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23 December, 2010

Reading Suggestions for Victorian-Period games

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For over a decade, one of my favorite settings for a game was a speculative fiction Victorian period (I’m not a big fan of the “steampunk” term.)  From Space: 1889 to Castle Falkenstein to Victoriana, I had some 19th Century campaign running until about 2006 (mostly because i started running Serenity — which is sort of like Victorian sci-fi, but with modern science…)

I tend to use a lot of actual history in these games — it’s actually why I went into history; I tend to heavily research things for games, from big issues and events down to the sorts of advertisements you would see, clothing styles, etc.  There are a few books I’ve found indispensable for a Victorian-period campaign:

“The Big Green Book” as I call it: Chris Cook & Brenden Keith’s encyclopedic British Historical Facts: 1830-1900. New York: St. Martins, 1975.  This covers the major laws, political figures in the various governments, the colonial administrators and ambassadors of HM Government through the Victorian period.

Byron Farwell’s Queen Victoria’s Little Wars.  New York: Norton, 1972.  This covers all of the major and minor wars of the period and is a good beginning source for understanding the personalities and events of the era.

Thomas Packenham’s massive The Scramble for Africa. New York: Random House, 1994.  The Indian subcontinent is always important, but after 1876, Africa is the real hot spot for exploration and adventure (and intrigue!) in the late Victorian period.  His wife, Valerie’s Out in the Noonday Sun is more concerned with the Edwardian period colonial administrators in the Far East, but it still has plenty of good material for a game.

Much of my campaign involves high intrigue and espionage, which means upper middle class and aristocratic characters — for that world, the best source I’ve found is Anita Leslie’s The Marlborough House Set.  New York: Doubleday, 1972.

Wolf von Eckardt, et.al. Oscar Wilde’s London. New York: Doubleday, 1987 covers the more bawdy side of life in the capital.

I’m going to also throw in a shameless plug for my The Smoke — a London sourcebook for the Victoriana game line and the less setting specific London sourcebook for the Imperial Age game line.

For the America of this period — the Wild West — the tremendous Aces & Eights RPG has all manner of intensive research on how cowboys made their money, what the Western society was like, and other than the alternative history aspect, easily lends itself to coopting for your campaign.

 

22 December, 2010

Revising an Old Favorite

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I’ve launched myself into a project to distract me, when needed, from the dissertation work.  That project is a revision of some of the rules from the old James Bond: 007 RPG from the 1980s.  The project has been taking on a greater life, however, as I find myself scrapping some of the old rules, rewriting others, and generally turning the venerable old standby for my espionage or modern games and turning into a new game system.

Some of the changes include new rules to emulate the change in action movies — specifically adding martial arts specializations for the hand-to-hand combat, “spray and pray” style gun fu for the fire combat, and a new initiative system that matches the bidding of the chase rules — making the action sequences consistent and ridding us of the d6 that always felt pasted on to the d100 of JB:007.   The effects of your Speed rating are being reworked, as well, to fit the modern action movie style.

Fields of Experience are being reworked to have mechanical impact in gameplay, interacting with the skills — in the original system, they were an ad-on, essentially skills that players didn’t want to spend character points on.  FOE will be more of a specialization that can impact one or more skills.

Skills:  First Aid will become a skill you buy.  Connoisseur will become a Field of Experience, as will Photography.  Skill ratings, and attribute ratings are being tweaked, as well.

Weaknesses had little impact on the character that I saw in game play with the old system.  There are now actual mechanical effects from weaknesses on the ease of tests, etc.

Hero Points — originally, the game had you earn HP for an excellent success, now you will gain HP for playing your strengths and weaknesses, for ideas and actions that help the plot along, as well as excellent results.  This will allow the character more opportunities for Hero Points.

Gear will get a face lift.  Cars are a lot more performance oriented, so the stat will be reworked to match the realities of modern vehicles.  Weapons will see changes to more accurately reflect the real world.

The goal is a modernized system that still keeps all the things that made JB:007 great, while making it a bit more robust and also backward compatible.

 

13 December, 2010

Thrilling Action Stories

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Started my new Hollow Earth Expedition series “Thrilling Action Stories” last week with the new characters involved in tomb robbing and espionage in “the Pearl of the Orient”, Shanghai.  (I found some fantastic resources online, like Tales of Old Shanghai.)

The characters are a Steve mcQueen-esque tomb raiding scoundrel archeologist, a handsome, action oriented brick…with about that much in the brain trust adventurer, an 11 year old street urchin (think a female Short Round), and a half-Chinese Kuomintang-connected member of the Green Gang and nightclub owner.

The first issue of the series brought Dr. Hannibal Drake and Jack McMahon to Shanghai by way of Hong Kong.  Drake has discovered the body of the famed admiral Zheng He — not buried at sea, but instead on the Malabar coast.  He and Jack link up in Hong Kong, where a deal to sell the cadaver and his casket goes badly, so they take it to Shanghai to try and get the nationalist government to buy it.

Meanwhile, Roland Kessik — half-Chinese son of a Jardine, Matheson & Co. lawyer — has found a mole in the KMT structure that was getting his gun shipments intercepted by the Japanese squad of the Shanghai Municipal Police. Through the street urchin Shanghai Sally, Kessik stops Wen Wo — an archivist in the KMT offices in Nanjing — from selling more secrets, and an ancient book and court papers, to Japanese agents.

After Kessik has turned over the Japanese archeologist they nabbed and Wo to Du Yeushang, the Green Gang head and a KMT general, Kessik is back in the nationalist good graces.  But he keeps the book and papers, intrigued by what the Japs wanted.

Enter Drake and McMahon — they have Kessik’s name as a contact to try and move the admiral’s remains to the KMT.  He agrees to broker it, but aks Drake to have a look at the book.  It is an original copy of the Bencao Gangmu — a famed medical treatise from the 1500s.  More importantly, the court papers reveal that the Kangxi Emperor had used the techniques in the BG to punish a court official (or so they currently think) guilty of treason to the “Arabic process in the Bencao Gangmu“.  Drake realizes that this is the holy grail for his gradute advisor back at Columbia, for this can only mean that the Kangxi Emperor made this felon into a mellified man!

 

12 December, 2010

New House Rule: James Bond: 007 RPG

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I’ve started working on tweaking the James Bond: 007 rules set, starting with trying to make fields of experience and weaknesses more interesting mechanically (search the site, there’s a couple of posts but it’s Sunday morning and I’m to lazy to link to it this moment) and now turning my attention toward the combat system.

One of the more interesting and fun mechanics (but also a hard one for new gamers to grasp) is bidding on initiative in chases.  It allows the players to craft more intense and dangerous chase sequences for their (and your) entertainment. I propose that bidding be streamlined (we’ve had bidding wars go from Ease Factor 8 all the way down to EF1/2…it gets a bit slow.)  Here’s the idea:  the GM sets a base bid for the NPCs, then the players respond (if there are multiple vehicles involved they may either agree to bid the same, or each bid themselves.  The NPCs get a chance to stay on their original bid or try to best the players.  The players get one last chance to underbid the NPCs.

Example:  James and John are on motorcycles, trying to catch the villain in his Jaguar XK8.  The villain has a fast car with good acceleration and decent cornering (PM: +1)  He bids a 6 (with the PM he’ll test against EF7…almost certain make the test successfully.)  James and John are on a Triumph Speed Triple and Yamaha R6 respectively — both get PM: +2 for the test — and John has a better skill in Driving (but has terrible luck rolling on tests like these.)  James bids an EF4 — he’s gunning the Speed Triple for all she’s worth and dodging traffic to get in close.  John decides to redline the R6 and wheelies the Yamaha through the traffic with an EF3.  James doesn’t really want to go that low on a two-wheeled vehicle.  The villain counters with an EF2 — he’s weaving through traffic and even goes into oncoming lanes, taking a hard left at the first light they approach.  Bikes…they don’t turn so well at high speed…

John really wants this guy — he punches it and bids EF1, but James decides to back off and let the villain go first.  John rolls his Driving with a PC18 at EF3 (thanks to the R6’s PM) and needs a 54.  He rolls a 67 — he’s going to fail.  He tests his safety roll since he failed (and would have since he was under the bike’s REDline.)  He needs a 54 and true to form rolls 78.  He weaves through traffic, guns the bike into a wheelie — and looks great! — then had to break hard for the turn as he gets alongside the Jaguar…and locks the breaks.  The R6 throws him for a medium wound to him and bike!

The Jaguar takes the turn, the bad guy gets an acceptable success and slews the car around the turn in a screech of tires and plume of smoke as he burns rubber.  James needs a total of EF6 to stay with him.  His patience, backing off a bit, letting the others get stupid, allows him to hook the turn on the Speed Triple at EF8 on his Driving of 15 (90 to succeed) and gets a 32 — a good result!  He’s closed the distance from long to close….

Now let’s extend this bidding system to initiative…there’s an old saying in the gun community: Better to be accurate than fast.  In this case, the bidding is applied to your combat tests and allows us to ditch the pesky d6 that has always been (to my eye) out of character with the percentile nature of the system.

In this case, the villain decided to do the classic jump out from behind cover, snap off a few shots and jump back to cover.  The GM decides this is an EF5 bid for the villain.  He has a Speed of 2 — if he wins, it’s an EF7 to try and hit the boys — James and John — before applying dodging mods, etc.

James is going to do the knee slide behind the nearest cover — say, a 55 gallon drum (yeah, we’re in an abandoned warehouse for the denouement) — and bids EF4 (with his Speed, it’s EF6 if he succeeds).  John on the other hand is going to haul ass into the fray, using a convenient set of pallets to leap into the air, double-guns blazing, screaming “aaah!”  That’s an EF3 John decides.  The villain isn’t going for it.

John goes first and with his Fire Combat PC18 rolls a 68 and 44 on his pair of 1911 .45s.  One shot bangs off of the big industrial-looking circuit breaker box the baddie is hiding behind, the other clips him in the slightly exposed shoulder.  James goes next — sliding across the floor to cover and rolls 90 and 81 on his Fire Combat PC17:  with the cover knocking his EF to 4, he misses.  It looked good, but was wholly ineffective.

The bad guy goes for it, jumping out from cover and snapping a few shots at the most obvious target — John sailing through the air and screaming “aaaah!”  He has an EF7 before we apply dodging mods for John — EF5.  He has a PC14 for his Fire Combat:  75 and 51.  The first shot goes high and blows out a window on the second floor of the abandoned warehouse/steel mill/whereverthehell we’re shooting this movie and the second clips John with an acceptable success.  On the DC: F of the baddie’s Glock 17, that’s a light wound.  After the bike accident earlier in the session, John’s character is getting seriously tashed up…

This is a preliminary version of the combat bidding I’ve been working on, but a more mature version of it might be coming to a blog — or possibly a game book — near you.

 

8 December, 2010

A Good Night at the Table

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Ordinarily, i don’t tend to bring a lot of my personal life to the blog beyond the most basic bits.  I’m a “don’t air your dirty laundry in public” sort — very Scottish.  But tonight was a good night at the gaming table and represented a closure of sorts for me.

For 19 years, I’m had one constant at the gaming table — my ex-wife.  Even after our divorce, she was back at the table for a few months before she finally wrote me off after the announcement of my impending fatherhood.  Completely understandable, and completely expected.  She took with her one of my friends of 17 years.  He had been increasingly erratic in his behavior for a while before our divorce, and while I’m sure he would find a way to blame me, it was simply that he was a miserable bugger that wouldn’t shift himself to fix his life.  It seeped into every aspect of his life, including gaming.  He stopped being fun to hang out with years ago (but then again, so had I…)  A few others picked sides, as well, which is also understandable and in one case expected.

This happens from time to time.  You’re gaming group might collapse.  It might not.  In my case, three of the core players and friends — and that’s usually where the strength of a group lies…you have to be friends first — stuck it out.  Tonight was our first gaming session without two people they’d played with for seven or so years, another that was with us for, on and off, three.  Half the group gone.  It could be sad, or we could move on.

We did the latter.  My fiancee joined us as well, her third or fourth time playing.  I crafted a new universe, a new campaign — in this case a Hollow Earth Expedition game set in Shanghai and revolving around a search for a mythical mellified man (google it, it’s a good McGuffin!)  Characters included the unscrupulous archeologist/tomb raider, the vain and slightly stupid playboy adventurer, a mid-level lieutenant in the Green Gang with ties to the Kuomingtang and an 11 year old street urchin thief working for the gangster.

We had dinner (I made a killer pot roast), we chatted about things, then got down to play.  My girl dropped into the group well and they treated her like she had always been there, and the rest of us continued to mess like nothing had happened.  For me, it was a bittersweet to not have the usual gang around, but life changed you, your life, and your group.

This is shaping up to be an excellent campaign and group.  Game on!

 

4 December, 2010

More New Pending

Posted by blackcampbell under General Ramblings, Roleplaying Games
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Keep an eye on the blog:  there’s likely to be big news pending regarding the Black Campbell — I’m thinking about getting back into games writing.  First comes the business plan and ideas for how to write, hire talent, market, etc…  With the new electronic media, it’s cheaper to dive in than ever before, and while I don’t expect to get rich, I do hope to be able to put out product people want.

More as it develops.

 

4 December, 2010

James Bond: 007 RPG — Making Weaknesses Count

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The James Bond system has the potential for modernization, bringing the mechanics up to date with other current rules sets, without losing the flavor of the original game.  One of these things is making the weaknesses of a character more important to play.

There is very little incentive to play up weaknesses that a character is built with — for many players of JB:007 it’s simply a means to extract more points to construct the character with.  But character isn’t the numbers — that’s a simulation.  Character is in what the person is, what they do, how they react to things.  You know that Bond is going to do something non-survival enhancing at some point in the story because of a woman…that’s who he is.  You know Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead is going to try to treat people fairly and will not kill the living if he can avoid it…that’s who he is.

Weaknesses more than your attributes or skills, make the character.  There are some mechanics for weakness in the original game, most involving “distraction”, but here’s a good way to get the players to use their weaknesses…

Bribery.  Like most system, if the player has their character act to their weaknesses despite it causing them trouble, give them a hero point.  Example:  Jed is a bad ass.  He’s not afraid of anything, it seems…except heights.  So when the bad guy escapes up a rickety ladder to the top of the building, Jed is all fired up to go after him.  But a few rungs up the ladder, his acrophobia hits him like a hammer.  He gets a point if he looks for another way to chase the bad guy, or if he loses him, he gains two, perhaps.  (It also allows you to design your action sequences with a “railroading” factor — where you can make sure the situation is such that the character doesn’t catch the bad guy to early…)

Clay from The Losers has a tendency to do stupid stuff because of women.  He allows the team to be lead by the nose through Aisha’s hoops.  Why?  He likes her.  It’s just Clay.  albert Gibson in True Lies apparently blew a stakeout at some point because he was getting a blow job; once again, that’s an example of Attraction to Members of the Oppose Sex getting the better of you.  In the first case, the weakness drives the adventure and could lead to multiple instances of gaining a hero point.  Gibson’s screw up might have set the team back badly — that might be worth one or two points, depending on the impact.

Using hero point to play up weaknesses will make you Bond campaign much more rich and fun.

But that’s just my opinion…

 

4 December, 2010

Hollow Earth Expedition: Taking the Average

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One of the rules that my players like in particular from Hollow Earth Expedition is “taking the average” — where the character can take the average expected success of their die automatically.

Example: Jack is an athletics guy who needs to do some fast footwork across a crumbling stone wall to get to the heroine and rescue her.  Jack’s Athletics is a 6…and average expected success of 3.  The wall is wide but in sketchy condition — loose mortar, etc. — He need 3 successes to make it across.  Taking the average, he’s done it but without aplomb.

Now for the average every day stuff — driving a car down a road at normal speeds in normal traffic — you shouldn’t need to roll a test.  In some more important tests, taking the average allow you to succeed at more difficult tasks without risking a crappy die roll.  But that, in itself, can be a problem for players…when you have a high average (remember, HEX difficulties generally range from 1-5), you don’t really fail at anything.  That removes a certain sense of danger and chance from the equation.

So to address this, I propose a few tweaks to make taking the average not so pat.  On tests where there is danger, or something at stake, the character taking the average still get their average benefit, but they roll their dice anyway.  If they roll all failures they botch, even if they succeed.

Example:  Jack takes the average and goes over the wall fast and without risk of falling to his death, but when he rolls his six dice and gets all failures.  The GM decides that at the last moment, the wall collapses and he throws himself to safety on the altar platform that the damsel in distress is on.  Now they are on the 18′ rickety platform, their initial means of escape gone, and the natives below have them surrounded.

Or the GM could have gone with the wall crumbles, even though Jack didn’t fall through any fault of his own.

 

 

25 November, 2010

Some Car Porn

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Here’s what I’m pretty certain is a 1928-ish Bentley 4 1/2 or 6 1/2 Litre Touring I saw outside of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh:

Some game stats…just because:

For Hollow Earth Expedition — Size: 2   Def: 6   Str: 8   Speed: 90   Han: +2   Crew: 1   Pass: 3   Cost: $5000 (£1000)

For James Bond: 007 — PM: 0   RED: 4   CRUS: 50   MAX: 90   RNG: 180   FCE: 3   STR: 8

 

12 November, 2010

Quick Review: Leverage RPG

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Margaret Weis Productions is moving quick to make themselves a major publisher of licensed role playing material — from Battlestar Galactica, Serenity, and Supernatural (all using the original Cortex game engine) to Smallville, which uses a sharply different version of the Cortex system.  Now comes the latest game line, based on the TV show Leverage — about a team of grifters, hackers, and thieves who work together to get their clients revenge from the sorts of crooks that can’t easily be brought down.

The look of the book is spectacular — I bought the .pdf version, but it’s obvious how nice this product is going to look.  The graphic design on it is visually heavy — and the pages loaded slow on my iPad, which is unusual, and was even juping in preview on my laptop.  The introduction by the show creator is nicely done and sets the tone for the book well, and the whole book is well written and surprisingly well edited for a MWP publication.  I found no egregious typos or typeset errors — something that didn’t happen with the first couple of core rules sets.

The rules differences are striking:  you still have the traditional six attributes of the Cortex system, but instead of skills, you have a role — grifter, hacker, mastermind, thief, hitter…  These roles dictate what you do and how well.  Want to hit someone?  that’s probably Strength+Hitter.  What to insinuate yourself with a mark?  Intelligence, or maybe Alertness+Grifter.  Roll the dice, the system uses a scale of d4 (low skill or ability) through d12 (world class.)  There’s also the addition of distinctions — what old school Cortex fans would call traits or complications.  these come into play — sometimes as benefits, sometimes as penalties.  There’s talents — specific things you do well.  There’s assets, but here this could mean anything from Fast Motorcycle d8 to Lockpick Set d4, or what have you.  these are things you buy with your plot points to use during a con.  Complications run the same way — they are temporary (say, Beat to Snot d6, from being in a fight.)

As with Smallville, I think Leverage does a good job of trying to provide a stripped down, fast role playing experience…but it also can come across as overly complex to new players.  For the GM, the use of traits is nicely streamlined, and might be work incorporating into the older Cortex systems.  Here a villain might have the traits Lazy d4 Security Guard d6.  The characters could choose to use the Lazy trait (for a plot point) to benefit them, adding it to their rolls when encountering them; otherwise, the GM (called a Fixer in this game) would roll d4+d6 vs. the players when appropriate.  It’s a good fast cheat for most opposition for the players.

Traits (like the motorcycle above) get rolled when useful.  You’re in a chase sequence with Mooks d6 Who Can Drive d6 in a Late Model Sedan d4 vs. your player’s Agility d8+Hitter d6 on a Fast Motorcycle d8.  The mooks roll 3, 4, and 2 and take the two best rolls — a 7.  Your character decided to raise the stakes by not giving up.  He rolls 4, 3, and 2 — a 7…he’s not getting away.  Spending a plot point, he adds the motorcycle die taking it to a 9.  He’s pulling away!

The new creative team of Cam Banks and Rob Donoghue are trying hard to shift the Cortex property from a more traditional RPG system with attributes and skills and hit points toward a storytelling device where the player collaborate.  It’s a great idea, and some of it works quite well…some of it I suspect does not, but until I run a game using this rules set, I’ll hold fire.  One of their big themes in Leverage and Smallville is pushing the players and GM to work collaboratively to create characters and teams.  It’s a good idea, and one I use when I can, but it feels a bit forced in the writing.  (And don’t get me started on what a cluster f#$k it is in Smallville!)

I’ve been a Cortex fan from the jump, and thought it was particularly good at pushing role playing over roll playing.  Elements of the new Cortex, which is pushing to be more free-form and rule lite, should work well even bolted onto older Cortex versions, but for those that like a bit more structure and crunch, Leverage will probably feel off.

For me, the best bits were on how to build a mission for Leverage, explaining the three act (or more appropriately, the 5 act) structure of the show, how to create marks, reasons to go after them, how to take them down, etc.

Style: 5 out of 5 (it’s beautiful and very well written), Substance 5 out of 5

For $20 for the .pdf, I was not disappointed.  i might even take a crack at testing the rules, but I’ll admit, I’m not particularly big on the new Cortex system.  I like my rules lighter than some, but I’m not much on minimalist rules sets, and it feels like that’s where MWP is headed.

 

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