The Black Campbell

Most of us want to play big, strappin’, competent characters — the clever mage, the powerful fighter, the ultra-suave spy, the tough or  sexy femme fatale…but sometimes, stepping out of the usual can provide the player and group with a bit of fun. One thing I’ve rarely seen people rush to play is a child. Not a toddler, mind you, but the pre-teen/teenager.

Why would anyone want to play a kid? 1) In the case of prepubescents, and unless you’re a member of NAMBLA or B4U-ACT, it removes the sexual aspects from the character. This is especially nice for the younger player, or for that newbie that doesn’t want to get wrapped up in the weirdness of intercharacter relationships. 2) Children provide both particular challenges and benefits in many settings, that aren’t the case with most adult characters. 3) It makes the players have to think and work at the play…and that’s fun!

Point 1: My wife recently started playing. She’s new to gaming and she’s seems a bit uncomfortable with the idea of inter-character relationships (but I could be reading into things.) Her favorite character was a toss-off, a recovered character from a then-abortive campaign set in 1936 China (now resurrected and running well): “Shanghai Sally” — an 11 year old street urchin and thief that works for one of the other characters. There’s no sexual tension between her and the other characters, there’s no distraction with boys, etc…she’s all about the fun and the score.

Point 2: Sally provides some unexpected benefits to the player. As a child in a city full of homeless or itinerant children, she’s invisible for the most part. People don’t notice her doing surveillance while playing in the street. People don’t concern themselves much with an underage, dirty street girl poking around the bad guys’ hideout, save maybe that she might steal something. She doesn’t tend to attract violence, save a disdainful cuff to the head by the local toughs and cops. She’s small and fits into places the adult characters can’t. No one expects her to pull a Colt .380 Pony out of her pants. She’s been able to play the cute factor a few times to keep from getting pulped by bad guys.

The downsides are obvious: she’s not strong, big, or particularly talented in fighting. In fisticuffs, she usually comes away the worse for wear if someone lands a blow. She’s not as fast as adults, but she is quicker, able to dodge, weave, and use small spaces to escape. She has no real rights as a minor — the state can do what it likes with her. She only garners a certain level of respect, no matter how effective (she’s their “monkey”)…because she’s a kid. She doesn’t have money or a real job.

Point 3: Unlike what I expected, she’s turned Sally into a fantastic part of the campaign — our Short Round, if you will. Sally has just enough fighting skills to get herself into trouble if no dealing with a mook, and that leads to complications and more fun. She has to think her way out of trouble and uses her surroundings to her advantage (I think that’s the first time I’ve seen a hotel luggage cart used as a weapon!) She provides comic relief by making the other characters have to worry about the kid in their midst. She’s fun, and she makes the game fun.

So kids…an interesting role to take on for a game, if you’re thinking about something different.

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.