5 May, 2015

Short Film: State Zero

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Here’s Andrée Wallin’s State Zero — in which a small military team has to investigate a downed comms tower in a devastated Stockholm, Sweden. Of course, things don’t go to plan…

 

4 May, 2015

Chases in Atomic Robo RPG (or Fate…)

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Chases are an integral part of the pulp genre, which Atomic Robo most certainly inhabits, and our first two sessions of the game have included chase sequences — a delivery van vs. a giant kaiju crab, then a motorcycle vs. car/boat chase in the Philadelphia Naval Yards of the 1940s. Going off of the rules in the game, this can be done one of two ways — if it’s to be a short chase, say you have to get far enough to find a place to hide, or the opponent only has to go a short distance to escape, you can play it as a straight challenge, or you can run it as a contest — where the PCs have to get a certain number of victories in a certain number of rolls (we did the latter…)

But to really give chases character, something they really need to get that pulp flavor, you need something a little extra. One thing you can do is break the chase into a number of zones, each having its own particular stunt or setting to overcome while trying to catch the bad guy. You can also set a victory parameter for when the prey in the chase escapes. Since characters in the same zone are assumed to be able to get into direct conflict, lets assume this is “close” range — if the pursued can gain a victory in a chase over their opponent, they get to be a zone away and can only be attacked by long arms (let’s call this “long”) and also gain a +1 boost to their next chase test. If they can gain a second success, they are two zones ahead and are at extreme range with a +2 boost for the next test. With three victories, they have escaped. If you want to make it more interesting, if the opponent “steals” a victory from their prey during the chase, and close the distance. A success with style — for either side — would count as two victories.

The end point of a chase would be one of two events: the prey either gains 3 victories and escapes, or the pursuer is successful in catching their opponent by gaining a success in while in the same zone — perhaps they’ve tackled the guy, or cut off the fleeing suspect and stopped their car.

You can make the chases more interesting by allowing different skills. Perhaps during the car chase in which your characters are involved, they have managed to gain a zone from the bad guys. Instead of using Vehicles, they might choose Stealth, and try to hide the car in a convenient alley or behind that semi truck; maybe they bailed out of the car and hide (Athletics) — a success would count as another victory, mechanically, but would give the chase more character.

If the pursuer has caught them, there’s always the possibility of fighting. Maybe the pursuer has gotten a victory on a chase contest and has now “caught” them…the characters might decide to fight by using their vehicle to try and force the other off the road — you would use Vehicles or Combat in a direct challenge here with the stakes being the other car is disabled or crashed, or they are caught.

Example time: the opening motorcycle chase in Skyfall is an excellent example of giving zones their own character. The chase starts in a Crowded Bazaar, in the same zone. It progresses through Busy Streets, then onto Angled, Tiled Rooftops, before jumping though a big window into Covered Bazaar, then to Moving Train (where it turns into a foot chase.) There are five zones — each with decent character in their Aspects — and in Skyfall it would seem that the bad guy is never able to gain more than a single victory from Bond, before they are on the train. Bond “catches” the guy on the roof and the action moves from a chase contest to conflict.

Opponents, of course, could also throw aspects on scenes, as per the rules, to give these scenes more character, like Stained Glass Window on the Covered Bazaar scene — you’re going to have to take that bike through the window to follow!

These are just a few ideas to give chases a bit more character in a Fate-based game.

 

1 May, 2015

Play Report: Atomic Robo RPG, Pt. 2

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The second installment of our Atomic Robo game went well last night. In it, we jumped from the modern day (see the last play report a bit down the page) to Philadelphia, 1943. This first of several WWII “issues” was titled “The Philadelphia Experiment” — in which the Strategic Science Division and Office of Naval Intelligence tried to cloak a destroyer, USS Eldridge, with some Teslatech they got from the inventor’s destroyed labs (this was established in the comics…) They have no idea how it works, and the players tried to do some brainstorming to figure it out.

One of the players has a “Gearhead” weird mode we made up (see Finch from the She Devils) — a WAVES aviation machinist’s mate that just has a knack of gizmos. She realizes it pulls its power from the Earth’s magnetic field, somehow. During the test, the ship is cloaked or gone for ten minutes, but for the crew — one of the PCs was aboard — it’s a harrowing few seconds of bulkheads dematerializing, strange electric effects, and other weirdness. A later brainstorming session they decide that it might have created some kind of Einstein-Rosen bridge.

Note: the brainstorming sessions are less fun than I suspect they would be for a bigger group — we have two players and a GM, right now, and that cuts down on the back and forth banter I think these sessions are supposed to generate. Still a great set of mechanics, though.

The science is interrupted by imposter FBI agents collecting the plans to take them to the vault on the Philadelphia Naval Yards. A foot chase ensured that led to a throw down with local mobster mooks. While the PC naval officer was fighting and interrogating one of the suspects, the WAVE and an NPC member of the SSD chase down a shore police jeep with the other bad guy on a messenger’s Harley-Davidson. The officer learns the mooks have been hired by a dame — English — and they are taking them to the rendezvous by boat and grabs the a nearby Chrysler Airflow and tried to catch up in the chase.

It’s taking some getting used to throwing aspects on zones and scenes — I’m used to doing that on the fly and narratively — but we’ll get there, I think. The chase wound up on the wharf, where the baddies were transferring to a launch. The Chrysler wrecks into the jeep and takes out a mook, and the harley hits the Chrysler and the whole shee-bang winds up in the Delaware. Now with the bad guys having a big lead, they give chase in another launch that wound up with a wreck and gun fight in the marshes south of the yards.

The bad guys got away — the players got fate points for conceding so we could continue the story — but they find out the English dame is possibly Eurasian and was holed up in a boarding hotel on Carpenter Street that the naval officer knows. Turns out, he’d had a drunken night a few weeks back with the girl and knows what she looks like. He has to talk his way out of being a suspect in the whole issue and vows to catch her, convincing the SSD leader to take him on the mission to stop her.

They track her on a TWA transcontinental flight to San Francisco and give chase, requisitioning a B-25 that was headed to Crissy Field. That was the end of Issue 2. Next week, issue 3: The Face of the Enemy.

The general consensus is that this version of Fate runs very smoothly and quickly. The mechanics are simpler, in some ways than the gigantic list of aspects you have in normal Fate (5 compared to 10.) I’ve noticed we’re plowing through adventures in about a 2.5 hour session, rather than the usual two 3 hour sessions of something like Battlestar Galactica. Partly, that the pulp genre nature of clipping along on a story rather than wallowing in character development, partly the mechanics lend to a faster play (we think.) I’m still not a huge fan of the +/nought/- dice mechanic, but it’s not awful. I rather think the Cortex Plus d4-d12 is a bit more fun, if only because it entertains the classic fun of rolling polyhedral dice.

I’m not won over from classic Cortex for some of the campaigns I’ve got in mind for the future, but this version of Fate and the pulp universe of Atomic Robo lends itself well to doing some of the niche campaigns (a ’40s spy game, a ’70s blaxploitation/James Bond-style action game) and allows me to connect these disperate ideas I’ve had in a single campaign and system of rules.

So far, so good.

 

29 April, 2015

I Know It’s Strange to Some…

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…but I’m actually more interested in seeing Ex Machina than Avengers 2. I’m sure the Marvel blockbuster is going to be full of action, spectacular visuals, Joss Wheedon-quippitude, and a surprise death by some beloved minor character just ’cause… It’sll be one of those you have to see in the big screen to really get the impact.

I also suspect it will have the issue most writer-director projects these days suffer from…they forget to hire a friggin’ editor. Avengers 2, like the first, is around 2 1/2 hours long, and I’m sure the final battle sequence will be about half the run time of a normal film. (The first had a bloody 40 minute action sequence!) I’ve been finding the really long action sequences in the Marvel movies are starting to, well, bore me. Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier was excellent at balancing action and story/character development, at giving the audience time to breathe and feel…until the final sequence which was just on the edge of being, to use a cinematography term: too damned long. I absolutely love Guardians of the Galaxy, and think it’s the best space opera since The Empire Strikes Back…but the battle over Nova Prima, again, was starting to tip over that point where an action scene stops being breathtaking, and starts being tedious.

For the most egregious example of this, find Peter Jackson’s King Kong — where every single scene was about 10-15% too long. The restored spider pit scene? Brilliant and truly scary for the first 4 hours… Another good example of how throwing too many action scenes into a movie breaks the narrative and winds up being a bit mundane, see Quantum of Solace. Now compare it to the spare, slick John Wick from this year: no shaky camera bullshit, action scenes that are tight, well-executed, and stop before they carry on too long so that you can have a breather and do exposition and character development.

Weirdly, I find myself suspicious that the “good” Marvel movie this year will actually be Ant Man — despite losing Edgar Wright, his influence may linger enough to give us a funny but poignant caper film stuffed into the interstices of the MCU.

Meanwhile, Ex Machina has had some pretty intriguing trailers and is getting an 89% on Rotten Tomatoes, as of this writing. It looks to be a thoughtful sci-fi flick. Yes, they’re different animals — blockbuster action pick vs. low budget sci-fi thriller…but the more I see of Avengers 2, the more I’m getting this feeling I’m going to be disappointed.

 

29 April, 2015

New Call of Duty: Black Ops III Commercial is Good Sci-Fi Worldbuilding

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29 April, 2015

The Five Stages of Watching a Marvel Movie

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…from the folks at How It Should Have Ended:

 

23 April, 2015

Play Report: Atomic Robo RPG

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So, we finally got the first session/”issue” of our Atomic Robo game up and running. In it, the characters are playing agents of the Office of Scientific Intelligence — a superscience spy agency, ala SHIELD, that likes to think of itself as the stand-up spy agency. They see the antics of Majestic 12 as dangerous and counterproductive…but do a lot of shady stuff, as well.

The characters the players picked were Agent Craig Scott, the smooth-talking ladies man and bureaucrat; the other chose the parkour-action engineer, Agent James Crille. The discarded characters became NPCs — a cryptobiologist and a Silicon Valley roboticist.

The first issue was more of an introduction ti the mechanics, the universe, and the flavor of the game: the team was dispatched to Ōshima, Japan to investigate a possible cover-up of what was going on at the Fukushima nuclear reactor by the company running the place, a division of Big Science! Hojin (Big Science! from the comic.) They slip in, use robots to investigate they are running from a panel van, disguised at power company employees. They biffed a few rolls during their brainstorming as to the strange green fluorescent material and unusually low radiation and temperatures in the reactor room, (Recently reported in real life…) so I had their activities discovered by Big Science!, who dispatch Science Team Super 5 — a Power Rangers-esque team of hero scientists from the comics.

Scott proceeds to hit the Deceive skill hard, playing it up as him being — gaijin and all — a member of the power company thrilled to meet them and asking for autographs. A great roll made better by the player going fanboy in the extreme and speaking in Japanese! They’ve just about made it out without issue when an earthquake strikes. The other player and NPCs witness something moving in the reactor: a giant monstrous thing that eats their robot. Said kaiju monster then busts out of the plant: it’s a giant crab, several stories tall, breathing atomic fire, and rampaging through the city.

Science Team Super 5 makes their attempt to fight the creature with no luck, but dispatches Scott and company, with Guardian Pink to grab their giant “monster stomping robot” (that was one of the aspects) to fight this “folly of man” (one of the crab’s aspects.) Rocket launcher action, giant robot armed with giant sword piloted by our parkour hero and Guardian Pink, and loads of collateral damage later, and they’ve taken the creature down.

This included using the “collateral consequence” rules to keep Scott from getting fried with a 8 shift physical harm when the crab lit up Big Science!’s local HQ with the atomic breath. Later, Scott used a contact-based stunt to create an aspect on the JSDF officer that had come to arrest them; he was a friend of Scott from the ’90s when they “fought the yakuza together.” His team safely free of jail time for espionage or destroying section of Ōshima, they find out the earthquake was some kind of seismic and gravitational event out in the Bonin Islands. An island has mysteriously appeared in the space of three hours, wrecking havoc on the weather and seas around it, and creating tsunamis.

They are contacted by OSI and told to meet up with a carrier group near the event. After a helicopter ride in which they watch the recon flight of an EA-18G Growler that loses power as it nears the island and is lost. The team brainstorms that the island is the creating the weather, oceanic, and gravitational anomalies and might itself be an island sized machine of some sort.

They arrive on the carrier and get briefed by the group’s admiral on a mission by the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Strategic Science Division in November 1943…

That was the cliffhanger for the night.

Overall, the game played swiftly and with almost no need to look in the book at the rules. There were a few issues with using stunts and aspects but those were sorted out quickly. The big thing we missed was using fate points like plot points in Cortex to “get out of death” by buying down damage.

I’ve only quizzed on player so far on the mechanics, but the quick consensus was that the stripped down Atomic Robo version of Fate played much quicker and easier than Fate normally does, and that it well suited the tone of the comics and the style of play it was trying to evoke. I only had to explain bits of the rules for the Fate newbie for 5 minutes or so; the rest was on the fly. I did think that it might be handy to have some Post-It notes for tracking the aspects. Atomic Robo doesn’t have as many crowding up the field as, say, Firefly, so it was much more manageable, but the stickies will make it more convenient. For Fate points, we used spent 5.7mm casings, like we do for Battlestar Galactica…works great, as they are small and a bunch fit in an old Fossil watch box (that has something about Peace and Love on it.)

The only real issue was balancing the opposition to the characters. The crab was a bit over powerful, so I stepped it down a bit to fit better. We thought that having another player would aid in the banter that the game seems to want to create with the brainstorming rules — again, mimicking the style of the comics.

Overall, I was very pleased with the first run of the game, even though it was a short intro session, and I’m looking forward to next week, when we flashback to 1943.

For those who are interested…the Fukushima Crab Monster!

FUKUSHIMA CRAB CREATURE

Modes & Skills: Superb +5 Kaiju: Atomic Breath, Physique, Provoke, Tooth and Claw +6 (Epic); Aspect: City-Stomping Monster. Great +4 Mutant; The Folly of Man. Good +3 Crab: Combat +3; Claw!

Stresses — Physical: 5 Mental: 2

Stunts: 10 stories high! Bulletproof and fearproof. Physique to defend against other attacks. Weapon 4 for strength attacks; Wake of Destruction: Success w/ Style & FP to cause lowest collateral damage consequence in addition to any other harm; Atomic Breath: Weapon 4

…and on the other side…

GUARDIAN MECHA

Modes & Skills: Great (+4) Mecha: Athletics, Combat, Physique, Provoke +4; Aspect: Monster-Stomping Mecha.

Stunts: Walking Tank: Use Physique vs. combat, Armor 2; Advanced Sensor Suite: +1 to Notice; Giant Melee Weapons: Weapon 4

Stresses: Physical 4 Mental (use character’s)

 

22 April, 2015

Atomic Robo RPG, Special Guest…

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We’ll be starting out first Atomic Robo game — something I’ve been looking forward to doing for months, now. Our first volume The Perils of Science! will start in modern day, but several of the middle issues will take place in 1943, during World War II.

One of the “special guests” in one of the issues, taking place at the Philadelphia Naval Yards will be…

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

Concept Aspect: Science-Fiction Engineer, Omega Aspect: Pulmonary Tuburculosis

Modes and Skills:  Good (+3) Banter: Provoke, Will +4, Contacts, Deceive, Empathy, Rapport +3; Aspect: Failed Politician. Fair (+2) Science!: Aeronautical Engineering +4, Naval Engineering, Notice, Physics +3; Aspect: Thin line between science-fiction & science fact. Average (+1) Action: Combat +2, Athletics, Physique, Vehicles +1; Aspect: Best swordsman in the navy!

Stunts: Do the Math!: 1 fate point to use Will for one Science! skill for a scene; Forceful Personality: Use Will for Rapport when attempting seduction or initial attempts to befriend; Mind Over Matter: 1/scene, can check a mental stress box to absorb a physical hit; Storyteller: If talking to people for a few minutes, gains a free boost on them in Deceive or Rapport tests; Will Over Illness: 1/issue, can take a complication and add the value to a single test.

Stresses:   Physical 2, Mental 4

At the time, Heinlein was a naval reserve officer (lieutenant) working as an aerospace engineer at the Philadelphia Naval Yard, where he met his true love, the amazingly intelligent and redheaded “Ginny” Gerstenfeld., a lieutenant in the WAVES.

He will be working the the Strategic Science Division to try and create a device to cloak ships from radar and sight using confiscated Teslatech after the explosion at that famed inventor’s home/laboratory.

 

21 April, 2015

After Action Report: Battlestar Galactica RPG

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It’s been a while since I’ve thrown up an AAR for our Battlestar Galactica game, mostly due to a series of missed nights here and there, and a plotline that didn’t finish ’til last week. When last I wrote an update on the campaign, we had once again faced down The Blaze, or Hades, who was attempting to regain control over the Cylons and the humanoid “Cylons” or Seraph using an old shard of a TITAN. The ensuing battle was brutal and a lot of people and Seraph from a rogue basestar that the fleet had allied with wound up dead, and one of their vessels, Cygnus, destroyed.

The two surviving ships limped back to Argos, an ancient Kobolian outpost that had been left, more or less, unprotected during the mission. Among the survivors were the Lords of Kobol ATHENA, HERMES, and HEPHAESTUS. The last began directing repairs and refit to the two warships with an estimated time of about two months to finish. This gave us the choice of jump the game two months and get on with it, or delve into the politics and personal responses to battles with gods, three different races trying to coexist in an uneasy alliance, and some sci-fi exploration of the giant city and citadel the Kobolians had been driven out of by the Blaze 3000-4000 years ago. We went for the latter…

One of the main plotline that dominated the next weeks involved the settling on Argos to harvest food and collect food animals, as well as to do archeological work at the citadel. Earlier, the DNA and DNA-storage of memories for the Kobolians had been found, and the bodies of these lords resurrected. POSEIDON is the main antagonist in this mix — he’s trying to get the Citadel up and running, and is generally fixated on trying to recover the Olympian archives from their DNA storage…but the machines of the place are millennia old, and one of the PCs — a computer engineer turned policeman in the fleet — and Dr. Baltar have to cobble together patches to get their machines to read the data. Other Kobolians include the violent, frat boy-ish ARES, Athena’s major domo NIKE, and ARTEMIS, who is mostly gathering women into her own little cult and hunting animals with abandon. Over the course of the adventures, they were finally able to crack the database and find out that 90% or so of the DNA was still legible. Massive amounts of history, technical achievement, and the DNA and memories of 256 Kobolians were recoverable. More on that in a moment.

Meanwhile, one of the PCs, a veterinarian-turned-medic who had been working on the issue of Seraph reproduction (and with Baltar cracked it) has stirred up some animosity between the Seraph of the vessel Resurrection 3 and ATHENA, the prime minister to the interim president. (We’ve already had a coup attempt that killed many of the government officials.) Tensions are high, so that when a strange virus that eats the silica-based circuitry of Seraph turns up — giving encephalitis-like effects and causing data disruption during direct communications between models — things quickly spin out of control.

The characters manage to quarantine the diseased Seraph — the humans are immune, save those with “puppetry” implants — but the Health Minister, Dr. Michael Robert, sees his opportunity to destroy the Seraph once and for all. He infects the vet and clears her to go back to her research on Resurrection 3, where she immediately spreads the infection to several dozen Seraph. After the fleet isolates the ship and shuts down the various Cylon ship networks, they are able to contain the outbreak. However, it becomes quickly apparent this was no accident, and the marshal’s service that handles the civilian policing figures out that Robert was at fault. Under questioning by police, aided by Hermes, Robert admits he tried to commit genocide.

Athena has to take this to the Seraph, who want blood and are ready to spill it for satisfaction. She and the vet are able to talk the Seraph down, but the Fours — who suffered the brunt of the infection — are not pleased with the prime minister’s solution: Robert will stand trial for his actions with a tribunal of Kobolian (Poseidon), human (ADM Pindarus), and Seraph (a Nine — our version of Leoben) presiding. They are expediting the trial, but this is not enough for the Fours, who conspire in their model, and with some help from the Fives (a vicious female model in our campaign) and some Sevens (Ares-like warrior) launch an attack on the prime minister and the Kobolian who had set themselves up on Resurrection 3 to control the impressive biological labs and other medical equipment.

They use cyanobacteria to make tetradotoxin and manage to nearly kill NIKE, but only injure Athena. In a brutal bit of combat, the goddess of war takes down about three dozen Seraph, in our first real look at what she can do when fully armored, armed, and angry. The commander of the basestar, a Three that’s not fully trusted by her people as she was suggested by the Colonials, is trying to hold everything together before they find themselves in a fight with the mostly repaired Galactica; their basestar, on the other hand, is surrounded by flattops and foundry ships working on her…they are in a terrible tactical position.

There was a lot of politicking and trying to convince both sides to stop making the same damned mistakes over and over…allowing their hatred and past to drive them into retributive actions. In the end, they manage to keep their shaky alliance together, especially after the Robert trial finds him — almost by necessity — guilty. This angers a lot of the Colonials who saw him not as a prospective mass murderer, but as a hero to the people. In the end, the efforts to keep the fleet together to continue to Earth have mostly failed, with 40,000 or so remaining on Argos, while 17,000 travel with Galactica and Basestar 19 to that mythic world.

One of the things was saw was the different Seraph, now avoiding the dangerous use of direct electronic communication between their units, starting to take on different characters. Just among the Threes, one self-hating sleeper agent that had helped destroy a major base is now firmly on the side of the Colonials and is even in a love affair; the commander of the basestar is increasingly interested in military camaraderie and a developing friendship with the admiral that started more out of necessity and is now about how alike they are; another is trying to develop a sense of humor and is terrible at jokes… The Seraph are becoming people.

The rump fleet left for Earth at the end of the last adventure, leaving the people under the care of Poseidon’s citadel. The sea god had a number of his fellow Kobolians resurrected using fancy flesh 3D printing, etc…onyl to find out that Athena had convinced one of the techs to bring back one particular DNA signature. Instead of ruling as king here on Argos, Poseidon found himself facing a new ZEUS.

We’re now taking a break to do some Atomic Robo, but the last “season” of our now four year long campaign will focus on the weird posthuman/transhumans of the worlds near Earth, as well as checking in on what happened to Pegasus, which – realizing the Seraph/Cylon war put them in an advantageous position, returned to the Colonies to try and destroy toasters and save more survivors on the 12 Worlds.

We should be getting back to Galactica later in the summer, I suspect.

 

21 April, 2015

First Impressions: Ducati Scrambler

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My local dealer finally got one of the most anticipated bikes of the year in this week, the 2015 Ducati Scrambler Icon (or Scrambler Ducati, whatever…) I took it out for a bit this morning to get acquainted, as I’ve liked the look and the reviews have been positive.

2015-04-19 11.35.40First, the styling — it’s a small bike and a nice tip of the hat to the Scrambler of old, but this is a modern bike. It’s just a no-frills modern bike. I hate the over-the-tire bumper thing Ducati and other bike companies have been doing, the faux-aluuminum panels on the sides of the metal tank look a bit cheap, but the single, off-side instrument cluster is a nice touch, the seat is wide and comfortable, and in yellow, it’s not too obnoxious.

Comfort: I was only out for a half hour or so, but that’s about the length of time most folks are going to commute or hit the local coffeeshop with this thing. It’s sprung a little soft, but I don’t mind that. The stock bars are a bit high, but I found that once I got used to them, they didn’t bother me. You could probably have your dealer roll them down and back ten degrees or so and be happy. Leg position is comfortable, although I’m splayed out a bit more than on the Triumph Thruxton I have.

Function: It’s not fast like most Ducatis, and if I get one of these, almost guaranteed it’ll be near year’s end when some doofus who bought this is getting rid of it because it’s not Ducati enough for them. It’s still very quick. All this BS in the magazines about it not being able to “launch” is crap; she takes off nicely, and I redlined the thing in second handily in acceleration. It won’t rip you off the seat, but it’ll get you to speed faster than my Triumph. It’s light and very, very nimble, with copious lock to lock turn on the bars. I was able to U-turn without issues, several times, in residential streets. The brakes are good and come on more progressively than the usual Ducati. Mash down, though, and it STOPS. The shocks are a bit soft, but the bike is overall comfortalbe, very easy to ride, and quick enough to get the blood pumping.

No, it’s not a 1299 Panigale. You want that, go waste $20,000+ on a bike you’ll never use the whole power band on. I’ll take one of these in a heartbeat.

After riding this, I transitioned to my 2010 Thruxton, and I could feel the weight gain, immediately, and while it handes very well, it’s not nimble.. The Scrambler’s a great pop around town bike — nimble, light, quick. At $8,500-ish after tax to get on one, it’s a definite buy.

 

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