Run a Liminal campaign. There's a bunch of pre-written adventures so I've got plenty of material to get started with even before I start writing my own stuff.
Write and publish some adventures of my own. Because I've run plenty of good games, and I should write that stuff down. If a scenario is good, there's no reason not to run it multiple times.
Finish my cyberpunk novel. Because the world is descending into a cyberpunk dystopia, and this might be my last chance to release it as sci-fi and not general fiction.
Games I've run this year:
- The Sprawl
- Scum and Villainy
- Liminal
Games I've played this year:
Campaigns
- Pathfinder 2e
- Coriolis
- D&D 5e
- Star Wars: Edge of the Empire
- Warhammer FRP 2e
- Night's Black Agents
- Blades in the Dark
One-offs
- Dungeon World
- Fiasco
- Ten Candles
- Trollbabe
- A Penny For My Thoughts
- Zombie World
- Delta Green
- The Shab-al-Hiri Roach
- Rapscallion
- Shadowrun
- The Code of Steam and Steel
- Blue Planet Recontact
- The Outhere
- Call of Cthulhu
And there's still a week of the year to go so I might be able to fit one more in there.
To anyone suggesting that I have no life, I would counter that I've had at least twenty-one this year, and that's not counting the eight different LARP characters.
Goals for next year:
Attend more conventions. I'll be doing the usual Concrete Cow and Spaghetti ConJunction, and have booked for the Dudley Bug Ball and the Northampton RPG day. Hopefully going to North Star and Owlbear as well.Run some Delta Green. The home group are deeply embedded in Pathfinder 2e right now, but hopefully they'll be up for a few weeks of X-files style investigation between campaigns.
Run a Liminal campaign. There's a bunch of pre-written adventures so I've got plenty of material to get started with even before I start writing my own stuff.
Write and publish some adventures of my own. Because I've run plenty of good games, and I should write that stuff down. If a scenario is good, there's no reason not to run it multiple times.
Finish my cyberpunk novel. Because the world is descending into a cyberpunk dystopia, and this might be my last chance to release it as sci-fi and not general fiction.
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