I’m not in the habit of posting every little upcoming RPG release, but I gotta take note when Dan Brereton announces a Nocturnals supplement for Mutants & Masterminds. Brereton is a pretty decent writer and a great artist. His full color painted style is way outside the comic mainstream, but man is it lovely. Nocturnals is his horror comic — there’ve been a few minis and graphic novels over the years.
Category: Gaming
What really amuses me about this review (warning: 100K GIF file) is how astoundingly accurate it is. I mean, yeah:
In general, the concept and imagination involved is stunning. However, much more work, refinement, and especially regulation and simplification is necessary before the game is managable. The scope is just too grand, while the referee is expected to do too much in relation to the players.
That’s the original three booklets in a nutshell.
WISH 34: Non-Standard Characters:
Do you prefer to build a character with a unique concept, or do you prefer a simple or more standard concept to start with?
I’m pretty prone to the unique concept. I like characters with an odd angle, or with weird hooks. The most “normal” character I’ve played in the last couple of years has been a half-orc barbarian, and even he was a trifle strange. He was on a quest to prove that half-orcs were a people, just like elves or dwarves or gnomes. Despite his unattractiveness, he might have wound up founding a church or something. I’m not the kind of guy who delights in bringing out the unique aspects of the standard character types, although I respect that tendency.
Mind you, I’m not the kind of person who plays mind flayer PCs. It’s useless to be offbeat if you don’t have the ability to interact with the rest of the PCs on a long term basis. Being weird is not a license to make other players unhappy. The oddities tend to be more psychological than physical, since those are easier to adjust for party viability.
Do you find that your preference correlates with a preference for elaborate initial backgrounds or with background development in play?
Maybe. I tend to be a Develop At Start kind of a guy. I want interesting things to happen to my characters on a psychological level during the campaign, but I have a pretty firm idea of what the character is going to start out as. In order to enjoy the journey, though, the point at which I started from has to be firm.
Since I almost always play wonky characters, I almost always have the personalities set when I start playing, since the personality is usually the biggest wonkiness.
If you?re a GM, do you find unique-concept characters easy or hard to GM for?
Easy. They come with built in hooks. I don’t really think unique-concept characters covers munchkins, because those aren’t character concepts, those are collections of numbers. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference, in my experience. If they can’t give you a rational story as to why the half-ogre (or insect spirit, or right hand man of Alex Able) is going to be able to interact with the party, they’re likely munchkins.
Come to think of it, it seems to me that player willingness to overcome the obstacles inherent to weird characters and party viability is a good way to distinguish between munchkins and people who just want something offbeat. In my book, munchkins are both those people who want their PCs to be uber death machines, and those people who want their PCs to get all the spotlight — and forcing the rest of the party to accomodate their strange quirks is a way to get lots of spotlight time. Being the best in the world at swordfighting is, when you get right down to it, just a specialized form of spotlight hogging.
What about playing alongside them?
Again, not a problem for me, given the comments above.
After getting Sorcerer (which I will talk more about at some point) and reading Gibson’s new novel Pattern Recognition (ditto), I got all fired up to write up a little discussion of using the former to run a game set in the environment of the latter. Then Rob MacDougall beat me to it, so I just posted my thoughts in the thread he started. Man, I’m getting some good gaming out here.
Weird gaming idea of the day:
You hand out character sheets that are folded up like origami, and instruct the players not to unfold them. They start out with the stats and skills and self-knowledge that are visible on the outside. At various points in play, you instruct them to make certain unfolds. New information is thus revealed, and put into play.
If you wanted to randomize things a little, you could use a cootie catcher, but I’m not sure the associations are right.
I think you’d want to use the concept for an amnesiac game, of course. Looking beyond that, though, there are other possibilities. It’d be an interesting way to simulate bursts of energy, maybe… hm. Actually, in some ways this is just a weird mutation of the click-base concept. The other primary influences are Sandman: The Map of Halal and a con game I played in once where we had a base character sheet for our stats, and an overlay character sheet which changed depending on which personality chip we plugged in.
If I knew origami I could develop this idea. Alas.
I went on a mini RPG binge this weekend, and wound up with quite a bit of good stuff, but the gem of the lot was Charnel Gods, by Scott Knipe. It’s a PDF supplement for Sorcerer, and it’s so good it prompted me to buy that game, but it stands perfectly well on its own; at five bucks, there’s no excuse not to buy it if you’ve got any interest in — but I’m getting ahead of myself and reaching for the conclusion already. Tsk.
So what is it? It’s an innovative and original take on the pulp fantasy genre. By pulp fantasy, I mean stories like Conan and Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane books, and Scorpion King on the lighter end of the genre. Charnel Gods is not light; it’s a grim world in which the heros bear the blasphemous Fell Weapons and battle the Nameless Ones, because the Old Gods are dead and can no longer fight. Magic is almost non-existent, with the exception of the Fell Weapons. The battleground — the world itself — is formed from the corpses of the gods, which are the only barrier between humanity and oblivion.
Not light at all.
The game is designed to be episodic. The heros are more fated than any White Wolf character, but the rules include a mechanism for inheritance; after each epoch ends, and each epoch will end, another will form atop the corpses of the gods and new heros will take up the Fell Weapons. This structure permits wide variation of genre inside the basic theme, and ameliorates feelings of futility, which is very elegant. Now that I’ve read it, it’s only natural that opening up the possibilities for the campaign also relieves the potential depression inherent in the setting, but I wouldn’t have thought of it on my own. Pay special attention to the maps of the sample epochs, by the by.
The balance of lost humanity (unavoidable for a bearer of a Fell Weapon) and impending doom of the epoch is masterful. The two downward trends are wholly separate and unrelated, except insofar as the Fell Weapons were created to battle that doom, which provides for excellent contrast. There are certain ambiguities about the setting which I won’t spoil, but which heighten that contrast. There’s a bit of the cliche in the ultimate weapons created to battle evil which corrupt the wielders, but I think that’s muted by the fact that the weapons weren’t created for humans. It doesn’t fly as a parable for nuclear weapons, for example.
That sort of elegance permeates the book. Another example: we all know players are gonna read the rulebook. So in Charnel Gods, knowledge of the Fell Weapons and the Old Gods and the rests is one of the things that separates heros (I should, perhaps, be saying “protagonists”) from the rank and file. Another: in Sorcerer, sorcerers can sense the Humanity level of other sorcerers. So in Charnel Gods, there’s a really good reason why the heros would want to do this. The economical synergy between rules and setting is very impressive.
As I mentioned, the game’s intended for use with Sorcerer. I think you could use it as a standalone, with whatever ruleset your heart desires. This may be blaspemy, but you could even pound D20 into working — perhaps by using something like the rules in Mutants and Masterminds. I don’t think stock D20 would work; since Charnel Gods is a low magic world, most of the D20 balancing methods would be absent. Something like Over the Edge would be great. You’d just need to include some sort of Humanity mechanism, since that’s essential to the setting.
It’s five bucks. The layout and art are really nice. I’d have paid $15 bucks for it and not felt ripped off. Go buy it.
I was musing about pulp settings the other day. Off the top of my head:
It’s the 1930s, and the Romany have taken to the skies. After the Hindenburg disaster, the public shied away from hydrogen dirigibles; but Paulo Pettersen, the sort of engineering genius who comes along once in a generation, believed he could make the vessels safe enough. What’s more, he convinced quite a few others of the same, and la! Before anyone realized it, the Romany flew, rising up above Europe in first a dozen and then a hundred great silvery balloons.
The second part of his genius idea, you see, was to provide a place for the gazhe to do the things they couldn’t do down below. Gambling, women, privacy — and luxury, for those who had the money to spare. Why not? If Bugsy Siegel could build a paradise out of desert, surely the Romany could build one out of air.
It worked, and within a few years the skies of Europe were the playgrounds of the well-off… and the hunting grounds of the political services of Europe’s nations. After all, the dirigibles were a much more convenient neutral ground than Morocco.
Paulo oversaw it all with a benevolent smile, which hid a worried frown. The inspiration for the flying nation was not his alone, as it happened; his wife, Zigana, was a seer. It was she who’d guided Paulo to success — and it was she who’d foreseen the coming clouds.
All historical and cultural inaccuracies are mine (and yeah, I slipped some dates here and there for the sake of fiction). In fact, anyone who takes anything in this as solid history should be gently mocked until cured of the habit.
OtherWorld Creations has, as it were, bitten the bullet: it’s the first D20 Modern scenario set in Iraq. Man, they gotta be hoping that when this sucker hits shelves it feels both relevant and not overly painful.
I guess stuff along these lines sells well enough, since Holistic Designs did well enough with Afghanistan D20 to warrant Somalia D20. Historically speaking, GDW made a mint on their Desert Shield Factbook, but lost most of it on their Gulf War Factbook. Loren Wiseman attributes the good sales on the former to being the only available book on the topic at the time. “The second was ‘just another Gulf War Book.’”
Bad taste? Enh, not inherently tasteless. Depends on how it’s done. I’d find an adventure in which the PCs bayonet hordes of Iraqis to be tasteless, but I’d find an adventure in which the PCs bayonet hordes of hobbits to be kind of tasteless too. More so the former, admittedly, since it’d more directly cater to real world unpleasantness.
But really, you just never know when you’re doing modern scenarios. A few years ago, Greg Stolze wrote an excellent adventure called “Fly to Heaven” in which a terrorist attempts to crash a commercial airline into the middle of Chicago. There’s some Stolze commentary on the whole question here.
Actually, it occurs to me that since the book has been announced, there’s nothing stopping me from saying “Hey, look at this, I wrote part of it.” So there you are.
Yes, I am a diehard wrestling fan. I have an old LJ post about this which I think I will dig up soon.