The Black Campbell

Our Hollow Earth Expedition serial “Thrilling Actions Stories” brought our heroes — tomb radier Dr. Hannibal Drake, his dim-witted but heroic friend Jack MacMahon, their half-Chinese mob lieutenant ally Roland “Boss Banana” Kessik, and wee Shanghai Sally (who has been having strange and terrifying dreams of Prince Yinreng since she ate a piece of the man in the last adventure to heal her wounds.) back to the monastery of the White Lotus, looking to recover the coffins with the mellified men in them. (Here’s the original post on this campaign…) They fly to the location in a DC2 piloted by Trapp Sommers — a Clark Gable-esque American Volunteer fighting with the Chinese Air Force — and find the monks are evacuating, taking not just the coffins but the mysterious, ageless woman in a magical golden cage that they saw and promptly forgot about. They are trying to get out on barges, but with the arrival of the airplane, fighting breaks out.

Along the way, Jack hoses down the monks with the cage and it rolls into the river where the barges are and sinks. Moments later, the woman levitate, glowing, out of the water. This is Wang Cong’er — the leader of the White Lotus in 1799…but she’s infused with the spirit of Yinreng. A battle ensues, with Wang absorbing the life essence of several monks. She shorts out the DC2 — they’re stuck fighting the sorceress. Jack is blinded (light comin’ out of her mouth!), Kessik panics, and Sally appears entranced by the woman. Drake shocks Sally out of her spell by throwing a rifle at her and knocking her into the river.

Using some kind of Chinese black magic (telekenesis rules), she’s tearing up the barges with the mellified men’s coffins on them, the DC2, the heroes…then Sally resurfaces. She’s had that little bit of the prince in her activated: she has Magic and Psychic Aptitude now. She is able to drive off the sorceress, as she has a particular insight into the mind of the demon inhabiting her. They are linked. Sally knows Yinreng/Wang is headed to Xi’an in the north to “wake the army there…”

The team grabs a few of the coffins, repairs the plane and flies back to Shanghai, only to have to dodge Japanese fighter interdiction. Once on the ground, they start researching this “army” and find out the first Sovereign Emperor had created a supreme army and he and the army were entombed through sorcery when his quest for immortality drove him to try and imprison a witch with the power to give him everlasting life.

Yinreng aims to wake the army and take over China. They have to stop her!

To make matters worse, they can’t just waltz in: “the Young Marshall” Zhang Xueling just took Chian Kai Shek hostage there in an attempt to force the Kuomintang to join forces with the communists to fight the Japanese…

Gathering Trapp’s Sky Rats (Foreign Volunteer Force), they are headed for Xi’an to save China!

Next issue — Hannibal Drake and the Terracotta Army!

Love ’em/hate ’em…we’ll usually buy ’em: gamemaster screens. Back before you had your notes, maps, die programs, and game books on a tablet or laptop, we wanted to protect our notes from prying eyes and make some dice rolls in secret — hence the GM screen, which also conveniently pulled together all of the more important (on the good ones; the bad ones…well, let’s say you’d have been better off just planking down a roll of toilet paper) charts for your quick reference. They were usually utter crap, materials-wise, made of lightweight cardboard with only one side having charts, the other having bad, setting-referential art, and were an anathema to good layout design and good sense. (The first really good GM screen I ever had was the James Bond: 007 screen — you could pretty much run the whole damned game off it; better yet, the player side had useful chart that the players needed to speed things along. Brilliant!) Occasionally, you’d get a well designed one with everything you really needed in a pinch. Rarely, you’d get one of decent stock or even heavy book hardcover stock (I think the first i saw of that was the Babylon 5 screen Mongoose did. Beautifully made, crappy on the charts.)

For rules or charts-heavy games like Dungeons & Dragons, Heros, or GURPS a GM screen was almost a necessity. When folks didn’t buy one, they often cobbled one together out of cardboard, copied bits of the game book, tape, and dispair. These were usually more tailored to the oft forgotten or oft used rules that a GM needed.  I did up one for the house rules Castle Falkenstein game I was running…it’s still around here, somewhere.

But with the computer/iPad era, I find I don’t need a screen so much. When writing up an adventure I tend to throw in the dice challenges that will be necessary instead of winging it. I only show the players what I want (the iPad is much better I find for this than the laptop.) Most of the systems I run now are dead simple — Cortex for Serenity and Battlestar Galactica, Hollow Earth Expedition (wonderfully strong screen but once again…crap choices for the charts.) About the only system we’re using right now I need a chart for is James Bond.

So is there a real use for the GM screen anymore? You can bookmark your PDFs for quick rule recovery on the computer of tablet…do you really need to shave a few seconds off the time to find a rule or chart? Answer: maybe. I woud suggest that for games which you have just started playing, a GM screen helps cut down the learning curve and get things moving. Once you’ve become familiar with the rules, you might only need the screen or rule books a time or two a session when you hit stuff you’re not as proficient with (for example, I never remember rules for damage from disease and other stuff like that in games…I have to look it up. Since it’s rarely the things printed on a GM screen, said screen doesn’t do me much good.

I guess it comes down to whether the $15-40 bucks for a few seconds’ fast data retrieval and the usual crappy adventure module is worth it in your estimation.

I came across an interest blog post on the difficulties of science fiction (and especially cyberpunk) settings, the case in point being that they can lead to nihilistic behavior in characters that is hard to GM for as it can derail storylines or make planning challenges for the players moot. I found some of the arguments persuasive, as I’ve seen similar problems in these settings — both as a player and a gamemaster — but I also found that much of this was due to the style of the GM and campaign, as well as the type of players that were at the table.

Starting with the subject of cyberpunk settings. This was a genre which was influenced mostly by noir-style detective/crime fiction (by William Gibson’s own admission, much of his early stuff was built on the style of Elmore LEonard and others of his ilk.) These universes are almost universally oppressive — government and corporative entities hold tight sway over the population either through police might or economic serfdom. The characters were almost always down-and-out street dwellers or criminals (even the wealthy characters.) They were often just trying to thrive ans survive — a setting that is intrinsically nihilistic. That’s the draw. However, the characters often found their fight against these powers-that-be to mold their perceptions — they gain empathy for people (Case and Molly in Neuromancer), they get their impressions of success shattered (Sarah from Hardwired), even when they are part of the system they get screwed (Deckard and Rachel in Balde Runner.)

For a gamemaster to run a campaign of this nature, you have to either embrace being the bad guys or you have to have a very specific goal for the characters as players and the GM…beyond “I wnat to be a bad ass that doesn’t take shit from anyone.” The ways to do this are evidenced in the complaints about the genre in the above cited piece. Cyberpunk (0r Serenity, which he cites later) is an environment where you are always outgunned, outfoxed, outmanned, and ultimately, your fate is not your own. It’s a world of control — so high-powered weapons aren’t as common as you would like. They’re there, they’re expensive, and the people that deal in them aren’t too trusting of strangers — instead of simply toddling over to Guns R Us, you make finding big f’ing guns an episode itself. (I’ve done this often with espionage campaigns where the host agency doesn’t arm the characters in denied countries to avoid legal entanglements…when they need guns, they’ve got to find them on their own. Think the gun buying scene from Ronin…)

The cops have better guns. And more of them. Probably non-lethal stuff, too; use of the latter means your characters don’t die in a blaze of glory — they go to jail, get their cybernetics stripped out, whatever… Use GM fiat (but on the sly!) to reign the players in, if needed. Hit them in other places — family, friends, have their accounts hacked. Get creative.

Or…you work together to define the campaign. Serenity is one of those universes that isn’t “cyberpunk” but is criminal oriented, if you follow the tropes of the movie, and the TV show Firefly. The good guys are forced to crime by an unyielding, meddlesome government and their own intransigence to opt into a corrupt system. Make good guys gone bad, have their heartstrings pulled with jobs that go south ala The Train Job or that protect the “innocent” or powerless (Heart of Gold).

I would submit that science fiction is not unusual in these problems, and would refute the idea that it lends instantly to more powerfully equipped characters, as opposed to a fantasy game setting. Point of fact, I would suggest that the latter is much more individualistic and prone to violence, save where the critter you’re fighting is immune to the effects of your weapons, or can turn them against you. (If you have aliens in your sci-fi campaign, you can achieve the same effect. How many times in Star Trek are creatures immune to phasers but not physical damage…so where’s the damned .45s?) Sword-wielding adolescents out to slaughter scores of “monsters” (genocide? racism?) so they can pilfer their stuff — sounds like the same problem to me. In fact, it’s why I don’t like fantasy settings — well, that and they’re all derivative of the Tolkein with a twist syndrome to my eye.

I would suggest that the problem is 1) players with a power gamer mentality — where the play is a chance to self-actualize through violence, anti-social behavior, and a touch of narcissism. There’s a place for that at the right table and more power to ’em…just not mine. Players interested in role playing — in taking on a character with flaws, as well as big biceps and a sword — tend to be more interested in the storyline, in the characters they interact with. You have less of the power gamer’s direct action and more subtlety.

Example: I played in a poorly GM’d Shadowrun campaign that was the typical hack-n-slash players with big ass guns. They were loud, boorish, and had the same sense of invincibility problem mentioned in the other blog. I decided to play a professional elven Irish terrorist. We were supposed to rob a bank for some reasons (it’s been 17 years since this…) and the boys wanted to do the usual big gun bash. I convinced people to do it quick, surgical, and with as little violence as possible…why? To not only do the job, but get away with it Scot-free. The change of style this brought to the game lessened the fighting, but increased the role playing, character cooperation, planning, subtly. And it was fun.

2) Campaigns that don’t have some kind of story arc — even a vague one — are prone to drift in a way that makes them difficult to plan for, and to keep the players on track or even interested. I’ve found that my best campaigns always had some sort of Omega point that the characters were aiming for. Sometimes, once reached, you could throw them another target; sometimes that was the end of the game.

For example, several long-running Star Trek campaigns grew out of what was to be a mini-campaign…but I had a clear vision of the universe where machine intelligence like Data was becoming more commonplace, and the slow decay of the Federation society through sloth brought about by generations of people not working for a living and spending all their time in adult education classes (Ever notice that, besides Starfleet and the occasional sicentist, everyone in the TNG and after universe were mostly artists?) The machines were taking over and trying to save the biological creatures by reintroducing artificial scarcity and other reasons for people to strive. Each campaign was a piece of that storyline with a different set of characters involved in some way.

Babylon 5 was even more direct: they were part of another group fighting the Shadows during the war. When the war ended, the campaign fizzled. My Serenity campaign was running well until they had effectively slipped the bonds of the Alliance and their yakuza opponents. Interest in the campaign died off after that.

I would suggest that sci-fi isn’t the problem when it comes to nihilistic behavior in a game. It’s the parameters of the game and the type of players/characters that are inhabiting it.

Over at Nevermet Press, the boys are having their latest RPG Blog Carnival. The topic was supposed to be Technology and Your Game Table, but they thought that would be boring. So instead, they went with the terrible “What Makes a Roleplaying Game Bad Ass?”

“What, in your view, is the most Bad Ass game out — or ever!? What tweaks, mods, fixes have you houseruled to make your favorite games even more bad ass?Why is Savage Worlds so much more Bad Ass than [insert the rest]? =P And last, but not least, remember the last time you were explaining some new mechanic or story plot point to another gamer and they just simply said “Oh, that’s just Bad Ass!” What was it that was so Bad Ass?!”

I think any game that does the job of helping the players have fun and the GM tell a story (or for those that like the more distributed storytelling — like Primetime Adventures — everyone tell a story) is “bad ass” (read: effective.) Some settings lend themselves to the sobriquet than others — espionage games, superheroes, pulp action… Whatever floats your boat.

For me, the most effective system I’ve used for espionage/modern action is the old James Bond:007 rules set, as evidenced by the support it gets on the website. I’m rather partial to Cortex for its simplicity, but the surprisingly amount of crunch it has; the mechanics just seem to work for me. It’s similar to Savage Worlds but I think it’s more streamlined.

FATE seems like, in the right hands, it could be very cool…those hand just aren’t mine, so that also leaves out Cortex Plus (aka Leverage and the execrable Smallville.) Otherwise, there’s no system that is “bad ass” to me.

Settings are where the “bad ass” moniker is more appropriate. Hollow Earth Expedition is bad ass: Naxis, dinosaurs, and a hollow freakin’ Earth! Space: 1889 is bad ass: Victorian steam powered sci fi on Mars!

What really makes an RPG bad ass is good players, characters, and the fun of doing things you wish you could in real life. It’s getting together with friends on a regular basis and throwing life aside for a few hours a week.

On the original topic: I’ve found the iPad to be an indispensable tool for running a game. I can use Dropbox to transfer files, game book pdfs are in iBooks. Diceshaker for rolling for NPCs, Google Maps for setting information in the latest espionage adventure (set in Ciudad del Este), Penultimate to draw maps, etc,.; hit the internet to call up a picture of a type of car or gun, or snag info from a wiki online. The battery lasts 10 hours, wifi+3G means you can usually get onto the net if needed, the screen is big enough for the players to see maps, pictures, etc.