Rules-lite Savage Worlds: It works for us

This month marks the one-year anniversary of my Savage Worlds fantasy sandbox, Autumn Frontiers. We're about 14 sessions in, which averages out to about one session per month—not too bad, but a little less frequently than I would have liked. Oh well, we're all adults with busy lives, so I'm not gonna turn up my nose at 14 substantive sessions in a year. And did I mention that this is the longest-running game I've ever GMed?

Anyway, we're using Savage Worlds, and over the last year we've tinkered mightily with that system. Most of our modifications have been designed to speed up an already fast ruleset. That's one of my weaknesses as a GM—no system will ever be fast enough for me, because I live in mortal fear of boring my players with drawn-out, grinding combats. So anything that speeds things along is paramount at my table.

The first thing we did was eject the playing-card initiative system in favor of a single d6 roll per side (one for the players' party, one for the GM's monsters). This also necessitated tweaking all of the various edges that reference initiative or being dealth the Joker, etc. Spending a benny can still win the players initiative if they so choose, however. I know the playing-card initiative system is a hallmark of Savage Worlds, but to us it just introduced 52 extra fiddly bits to our already crowded tabletop. Out it went.

We've also ignored a lot of the combat maneuvers (disarm, called shot, etc) as well as most of the edges that don't show up on character sheets. When I stat out monsters, I prefer to express their threat in terms of hard numbers rather than edges (which, like feats, are difficult for me to remember during combat).

We kept the skill list, but we only use about 6 skills regularly, the rest being relegated to specific situations or characters.

Really, what's kept us most excited about Savage Worlds has been the innovative resolution mechanic: Target Number 4, which you can attempt on a variety of polyhedral dice based on your relevant skill. But you're always trying for a 4, mostly. And any dice that rolls its maximum explodes, allowing you to roll it again and add it to the previous number. This can result in some hideously high damage rolls, both for the players and the monsters they encounter, and that's kept things very interesting out in the wilderness. Anything that rolls dice to attack you can, conceivably, drop you with one attack. We love it!

In retrospect, the path we've charted with this game has a lot in common with UncleBear's "Old School Anything" concept—just strip out all the extemporaneous stuff from your game, look at what's left, and run a game with it.

Savaging the D&D Monster Manual

My local gaming store is gearing up to host its twice-yearly consignment auctions, so I've been combing my collection looking for unused material to sell off. Since I'll be dropping off a load of stuff in the next couple of weeks, my buddy (and fellow RPG Diehard author) Ben pulled together a pile of saleable stuff from his own collection to add to the auction; this lot included the D&D 3.0 Monster Manual.

While organizing our shared auction wares, I happened to flip open the Monster Manual. Now, I must confess that I've never actually perused any of the various beast books for D&D—if you'd asked me last week, I would have told you that their content is utilitarian in nature...stat blocks for critters and little else.

And although I found stats aplenty, I also found myself enthralled by the narrative description of the monsters. In general, I've turned up my nose at the more mythic, oddball monsters in D&D, preferring instead to populate my wilderness with evil humanoids like orcs, hobgoblins and troglodytes. You know, monsters that can think and strategize. But skimming the Monster Manual really fired my imagination in regards to some of the more fantastical creatures in the book, stuff like thoqquas (the segmented, elemental lava-worms that will fit perfectly into a dungeon I'm working on), mohrgs (more interesting than your average undead), hippogriff (until recently, I couldn't say that word with a straight face) and, of course, beholders.

Before I knew it, I'd pulled out a notebook and begun sketching out Savage Worlds stats for a dozen of the more interesting critters. They're on the way to my campaign notebook now—and Ben's Monster Manual, having offered up one last burst of inspiration, is on its way to the auction and, hopefully, someone else's gaming table.

Revisiting the First Adventure I Ever Wrote

I've made no attempt to hide my utter fascination with sandbox-style gaming. Last summer's old-school renaissance, with its focus on non-linear, location-based campaigning, struck me like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky. Here, I thought, was the sort of gaming that I had been striving toward for most of my adult life. I've seen the light!

Well, almost.

See, I had an opportunity last weekend to dig through my old RPG notebooks. The earliest was from 1997, when I had become enamored with West End Games' Star Wars RPG. At this point, I'd owned the game for several years—indeed, it was the first RPG I ever owned—but hadn't yet had an opportunity to play it with anyone. I was 15 at the time, and I cobbled together a campaign to run for my high school friends. The game quickly degenerated into a fairly traditional "adventure path" type of campaign, with the PCs shuttling across the galaxy following clues I had painstakingly arranged for them to follow and interacting with PCs that served only to further the game's plot. It was my own original work, but I was definitely railroading them.

But that first adventure, when I was still trying to lure my friends into regular gaming, was different. I had no clue how to write an adventure. All I knew was that my friends—occasional D&D dabblers—had a tendency to run all over the place and get into trouble. Knowing that, I made a location-based introductory adventure set on a wacky space station full of cantinas, bazaars and brothels. I had a few scripted encounters, sure, but my primary motivation was making sure I could react appropriately when they tried to do crazy stuff.

And it worked! We had a great time playing, and the one and only goal of this adventure (get the players a starship!) worked out well.

Fast forward 12 years, and here I am, re-discovering those very fundamental elements of making games hum. Doubtless my 15-year-old self has a few more lessons in store for my 27-year-old self to discover.

Bridging the gap of the miniatures debate

The great miniatures debate perplexes me. Do I need to use miniatures in my fantasy game? No.

But do I like miniatures because they are super cool and a nifty way to visualize characters and scenes? Yes.

I use miniatures only because they're awesome, not because the players are threatening to revolt if we don't map out every square inch of the battlefield and place our figures accordingly. We spend half our time simply pawing through the piles of figures, finding unnoticed gems in my collection and wondering when they'll make an appearance in the game. Miniatures also serve to plant the seeds for a new character concept. (Example: "Whoa—what do you think that sorcerer is carrying in his backpack?")

I use D&D minis and Mage Knight pieces because they're affordable and because I can throw them in a cardboard box between sessions without having to worry about chipping the paint. Yes, I play wargames and paint miniatures myself. I'm just not particularly inspired to paint minis for roleplaying games, y'know?

The point is, my group uses miniatures not as a crutch, but as a way of enhancing our gaming experience. The system we're using (Savage Worlds) is actually written to accomodate and encourage the use of miniatures, but we've had no problem using the rules as-is without leaning on minis.

Sandbox Recap: Into the Wilds

I gamed twice in the last couple weeks, most recently in Chgowiz's OSRIC/1e game, which is modeled after the West Marches approach to group adventuring. So far we've played three sessions in that campaign, and the player mix has been different each time. In fact, Chgowiz and myself have been the only two static players; everyone else has rotated in and out.

Prior to that, I refereed the 7th session of Autumn Frontiers, my own sandbox fantasy campaign we're playing with the Savage Worlds ruleset. We've reached an interesting point in the game; several of the players are about to move into the "seasoned" experience bracket, which is my signal to start weaving a few of the disparate plot threads together.

True to form, Autumn Frontiers is set up like a traditional sandbox, with location-based encounters populating a largely unexplored wilderness setting. But each region of the map is rich in detail and mystery, and at this point the players have explored perhaps 30 percent of the whole wilderness.

I'm also handing over a few in-game tasks to the players. The shared table map, which I've been tidying up between games, is now theirs to use or ignore. It's got most of the main stuff penciled in already, but the rest is up to them. Same with dungoen mapping--next time we delve into some ruins, it's up to them to keep a running map of where they've been and how to get out. This particular task is quite a lot of fun, actually, as last Saturday's game with Chgowiz showed. My character has been mapping out the kobold-infested mines as we go along, and there's certainly a sense of accomplishment when the referee's description matches up with your own hand-drawn map.

In any case, that 30 percent (a relatively small area) has yielded up a lot of hooks, encounters and characters. There are a few common threads holding everything together, and over the next few sessions I'll start investigating how it all fits together. If the players show interest, we'll advance the plot together. If not, well, there's always another adventure waiting just over the next hill--quite literally in this case.

The Look and Feel of a Hive City

I've been digging on Dark Heresy lately, and a recent browse through the Fantasy Flight Games forums yielded this gem of a thread. The original poster asked what hive cities -- the ubiquitous urban megalopolises in the Warhammer 40,000 universe -- actually look like. The responses were amusing, along the lines of "Imagine New York City with a roof over it, with Los Angeles stacked on top of it, followed by Tokyo, Houston and so on for about 30 miles straight up."

Eventually a commenter named Jephkay posted a quick list of interesting features that can be found in these huge, ancient, decaying structures. Other forumites chimed in with their own ideas, adding to the list and no doubt firing the imagination of every Dark Heresy GM who stumbled across the thread. Here's a quick taste from Jephkay's original post:

Tactical Thinking in the Hive
I try to convey the multi-layered nature of Hives by making sure my players are aware of stairways. I'm constantly mentioning balconies, overlooks, bridges, gantries, catwalks, ducts, railways, sewage pipes, effluaries (not a real word, BTW, I made it up to describe the rivers of sludge that move waste around the underhive). They face attacks from all directions in a hive. Clever enemies will encircle the intruders, attacking from several angles at once. And there is always cover available!

Gates
There are also massive gates that close off various portions of the hive. These are most common at the spire/hive interface, but even then, there must be a few hidden ways up into the nicer areas. Also, I imagine some areas are off limits for other reasons, or once were, and the gates have been repurposed. Perhaps, a thousand years ago, there was a reason for a certain gate to close and lock for 12 hours at a time, but that's been forgotten, now there is a lockdown imposed on an area. No one knows where the cogitator is that controls the gate, so the dome in question has adapted to their imposed lifestyle. Perhaps they are unaware that no one else has such a limitation. These gates were intended to hold off armies, no force the Acolytes can muster can break through them.

Bridges
I can also see massive bridges across great chasms between building blocks. The bridges themselves have buildings on them. The folks on either side of the hab-canyons occasionally get riled at one another for reasons known only to them. Every once in a while, a krak missile is launched across the void to avenge some slight. It escalates, and the bridge areas become warzones. Certainly, they can't take too much of this, and might eventually fall into the abyss between hab-zones. Of course, that's where the Acolytes have to go to collect some important scrap of information, just as a hab-war breaks out over breakfast...

Effluaries
Being a made up word, it should have made up rules. Perhaps falling into one counts as taking a toxic hit. 1d10 wounds, no armor or TB allowed? Drink up!

Cold City Recap: We Were Playing It Wrong

Our Cold City one-shot last week was a lot of fun, but in retrospect it’s pretty clear that I was running it incorrectly. I kept clinging to the old way of doing things — namely, keeping narrative control firmly in the hands of the GM (me). Nothing malicious or mean-spirited — I just forgot, repeatedly, to pass off the story narration to the players after they won a conflict. This is how Cold City is supposed to be played; players are supposed to feel invested by devising clever ways to win arguments and deal with combats, which is then rewarded by having them receive a few minutes to narrate the outcome (within reason, of course). It’s a very mature style of roleplaying that I really dig — but in the heat of the moment, I forgot all about it.

That’s not to say we had a bad time. The session was great, in fact, and very moody. I’m a WWII history buff, so I feel like I presented a pretty atmospheric, spooky rendition of postwar Berlin. Plus, Ben’s brother-in-law was at the table for his first-ever pen-and-paper RPG experience. I gave him the British paratrooper character and he warmed up instantly, delivering his lines in a cocky Brit accent for the entire evening. That’s about as much as you can hope for from someone who’s never played tabletop RPGs before!

The plot was fairly straightforward: civil engineering crews composed of German and American workers were trying to repair a sprawling power station in a bombed-out Berlin neighborhood. Something kept happening, though. Every time the engineers would start the generators and power up the turbines, the entire setup would crap out. Fused wires, burnt-out transformers, the whole lot. Then, in the night after each attempt, there would be a horrible attack reported somewhere in the immediate neighborhood. Something was happening — but what? The players discovered a hidden Nazi hospital in a forgotten sub-basement below the power station, dating back to 1939. A little room-by-room exploration revealed a collection of metal sarcophagi, each containing a gruesome-looking humanoid creature.

The lab was hooked into the power station’s supply, so whenever the engineers would attempt to start up the generators, the nefarious operation would draw off some energy, short-circuiting the whole affair and, incidentally, activating one of the stasis coffins and releasing the inhabitant. The players tracked down one of these unfortunate creations, killed him in a blaze of gunfire, and brought the corpse back to the headquarters for research.

We played a little bit beyond there and then stopped abruptly to head out to a bar for some beers. The session was a lot of fun — and really ideal for a newbie who might be intimidated by the math of certain other, more complex games — but I still regret not playing Cold City as the developers intended. I think we would have had a much more robust session if I would have remembered to pass narrative duties around the table a bit more.

Also, the trust mechanic barely came into play. I love the idea behind this element — a multinational gang of cautious allies who are always casting sideways glances at each other — but it didn’t really click for a one-shot. We didn’t have the well-developed interactions and backstories that seem necessary to bring in the trust bonuses. All the same, we shoehorned a few trust-based rolls into a couple scenes, just to try them out. Used as part of a campaign, they would have added a lot of depth to the whole setup.

Regardless, a fun time was had by all, and we pledged to re-try Cold City and/or Hot War again the near future.

Cold City: Actual Play Session Pending...

On the agenda for tonight is a one-shot session of Cold City, Malcolm Craig’s atmospheric game of conspiracy and horror set in postwar Berlin. I’m the GM, which is really ideal since WWII/Cold War history is a hobby of mine, and I also speak a little Russian.

The game’s buy-in is that PCs are members of the Reserve Police Agency (RPA), a trans-national group of investigators who roam the alleys and ruins of Berlin, seeking out the crumbling remains of hideous technology, experiments gone awry and otherworldly monsters lurking in the shadows. Heady stuff, to be sure. Players are encouraged to play different nationalities — and the inherent suspicions therein. This is the Cold War, after all. For our game, I’ve pregenerated a group of three disparate characters, all bound together by the common mission of the RPA: a Soviet black marketeer, a doughty British paratrooper, and an over-eager American photojournalist.

I’ll write up a post-game account of the session next week.

Everway: My Favorite Obscure RPG

Zachary the First over at RPG Blog II wrote today about his favorite obscure RPG. In response, I dropped a comment about Everway, which to this day has the distinction of being the one game I’ve played more than any other in my gaming career. It’s also a game system that I’ve seen used to run an incredible array of genres, including Star Wars and homebrew superhero.

Everway was a bit of a marketing dud, and in retrospect it seems pretty clear that Wizards of the Coast (yes, WOTC published Everway) didn’t have any idea what they had on their hands. They made it into a boxed set and marketed it in toy stores alongside Monopoly and Risk. Big mistake.

In brief: Everway uses a tarot-themed “Fortune deck” to resolve actions and situations; players flip cards from the top of the deck in lieu of rolling dice. Cards themselves are interpreted by the GM based on their orientation, the illustration and a few bits of prose on each side of the card. I’ve included an image here of a card called “Summer.” It has two interpretations, depending on its orientation when flipped: “Energy” vs. “Exhaustion.”

This dynamic allows the GM and players to paint with broad strokes when necessary — and dig deeper into the plot and story for special moments. In combat, flipping a card like “Summer” is pretty cut-and-dried...if you get the positive result (“Energy”) chances are you might power through your opponent and land a crippling blow. Likewise, if you flip the card and it’s inverted (“Exhaustion”) the GM might describe how your character falters at a key moment and loses the advantage.

In a social scene, a card like “Summer” takes on an entirely different flavor. Different interpretations might depend on how the situation is going at that given moment. It could be literal (the nobleman must retire to bed; he’s exhausted) or it could be figurative (the barbarians tire of your attempts at parley and choose to speak with their axes!). Bantering with the GM over the myriad interpretations of a given card flip almost becomes a game unto itself, and it's certainly one of the most satisfying elements of Everway resolution system.

The flip side, of course, is that there’s virtually no crunch to the game and players must be of a relatively high maturity level to avoid an imbalanced play experience. Character creation starts by choosing a few fantasy art cards to illustrate key scenes from your character’s background. The boxed game comes with 90 or so random cards, and players are encouraged to seek out their own. (I snagged a small lot of Michael Whelan cards on ebay to use in my campaign.) This element makes the game instantly visual; players are encouraged to pick new cards throughout the campaign to illustrate new encounters or situations.

Characters have just four stats, representing the four elements: Earth, Fire, Water and Air. From there, players can buy powers to describe specific effects, or they can sketch out their own separate, uniquely customizable magic system. If you want magic, you must put work into designing it for yourself.

But again — the numbers don’t matter much; they’re just there to give the GM a few absolutes upon which to measure the rest of the game. Card-flipping is where Everway really shines. Depending on how much weight the GM has allotted it, a single flip might determine if you land a punch or mobilize an army.

Over the years, I’ve played several campaigns of “vanilla” Everway, usually some variant of the traditional D&D campaign. There’s less of a focus on combat, though, because the resolution system moves so quickly. This leaves more time for robust storytelling and character development, which I really enjoyed.

From this basis, my old group successfully ran Star Wars using the Everway system. In place of the Fortune Deck, the GM made up his own “Way of the Force” deck, with phrases and concepts appropriate to Star Wars. (Yes, we even had a “I Have A Bad Feeling About This” card!)

After that, we built on this success by molding Everway to run a Silver Age superhero game. Again, this necessitated a new, homemade Fortune Deck with cards like “Up, Up and Away!” and “The Villain Unmasked!”

The key with Everway is that the game moves fast. There are no cumbersome combat tables or formula to work out. You’ll move quickly from combat to a chase scene to a negotiation scenario, then back to combat — all in about an hour of play. Everything hinges on the GM’s interpretation of a flipped card. This meant we were able to really plow through a campaign — encompassing many months of in-game time — in a relatively short period of time.

(It's worth noting that Everway's published universe draws heavy inspiration from more ethereal, romantic, dreamy, mythological fantasy tropes; it's definitely NOT swords-and-sorcery. My group considered using the published setting for about 2 seconds, then jettisoned it in favor of a homebrew world that was essentially a clone of traditional D&D, albeit a bit darker. We've not looked back since.)

Last I checked, Everway was purchased by Gaslight Press several years ago, though no new products have been announced. That’s OK — the game itself is easy enough to find on ebay

The Benny Economy in Savage Worlds

Last night, amid much negotiation and impassioned discussion, our group hit upon a cool new house rule for our Savage Worlds game.

We’re calling it the Benny Economy, and it expands upon an existing mechanic in SW that gives each player three “bennies” at the outset of the game. These are tokens, stones, glass beads, whatever, and they can be “spent” for rerolls and damage soaks, kind of like hero points in Mutants & Masterminds or fate chips points in Deadlands. And since the GM is encouraged to give out extra bennies during the session for good roleplaying or problem solving, these resources are meant to be spent, not hoarded.

The GM gets bennies too, to be spent by his minions and NPCs, usually one per PC at the table, plus a couple more for each big monster or villain.

Last night, though, we hit upon a much more dynamic way of spending bennies: When a PC spends a benny, it’s added to the GM’s stock. Likewise, when the GM spends a benny, it’s passed on to the PC most directly involved with the action.

So we’ve established a free-flowing metagame economy whereby the GM can inject a little fiat into the game — but only by passing on a minor advantage to the characters. And when the players need a hail-mary roll, they can try for it — but next time they might not be so lucky. Plus, the players around the table can watch the GM’s benny pile wax and wane throughout the game, so they’ll know at a glance how many resources the referee can bring to bear on a particular scenario.

Admittedly, this mechanic has virtually no grounding in the story or plot. It’s just a cool metagame notion that, for us, seems more engaging than the rules as written in the SW book. What do you think?

Last Weekend's Old-School Gaming Moment

Yep, we had our first great old-school gaming moment last weekend. The first of many, I hope, from Autumn Frontiers, my Savage Worlds/Points of Light sandbox mashup.

The players were exploring a ruined holdfast situated in some forested hills. As near as the PCs could tell, the crumbling, three-story tower and half-collapsed curtain wall had been built — and then abandoned? — centuries ago by a dwarven culture. The drum tower itself was in particularly bad shape, with heaps of rubble and collapsed masonry everywhere, not to mention gaping holes in the floor and ceiling.

The dwarves had stashed several sealed cauldrons of tar in various places around the holdfast, perhaps intended to be used to defend against invaders at some unknowable point in the past. The players found these cauldrons and deduced their contents after a little experimenting. (“I sprinkle some of our magic ice powder into the black liquid. It turns into a crystal? OK, I use my sword to spill a little bit on the floor and light it on fire. Cool, it burns! Must be tar or pitch.”)

Using ropes, the players were able to work their way into the squat tower. They explored the top level (replete with battlements and a commanding view of the surrounding countryside) and headed on down to the first floor, which was partially built into the hillside. Over the years, a small stream had pushed through the tower’s thick stone wall and now flowed slowly through this chamber. Roots hung from the ceiling and moss grew on the heaps of broken masonry piled everywhere. It was dark and dank.

So it was no surprise that this fetid chamber should be home to a colony of oil beetles, huge and black with glistening carapaces. The players locked swords with these beasts for a few rounds, but common sense quickly won out. They darted back upstairs, whereupon the paladin and the druid began dragging one of the heavy cauldrons to the edge of a large hole in the floor...that led down to the beetle-infested first level. While they were doing this, the thief and the wizard mounted a determined defense against the enraged beetles, which were now swarming up a crumbling spiral staircase onto the second level.

After a few close calls, the characters managed to tilt the cauldron over the lip of the maw, sending a hundred or so gallons of black tar spilling down into the depths of the beetle hive. The druid tossed in a torch, and the rest is history. I didn’t even roll — those beetles didn’t have a chance. They squealed and hissed and burst from the heat as their innards boiled.

It was a elegant solution that I didn’t really see coming — and it’s also a strong argument in favor of logical dungeons built for particular purposes, with lots of options for enterprising players. In this case, the dwarven holdfast was meant to defend against something, so it was only logical that the battlements should have cauldrons of tar ready to be dumped on invaders at a moment’s notice. Turns out the “invaders” were inside the tower itself.

Dungeon Vermin in Savage Worlds

I’ve been enjoying some of the posts lately about “dungeon vermin” — giant beetles, centipedes, rats, scorpions and other creepy crawlies that adventurers are sure to find in most ancient catacombs. So I started thinking about how to incorporate these suckers into Savage Worlds, the system of choice for my upcoming fantasy game. There’s not telling how much dungeon-delving the PCs will do, but if they do venture underground, I like the idea of having a thriving ecosystem waiting for them down there.

The key with dungeon vermin — near as I can tell — is that they’re not threatening on their own, but they’re able to endanger the party in certain situations (right after a big battle, for example, when the exhausted, drained characters blunder into a pit filled with giant leeches).

How to represent this in Savage Worlds? The best way, I think, is with the Shaken mechanic. Savage Worlds doesn’t use hit points; rather, each character has three wounds representing progressive levels of injury. Shaken is a sort of pre-wounded condition that limits a character’s actions and makes it much easier to subsequently wound him.

So, rather than stat out full blocks for each type of dungeon vermin, I think I’ll simply give them an attack rating, a toughness score and a custom Edge (read: feat) that limits any successful damage roll to Shaken. This makes them superbly annoying, occasionally deadly — but never to be ignored.

Think of the insect pit scene in King Kong — the characters were on the ropes, exhausted, and the scary bugs thought they had an easy meal on their hands until the rest of the party showed up and massacred the insects. But not before the swarming bugs managed to snack on a few adventurers. Dungeon vermin should be a low-level background threat for most of the game, except for that one-in-a-hundred situation where the Shaken result combines with some other unforseen scenario to make the players really sweat.

Game supplements I will buy: Savage Worlds Fantasy Companion

Last weekend my group made characters for our Savage Worlds sandbox fantasy campaign. Chargen was quick and easy, but the core book is not really written for traditional fantasy gaming. Among other things, it's missing a more robust spell list and genre-specific edges and hindrances.

That's no big deal, of course — we'll happily stat out our own weapons and spells as long as necessary. But I’m really looking forward to the newly announced Savage Worlds Fantasy Companion, which promises to fill in those gaps (and then some) in the swords-and-sorcery genre. As near as I can tell, the book was announced earlier this month, and it could be in stores by early 2009.

Review: Hot War

Last week I spent most of a three-hour plane trip reading Hot War, the spiritual successor to the very excellent Cold City by Contested Ground Studios.

Set in Berlin just after WWII, Cold City’s crowning achievement was a spate of innovative “trust” mechanics that realistically modeled the intrigue and conspiracy surrounding American, German, French, British and Soviet operatives as they investigated horrific Cthulhu-esque monsters and dark occult happenings in the shattered urban cityscape.

Hot War took Cold City’s setting — teetering, as it were, on the brink of out-and-out war — and advanced it to its logical conclusion. But the war that Hot War chronicles involves more than simply atom bombs; this conflict also makes ample use of the so-called “twisted technology” that both sides were voraciously developing as a deterrent to traditional nuclear arms. So Hot War’s London was scourged with hellish mutants, otherworldly creatures yanked to Earth from alternate realities, and crude Soviet cyborgs powered by arcane technologies.

The result is an apocalypse, which creator Malcolm Craig chronicles through a chapter’s worth of diary entries, official memos and propaganda posters (including one shown here). This sets the scene for the game setting: a ruined London struggling to survive amid dwindling resources, even as the terrifying leftovers of the botched Soviet invasion stalk the landscape, menacing the cowed population with indirect terror.

In place of a trust mechanic, Hot War has each player describe two agendas: one representing their player’s personal motivations (ex: “Find out where my sister went after the war”) and another representing a missive handed down from whatever branch of the government they work for (ex: “Find the mole who’s selling Navy secrets”). This is especially important because the UK’s fragmented military factions are a source of great drama in the game; each branch is vying with the others for manpower and resources, which leads to intense behind-the-scenes struggles.

The agendas are rated in terms of how long it will take to accomplish them and given a die bonus that can be employed on all dice rolls associated with them. Longer agendas give fewer dice — but they can be used more frequently. Once they’ve been roleplayed out to their conclusion, agendas are fulfilled in some way and the player makes a new one — very similar to Burning Wheel’s belief mechanic, though Hot War’s agendas appear much more actionable on first brush.

The game revolves around encounters, not tasks, so there’s no “rolling to hit” in this game. Rather, players assemble a die pool for a particular encounter, adding in one die for various relevant abilities (a mechanic that’s gotten a lot of mileage lately in indie games). Then players roll the dice pool, determine a winner, and narrate the outcome of the encounter. It’s graceful, sure, but there’s a distinctive lack of crunch. Character equipment and environmental effects are all boiled down to a series of pluses or minuses applied to the die pool.

A very cool aspect of Hot War is that players can take over narration duties at various times during the game. Whenever a player wins a particular conflict scene, he or she gets to dictate the outcome (within reason, of course). The same goes for agendas: When they’re fulfilled, the player describes the outcome and its effect on the game. This is great, but it demands a very mature, involved group of players, since they’ll each serve as GM for about 20% of the game.

Hot War is among the most satisfying post-apocalyptic games I’ve read in a long time. It’s not campy; it’s stark and hopeless. While reading the description of the war itself (told via diary entries and government posters) I kept thinking about Threads, the made-for-BBC documentary that presented a similarly unflinching look at nuclear war and the immediate aftermath. Imagine my surprise, then, to see Threads listed as one of a number of film and TV shows that served as Malcolm’s inspiration for the game.

Up next: An actual play review, to be completed as soon as I can manage to assemble a group.

What I love about RPGs, or The Problem of Logistics

If there's one thing I love about rpgs, it's playing them. And if there's one thing I don't like about rpg's, it's trying but not finding time to play them. The latter happens all too often.

Our Wild Talents game got off to a really nice start, but weekends filled up fast, and football season (the real football, meaning NotSoccer) as about to begin. Through January, playing rpgs on Sundays is basically shot for me. Priorities, you know.

Anyway, we've been having trouble scheduling our game, and now we're batting around the possibility of splitting the group and running them in parallel for a little. In the meantime, we still haven't nailed down a time to play regularly, and this was what it was all supposed to be about: getting back into the groove of a regular, biweekly game. Something to depend on.

Now, this isn't the fault of anyone in particular, but it just stinks and is all too common with gaming groups. The hardest part about gaming isn't the johnny on the spot creativity, synthesizing a ruleset, or strategizing a character build - it's logistics.

I'm just thankful that I'm getting involved with a Play by Post game.

Defying vanilla: Tales of New Crobuzon

Irony is a funny thing. I was gearing up to write a gushy post about one of the most exciting Gencon announcements I came across: Adamant Entertainment’s forthcoming RPG line based on China Mieville’s Bas Lag universe. For the uninitiated, Mieville’s fiction (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council and a handful of short stories) blend elements of fantasy, sci-fi, steampunk and romance in the melting pot of New Crobuzon, a sprawling, gaslight-era urban fantasy city. You'll either love his prosaic writing style or hate it.

The city is very cool, but (critically) it’s an entirely new fantasy setting that completely discards common tropes — and brings in so many new, exciting ideas. It’s the complete opposite of Uncle Bear’s recent post bemoaning the lack of originality in D&D today — the idea that, once we strip away all the pop and sizzle, most D&D settings are basically the same. Vanilla through and through, to use his phrasing.

Mieville’s fiction defies this notion, and it will be interesting to watch the development of Adamant’s forthcoming Tales of New Crobuzon RPG. (Email tonc[at]adamantentertainment[dot]com to sign up as a playtester.)