26 May, 2016

Black Flags

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We left the Hollow Earth Expedition game last week with the characters in a cliffhanger showdown with pirates in the muddy streets of San Antonio — a trading outpost in “the World” that was a melting pot of different races on the coast, a few days downriver from Argatha, the City of the Devi, where the Eye of Shambala deposited them.

The fight was on, with Lady Zara taking a pop at the pirate captain, only to come zero on the successes. He drops her with a smack of his pistol. Hunter, a former Marine during the Great War, proves supremely effective with his spear and take two of the pirates.  Gustav, furious at nearly getting his head blown off, pummels the captain insensate. Zara’s monkey, Rigoletto had distracted one of the men by jumping in his face and scratching him, allowing Gould, with some judicious use of style points, to takes out another, and injure a second. Finally, Zara drops one of the baddies with her bow.

While they are taking stock and grabbing guns and other things from the pirates, they are surrounded by more — Asians, this time, and led by a 7’2″ African named Tongo. Tongo and his crew are “black flags”, pirates under the chua te or “lord” Van Trihn, the pirate king of San Antonio. They were called by Phan Li, the brother owner who watched them take out Captain Santiago –a troublemaker at the best of times. Trihn himself arrives to thank them and drag Santiago and his remaining thugs off to a certain ill fate. After Zara charms them, and vice-versa, they are invited to dinner at the Citadel.

There they meet other captains — Papa Tome, the French Creole from Louisiana who sailed into a fog bank off of Bermuda in 1889, and emerged here; Tomas Franco, an acquaintance of Zara’s uncle Trevor, who was lost through a “vortex” in an Olmec temple he’d discovered in the Yucatan in 1924; Trihn arrived after his ship came through a storm in the South China Sea when he was a young man. None of them look as aged as they should be. Franco speculates, having traveled all over the “Inner World” as he calls it, that people with a particular psychic resonance or character are drawn into this place, that it seeks them out.

Through the party, the characters get roaring drunk and gorged on food. Zara lets slip that they are looking to return to the Surface World, and that they hope to return. Gould drunkenly hints at Atlanteans and Atlantis to Franco. Eventually, Trihn figures out one of them has “the blood”… He tells his story, of how he has secured the prosperity of San Antonio by protecting the crews of the town from the monsters and creatures that roam the waters of the Straits of Varuna. He shows them this insurance policy — a mermaid named Osha that is either the daughter or an important personage in their pod or school or whatever they call it. None dare attack their ships, now.

After dropping off, the characters (save Zara, whose “deep sleeper” flaw came into play) find themselves captured by Trihn’s people. They want to trade Gould to the Vril-ya, who will pay well for those with the blood. gould tries to negotiate his way out, offering to broker modern gun deals to the pirates from the surface world in exchange for their freedom. It looks like the pirate might go for it, but his mistress Phan Li is more savvy, and we broke on the characters in cells under the palace.

The guards had missed Hunter’s stiletto, and he is just waiting for the chance to pick the lock of the door. Zara has been hurling invective at the guard and anyone else who will listen (or not), and Gus is recovering from the savage beat-down he took fighting the mighty Tongo.

They players were formulating escape plans from picking the lock and scooting for Argatha, to dealing straight with the pirates (who would most likely want to keep the women hostage to insure their return), to escaping and going the way they wouldn’t expect — to sea, possibly with the aid of their fellow prisoner, Captain Santiago.

These are all good setups for continued adventures, and showed the players were really getting into the world and situations. Also, we’ve been falling into a nice pattern of cliffhangers for the end of the evenings, something I hope to maintain.

 

13 May, 2016

Alternate Look at Gillman for Hollow Earth Expedition

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The official “gillmen” in Hollow Earth Expedition‘s Mysteries of the Hollow Earth sourcebook are anthropomorphic fish people. They have legs, and are pretty unseemly things. I was originally going to ignore them, but a possible angle to the current campaign has given me a possible use for an aquatic race. I just don’t like these ones…

05b9db24b04505837d649cee3db2e738I decided I wanted something with a more Abe Sapien vibe from Hellboy, but I also wanted them to be alien; a tail was something I thought was needed.

The obvious choice was to go full merfolk… But all the merfolk images tended to be sexy mermaid crap.

Then I stumbled onto Ian McCaig’s on the left. Similar enough to the Abe Sapien look I wanted.

So I reworked the Gillman package into the Mermen package.

Mermen

Ancient, mysterious, and the subject of intense superstition, merfolk are one of the more populous races in the Hollow Earth, but are rarely directly encountered. Their appearance ranges from truly alien — gilled, long tails, scaled, to strangely human. Some have even been rumored to have legs!

Physiologically, from the “waist” up they appear nearly human, but caudally they have long tails. Their faces are eerily human, but will large, dark eyes, gills to the sides of the head and neck. They have no apparent ears, but hear through their skin, using a form of echolocation. Additionally, they possess Ampullae of Lorenzini, like sharks, and can sense fain electrical fields, allowing them to find prey more easily. Some merfolk are known to wear jewelry about their bodies and it has been speculated that this may enhance this ability. Some have “hair” that look to be some kind of protective growth and tend to only be seen on the females.

Culture

Very little is known about the culture of the merfolk, other than they travel in “pods” of “schools” of a dozen to perhaps three or four dozen. They communicate through a complex tonal language that can be heard for tens of miles when they are underwater and is sometimes mistaken for whale-song by those from the Outer World. Some of the merfolk have been known to lure sailors to their deaths but hypnotizing them with certain frequencies and progressions in their songs.

They are romantic, impulsive, artistic, and philosophical, but they are also hardly pragmatic as a race in the highly competitive environment they live in can be.

They appear to believe in something called the “Great Deep” — an allegory for eternity. They claim to have been “created” by the Ancients that once populated “the World”, as most of the beastmen were.

Language

There are some that claim to have talked to these creatures, and that some have learned the speech of other denizens of the Hollow Earth.

Mermen Zero Level Skills

All mermen are assumed to have at least zero level (see the sidebar in Secrets of the Surface World) in Athletics, Brawl, Melee, Performance, Stealth, and Survival

Mermen Characteristics

Starting attribute adjustment: +1 Body, +1 Dexterity, -1 Strength, -1 Charisma

Natural Advantages: Aquatic (double movement rate  in water, but half Dexterity (round down) and movement on land; Captivate: Can use Performance to entrance a target for the number of rounds equal to their number of successes over the target’s Willpower; Gills: can breath in water; Echolocation: can “see” without light; Electroreception: can sense electrical fields in water, +2 perception in water; Siren Call: This is a longer version of Captivate that can only be used in non-violent situations. The length of time is in minutes equal to the number of successes over the target’s Willpower.

Normal Flaws: Dry Skin (after an hour will take 1N damage for each hour not hydrated.), Primitive

 

13 April, 2016

New Weapon for Hollow Earth Expedition: Knout

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Knout is Russian for a type of scourge or whip. Often they had multiple rawhide thongs attached to a stout and long handle (like a cat o’ nine tails), but could also be a single, whip body that was less flexible than a bullwhip; these were more like oversized saps. These were used to punish criminals and political offenders until their use was abolished in 1845, and replaced with that of the pletti.

A variation, known as the great knout, consisted of a handle about 60 cm (24 in) long, to which was fastened a flat leather thong about twice the length of the handle, terminating with a large copper or brass ring to which was affixed a strip of hide about 5 cm (2 in) broad at the ring, and terminating at the end of 60 cm (24 in) in a point. This was soaked in milk and dried in the sun to make it harder. some versions replaced the lead shot or iron rings at the ends with fish hooks.

cossack knout

The pletti was a shorter, triple thonged knot that usually had lead balls woven into the ends.

knout

Knout or pletti:   Damage: 1N   Range: 6′   Str: 1   Spd: A

Great knout:   Damage: 1N (1L hooks version)   Range: 10′   Str: 1   Spd: A

 

 

6 April, 2016

The Eye of Shambala, Part 3 (and Handling the No-Show)

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This week saw a schedule change to accommodate one of the group’s travel, and left us a player short due to their (understandably) work schedule. I considered a board game or movie night, or maybe a one shot of something, but after some consideration, realized I could do a side vignette.

Having players not show for a session is a perennial issue for tabletop gaming, especially as folks get older. They have kids, family issues, work travel, etc. and cannot always make it to the game. My group regularly shifts nights as people have these things impose themselves on our lives. So how to handle it? The above ideas are good — a movie night, just a dinner and chat night, play a board game or a short pick-up in another system — or you can go for the “side quest” (more on this in a moment…) Whatever you do, do something together.

Over 35 years (!) of doing this, I’ve realized that regularity is essential to keeping a group together. The point isn’t just to be doing this one thing. If that’s the lay of the land, your group is likely to fall apart over time because there’s no connection beyond the gaming table. Do stuff together. If the game is short a player, especially one that is essential to the plot or action that night, do something else.

In this case, we — in D&D terms — split the party and did a side quest. The player who runs Zara — ostensibly the “lead” for the campaign — had work and couldn’t make it to our last minute change of time. Fully understandable. We left the game with them having gotten key pieces of information, discovered a secret organization that was dogging their actions (the Terra Arcanum), and realized that the SS was still taking an interest in their expedition to Tibet. they had ended with a meeting of some of Zara’s old friends who turned out to be connected to the Terra Arcanum, and who were arranging for aid to meet them in India, mostly because they TA is interested in Dr. Gould and his apparent Atlantean heritage.

We did a quick bit of hand-waving — the airplane was still being repaired, as the mechanic could not get parts from American in less than a month, requiring him to machine parts for the engines. They’re stuck in Istanbul for another day. With this kicking off the night, I decided that Zara would most likely seek to find herself some diversion — in this case one of the underground jazz clubs in the city. And, of course, that necessitated a wardrobe purchase — after all, she’s only got some sensible day clothes and arctic wear for the mission. This had her out of pocket for the rest of the day and evening.

As a result, she’s not available when Dr. Gould gets word from the Rabinowitz Group — the local Jewish crime syndicate connected to the much more respectable Bosphorus Hebrew Relief Agency — that the men they had tussled with at Rudolf von Sebottendorf’s home last session had disappeared. Not just the three men in custody, but the one that had died of his gunshot wounds — straight out of the morgue! (A revelation that has our big game hunter, Gustav, knocked for a loop…he’s never killed a person before!) Worse, on being released by the Turkish police, the old occultist was scooped up by four men in a black Mercedes with registry plates connecting it to the German Embassy.

The group aids them in locating the Gestapo agents that have him: they are holed up in some kind of facility in the catacombs under the city near the German embassy — a place that they can do what they need to while remaining deniable by the official presence of the Reich. Gathering a few of Rabinowitz’s finest, which included a Ukrainian woman who uses a knout to terrifying effect, they mount a rescue during a thunderstorm, capturing one of the lookouts guarding an entrance into the catacombs, them bursting in to rescue the old man from the SS.

Gathering Sebottendorf up, they make a run for it while Rabinowitz and Gustav keep the Germans’ heads down, only to wind up in a car chase and gunfight they eventually escape. After patching the old man up and getting him presentable clothes, they get him on a train to Ankara where he “has friends” and can hide out for a few weeks until things blow over.

Gould (an alcoholic) and Gustav (bereaved of murdering someone, even in self-defense) retreat to their hotel to get drunk, and we ended with them toddling up the stairs for bed…

Of course, Zara will have found some action, as well, and the start of next week’s session will cover her evening. That’s the key to the side quest — it should take a short period of time and reasonably cover something the other players might not have had a chance to be involved in. More importantly, when you come back, show what the other character was up to. In this case, it was a swanky party, but perhaps if you’re dungeon crawling, the player had separated to relieve themselves only to have encountered a [creature or trap] and were temporarily waylaid, maybe they had a run-in with an old antagonist, or they discover a highly important object or bit of information that could aid the party. They should have a short moment in the spotlight where they have to be able to get out of the predicament on their own and look awesome doing it. Keep the stakes low enough to use this teaser to have fun and show that they were doing something equally interesting or important, and nto penalize the player for whatever kept them away the game before.

 

27 March, 2016

Example of Play: Ubiquity

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Here’s a video of the Google Hangout session of Triple Ace Games’ Leagues of Gothic Horror using the Ubiquity system (the same used for Space:1889 and Hollow Earth Expedition.) Here the GM is Runeslinger, a regular commenter on these pages, and Andre Martinez, in addition to yours truly. I’ve been sick for several weeks, so my voice is a bit quiet in the video.

Here you’ll see examples of use of style points, how to “take the average”, which I do quite a bit.

 

7 March, 2016

Starting a New Hollow Earth Campaign

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I discussed this particular game in another post, but that was aimed more at the idea of reusing old game ideas. Still, for those readers who frequent the site, there will be a lot of reused verbiage.

We had brought on a new player, one of the core group was away on vacation, so I thought I’d try them out on Hollow Earth Expedition. It had been four years since the death of the marvelously over-the-top Shanghai Campaign. We’d made a few abortive attempts to get a new campaign going, but the characters and the players just weren’t connecting. So, using the bones of a one-shot I ran for a Meetup RPG group, I put together a “backdoor pilot” using the same basic plot — the characters were looking for an academic that was lost in Equatorial Guinea, and claims to have found the mythic white apes of the Congo. Evil corporate interests with the backing of the local peninsulares are looking to stop word of the apes from getting out because…what does it really matter? They’re the bad guys. Little hints, in this case in the form of one character’s fascination with American pulp novels, allowed me to do a bit of foreshadowing. The lost city and white apes sounded a lot like Opar of the Tarzan books (which the character is reading during the downtimes — Tarzan and the Ant-Men — according to the player) and the Lovecraft short story Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.

Here the missing fellow is Lord Trevor Ansom — Oxford Classics lecturer who runs about the world looking for mythic stuff. He’s a WWI vet, a bit addled thanks to serious PTSD, but just because he’s a bit weird doesn’t mean he’s not often right… The plot hinged on someone that would have the emotional connection to want to rescue him, and I wanted the new player to be the “lead” for the game. Her character: Margaret Ansom-Bose, recent divorcee and one-time companion of her uncle, who took her in after the death of her father in the War, and her mother from Spanish Influenza. She’s a “modern woman” who came of age as a flapper and an aviatrix in the ’20s, but after the Crash got married to an American oil tycoon to keep the family afloat. She’s a Beryl Markham sort of “damn it all, let’s have some fun!” sort.

The player leapt on this, but due to a series of crappy rolls over the course of two nights, this super competent woman kept coming up the damsel in distress for the other character to aid. Instead of decrying the situation, she’s added it to the flavor of Bose — she’s hyper-capable and useful until she needs to be a plot device. (I would point out, this makes her exactly the sort of heroine that was standard for 1930s/40s pulp.)

The next character was the problem one. The player in question just didn’t quite seem to jive with the pulp setting the two times we tried it. He had a big game hunter from Texas the first time around that just didn’t drop in well and the player didn’t connect with him. The second time he played a British occultist aristocrat…he liked the character but the notion didn’t sit well with me. I’ve found that unless magic or mind powers are common or ubiquitous, having a player with them sharply removes the feeling of danger and mystery from having powers loose in the game…it’s something bad guys have. The heroes have to overcome that. Look at almost every good horror/suspense piece — the good guys are usually outmatched and have to find some weakness that allows success. They don’t just hire a bigger sorcerer to take out the baddie.

The piece I was stealing from is set in Africa — big game territory. I took his original character of Gustav Hassenfeldt, and went to work with the editor’s scalpel. Background shifted from Texan of German descent to German who grew up in German East Africa until the British authorities tossed the family out in 1922. Didn’t connect with his dysfunctional homeland (and their actual family home is now in France and confiscated.) His parents moved to Texas to give me American adventure hooks, but he returned to hunting and being an  adventure guide for hire. There was my in to get the characters together. But the big reworking was to make him less arrogant and superb at his job (which he undeniably is — we’re talking Quigley Down Under levels of long shot goodness), less brash and impulsive, and made him a meticulous planner. Sensible and honest; a good man. This culminated nicely in a scene where he had the chance to take out a bunch of Spaniards at range and protect folks toward the end of night two, but quipped “This feels like murder…” This led to a non-violent solution to the scene — set up by the team’s combat bad-ass. It’s a great overturning of tropes. (He was also the guy referencing Tarzan.)

The first night started with getting the characters together through a mutual friend in Tangier. The necessary action scene to establish villains, get the characters to show their expertise and develop a connection, and set the stakes followed: goons hired by the Equatorial Lumber Company to get back the letter from Ansom, the map to his find, and (exposed) film wound up with a punch up and shootout on the harbor wall. Hassenfeldt character established himself as a guy that tried to talk his way out of big troubles, but is willing to throw a punch to be a gentleman and protect his employer (Bose.)

They travel by Bose’s old Sikorsky S-36 (stats are about the same as the S-38, here) over various points to Fernando Po, where they link up with the crew of Sylvia — the boat from the one shot, but now relegated to NPC status — who had been hired by the aforementioned contact in Tangier to get them upriver. The location they are going to will be inaccessible by airplane.

Here I was now back in the framework of the original one shot: a nighttime run past Spanish patrol boats, upriver until they are trapped by the Spanish in a tight section of the Benito River, rescue from the Spanish by the “lost” Professor Ansom and a platoon of gorillas led by a few white apes — gigantic, intelligent creatures that Ansom has befriended. They return to the city of the apes, called Mangani by the locals, and it is a place of strangeness: the color is all wrong, everything ooks like it is viewed through a funhouse mirror — geometry is peculiar, and the architecture looks almost Minoan. Ansom thinks it is an Atlantean outpost…and the piece de resistance is the temple, complete with a strange metal eye altar or icon (with the iris being an open space big enough for a few people to go through) — see the cover of Revelations of Mars for what I’m talking about.

hqdefault

They try to figure out some of the mysteries of the place, but the cameras don’t work — everything must be drawn and annotated. The apes can communicate, and Hassenfeldt helps Ansom train the apes to use the rifles they’ve taken from the Spanish. When Spaniards from the company show up, including a highly educated Jewish doctor named David Gould, they manage to defuse the situation. While showing the Spaniards the importance of the place and why they should cease their attempts to destroy the apes, they discover the doctor — when in proximity to the Eye — causes it to light up with a strange blue energy field. (Yeah — it’s a Stargate. Steal, people, steal!) The Eye firing up spooks the apes, who run away. While investigating, Hassenfeldt trips through the gate, and knocks Bose with him.

On the other side, it almost looks like they are in the Yucatan. The ground curves away for some distance…a massive valley? and they spot some kind of huge creature circling them in the air. A single shot from Hassenfeldt’s .375 magnum brings the creature down: it’s a pterodactyl! Realizing how alone and possibly endangered they are, Bose convinces him to go back through to the ape city and the gate shuts down.

That was where we left, with two possible PCs for the vacationing player — Ansom or the Jewish doctor with Atlantean blood that allows the gate to work. The player in question preferred the Gould character when asked. So this week, when that player away again, I had us return to Equatorial Guinea and Mangani, right at the point we’d left off: they’d come back through the Eye to find the apes had decamped, fleeing the city…but that was not all: landscape around the city seemed discolored and twisty, and the buildings of the city itself seemed to be moving. Whenever they looked away, things had changed.

Lord Trevor went to scout and see if other apes were around. Bose looked at the inscriptions on the walls for more information. But quickly it was obvious that something dangerous was occurring — the very geometry of the buildings was wrong! They looked for an found Lord Trevor in another of the larger buildings, a minaret-like spire. Inside, a red glowing, crystal (never good) was in his hand and when he addressed them, he told them they hadn’t much time.

“I’ve been sleeping a long time… I never expected one of my own to find me. (This to Gould.) It is time I return, before those that cast me out realize I have awaken.” When they try to find out what is possessing Trevor, he remarks “I can only wear this face for a short time. I’ve had so many, over the years, but this karn is old and will not handle the strain for long.” When asked what his real face was, he doesn’t even remember. Those that once worshipped him called him the Faceless One. “The city is returning home. We must not wait.” He took them to the temple and the Eye, where he casts the crystal through to some place of red sands and pink sky. “You must go. The city will disappear soon…” and with that he releases Trevor. The heroes hot foot it out of the city just as it folds and twists and pops out of existence.

The few Spaniards who had escaped when the apes ran, having seen the whole thing, take the characters into custody and question them at the local logging compound. In the end, no one really knows what to make of the situation — the Spanish saw the city disappear, the apes flee into the jungle. While they have issue with Trevor’s actions, and they suspect that the character may or may not have been involved in violence against their people, how the hell are they going to spin any of this? And the characters can’t really make too much of the Spanish actions, white apes, or a missing city. No one will believe it!

Released, the characters flee back down the river and eventually get to Fernando Po, where Bose’s S-36 is moored and fly home to England. On the way, the group decides they aren’t letting this go — they hit the British Library to quietly start looking for references to the Eye in literature and history; Trevor and Gustav talk to the Royal Geographical Society about the apes and to try and find anyone who claims to have encountered a creature like the one Gus shot.

In the end, they had a few leads — an eccentric mountain climber and hunter named Kinnie, preparing for his attempt of the Eiger in Switzerland had claimed to have shot a “dinosaur” in Venezuela; the others found references to the Eye in the Potala Palace of the Dalai Lama in the autobiography of Francis Younghusband (now the chairman for the Himalaya Exploration Committee of the RGS), and another reference in the crazy works of Thule Society founder Rudolf von Sebottendorf (recently arrested in Germany, but escaped, and allegedly in Switzerland, as well…)

So with one quick toss off adventure, I now have two lines of attack for a campaign — the Tibetan mystical one, or the Venezuelan jungles.

It’s a sharp break from the long running space opera of the last half decade, but I’m hoping this time it’ll catch fire with the players.

 

10 February, 2016

Quick Review: Space:1889 RPG (Clockwork Publishing)

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12670087_10153963273907082_3286283278008602244_nI’ve already done a review of the PDF version of the game, but I’ve finally laid hands on a physical copy of the game. This was a game that loomed large in my gaming through the 1990s, and informed some of the Victorian sci-fi camapigns of the early 2000s. I still have the original copy of the GDW game, bought at Compleat Strategist in Philadelphia in 1989. Now I have the new Ubiquity-powered game from Clockwork Publishing out of Germany to complement it.

First off, this is the “premium” faux leather covered version of the book. They go for about $100. Production quality on the book is good — the fake leather feels nice and the gold embossing is well done. The binding is solid, and includes a bookmark ribbon in bronze. Good glossy paper, with a readable font in two columns per page, with black & white, grayscale, and color art throughout the book. One point of contention is the sizing. Rather than a typical 8.5×11 or 11.25″ book, like many game lines, this one is 8.5×12″, so it sits higher in the bookcase. The different aspect ratio looks nice, but might be a pain if you don’t have spacious bookshelves.

The new edition is very true to the original setting, but expands a bit on the original material of the game, mostly in dealing with Venus and the German colonies there, but also adds a bit on Mars and Mercury. Setting takes up much of the page count at 121 pages. The game rules are Ubiquity — the same system that powers Hollow Earth Expedition, the ’30s pulp game that usurped Victorian sci-fi in my group’s play rotation. There’s not much new to the rules beyond those found in HEX, same for bits on gravity on different worlds, and comes in at 80ish pages with character creation. One point where the new rules dropped the ball was on the Martian and Venusian characters…there’s no racial templates to give them their own flavor, so I cobbled some together based on the rules from Mysteries of the Hollow Earth and Secrets of the Surface World sourcebooks from the Hollow Earth Expedition line. They are presented below.

Style: The original game was pretty sharp for it’s time, with good color art and crappy line art for the rest; the new version is average RPG quality art for the black and white art, decent color. I’d go 3-3 1/2 out of 5 for the normal edition of the game, but the faux leather brings this edition up to a 4 out of 5.

Substance: Unless you plan on really digging into political intrigue and the like, the book is good enough to launch into a campaign that night, and the rules are complete enough to handle most situations — 4 out of 5. Is it worth the $56US for the print and pdf combo? If you are into this genre, yes; if you are an old Space:1889 fan that wants a better set of mechanics than the execrable ones from 1989, absolutely; and this edition with the swanky cover might be worth the $100 for the fans of the old game.

Space: 1889 is now available through the shop at Mödiphius.

Here’s the templates for the main alien races of the setting:

MARTIANS

Hill, Canal, and High Martians -- as portrayed in Chronicle City's version

Hill, Canal, and High Martians — as portrayed in Chronicle City’s version

The denizens of Mars have three major racial types — the Hill Marian, found in the desolate wastes of the Red Planet; the Canal Martians, found almost exclusively in the urban and canal-fed areas of the world; and the High Martians — thought to either be the “Ur” Martian, or possibly a Hill Martians evolved to the particular environment of mountainous Mars.

Using some of the Beastmen advantages from Mysteries of the Hollow Earth (pg. 14-25), I slapped together Martian character templates that were more in keeping with the original flavor of the game:

template

Venusians

Venusians aren’t set up as a player character in either any of the editions of Space: 1889, but I’m sure there are folks out there that might want to give them more to do in their campaign than be a poor man’s Sleestak. So here is a Template, vikked from Hollow Earth Expedition‘s Mysteries of the Hollow Earth to use to create a player character Venusian:

venusian

 

 

 

27 November, 2015

Hollow Earth Expedition: How Much Hollow Earth?

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Runeslinger brought up an excellent question while chatting about my Reusing Stories post. He remarked that it was nice to see some Hollow Earth in my Hollow Earth Expedition game. Like me, he had avoided that obvious bit of faux science that — while a popular theme at the time — is utter rot.

In this case, I’ve got some ideas for why the hollow earth exists in our game that doesn’t cause the obvious issues dealing with gravity. Or common sense. But more on that at another time.

It got me wondering, however, ow many people that play Exlie Game’s Hollow Earth Expedition actually set adventures in the interior of the planet? While I suspect we’re unlikely to get many folks opining in the comments section, I’ll open this up to any reader — if you’ve run the game, did it include that setting; for those who haven’t played HEX, if you were going to run a ’30s pulp game would you consider using the hollow earth as a setting or McGuffin?

 

27 November, 2015

Reusing Stories

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“There’s nothing new under the sun”, the Bible says, but I think God was paraphrasing. Everyone steals, borrows, or repurposes stories — that’s just part and parcel of cultural capital. A good story is retold, revisited, rebooted, reskinned, or otherwise reprocessed. Some do it really well — Shakespeare’s whole damned catalogue, The Magnificent Seven’s Western-izing of The Seven Samurai, or the Nolan Batman movies take on Frank Miller’s work with the Dark Knight.

Don’t be afraid to borrow, tweak, file the serial numbers off, and repurpose. Yes, sometimes or often, the gamers will realize where you got the idea, but this can work to your advantage. If they expect that this plot, that seems ripped straight from [movie] will lead to a certain place, and you change it up, they will be surprised.

Borrowing from yourself is always a good idea, as well. If you’re like me, you’ve got years of plots and stories and characters on your hard drive, thumb drive, or in notebooks in your closet your wife and the fire marshal want you to get rid of. A few weeks ago, one of the gamers in my group left for a three week trip to the Orient, leaving the ret of us with either three weeks of no gaming, or the need to do something else. (His characters are kinda pivotal in the Battlestar Galactica game.)

So I thought about trying the new player out on Hollow Earth Expedition. I’ve wanted to fire up a new campaign since the end of the Shanghai Campaign, which had been delightfully fun and creative until half the gaming group moved away or had their work schedules change in dramatic and infuriating ways in the space of two weeks. Six gamers one week, a fortnight later, two players and a GM. Campaign: dead.

A few abortive attempts with the new group didn’t catch fire. The characters and the players just weren’t connecting. So, even though I thought it a longshot, I put together a “backdoor pilot” using the bones of a one-shot I ran for a Meetup RPG group. The basic plot remained — the characters were looking for an academic that is lost in Equatorial Guinea, and claims to have found the mythic white apes of the Congo. Evil corporate interests with the backing of the local peninsulares are looking to stop word of the apes from getting out because…what does it really matter? They’re the bad guys. Little hints, in this case in the form of one character’s fascination with American pulp novels, allowed me to do a bit of foreshadowing. The lost city and white apes sounded a lot like Opar of the Tarzan books (which the character is reading during the downtimes — Tarzan and the Ant-Men — according to the player) and the Lovecraft short story Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.

In the original one shot, the players were the crew of a small smuggling steamer, and one player was the father of the man missing. In this reimagining, the missing fellow is Dr. Trevor Ansom — Oxford Classics lecturer who runs about the world looking for mythic stuff. He’s a WWI vet, a bit addled thanks to serious PTSD, but just because he’s a bit weird doesn’t mean he’s not often right… The plot hinged on someone that would have the emotional connection to want to rescue him. Our latest player got that role, making her the lead for the story — Margaret Ansom-Bose, recent divorcee and one-time companion of her uncle, who took her in after the death of her father in the War, and her mother from Spanish Influenza. She’s a “modern woman” who came of age as a flapper and an aviatrix in the ’20s, but after the Crash got married to an American oil tycoon to keep the family afloat.

The player leapt on this, but due to a series of crappy rolls over the course of two nights, this super competent woman kept coming up the damsel in distress for the other character to aid. Instead of decrying the situation, she’s added it to the flavor of Bose — she’s hyper-capable and useful until she needs to be a plot device. i would point out, this makes her exactly the sort of heroine that was standard for 1930s/40s pulp.

The next character was the problem one. The player in question just didn’t quite seem to jive with the pulp setting the two times we tried it. He had a big game hunter from Texas the first time around that just didn’t drop in well and the player didn’t connect with him. The second time he played a British occultist aristocrat…he liked the character but the notion didn’t sit well with me. I’ve found that unless magic or mind powers are common or ubiquitous, having a player with them sharply removes the feeling of danger and mystery from having powers loose in the game…it’s something bad guys have. The heroes have to overcome that. Look at almost every good horror/suspense piece — the good guys are usually outmatched and have to find some weakness that allows success. They don’t just hire a bigger sorcerer to take out the baddie.

The piece I was stealing from is set in Africa — big game territory. I took his original character of Gustav Hassenfeldt, and went to work with the editor’s scalpel. Background shifted from Texan of German descent to German who grew up in German East Africa until the British authorities tossed the family out in 1922. Didn’t connect with his dysfunctional homeland (and their actual family home is now in France and confiscated.) His parents moved to Texas to give me American adventure hooks, but he returned to hunting and being an  adventure guide for hire. There was my in to get the characters together. But the big reworking was to make him less arrogant and superb at his job (which he undeniably is — we’re talking Quigley Down Under levels of long shot goodness), less brash and impulsive, and made him a meticulous planner. Sensible and honest; a good man. This culminated nicely in a scene where he had the chance to take out a bunch of Spaniards at range and protect folks toward the end of night two, but quipped “This feels like murder…” This led to a non-violent solution to the scene — set up by the team’s combat bad-ass. It’s a great overturning of tropes. (He was also the guy referencing Tarzan.)

The first night started with getting the characters together through a mutual friend in Tangier. The necessary action scene to establish villains, get the characters to show their expertise and develop a connection, and set the stakes followed: goons hired by the Equatorial Lumber Company to get back the letter from Ansom, the map to his find, and (exposed) film wound up with a punch up and shootout on the harbor wall. Hassenfeldt character established himself as a guy that tried to talk his way out of big troubles, but is willing to throw a punch to be a gentleman and protect his employer (Bose.)

They travel by Bose’s old Sikorsky S-36 (stats are about the same as the S-38, here) over various points to Fernando Po, where they link up with the crew of Sylvia — the boat from the one shot, but now relegated to NPC status — who had been hired by the aforementioned contact in Tangier to get them upriver. The location they are going to will be inaccessible by airplane.

Here I was now back in the framework of the original one shot: a nighttime run past Spanish patrol boats, upriver until they are trapped by the Spanish in a tight section of the Benito River, rescue from the Spanish by the “lost” Professor Ansom and a platoon of gorillas led by a few white apes — gigantic, intelligent creatures that Ansom has befriended. They return to the city of the apes, called Mangani by the locals, and it is a place of strangeness: the color is all wrong, everything ooks like it is viewed through a funhouse mirror — geometry is peculiar, and the architecture looks almost Minoan. Ansom thinks it is an Atlantean outpost…and the piece de resistance is the temple, coplete with a strange metal eye (with the iris being an open space big enough for a few people to go through.)

They try to figure out some of the mysteries of the place, but the cameras down work — everything must be drawn and annotated. The apes can communicate, and Hassenfeldt helps Ansom train the apes to use the rifles they’ve taken from the Spanish. When Spaniards from the company show up, including a highly educated Jewish doctor, they manage to defuse the situation. While showing the Spaniards the importance of the place and why they should cease their attempts to destroy the apes, they discover the doctor — when in proximity to the Eye — causes it to light up with a strange blue energy field. (Yeah — it’s a Stargate. Steal, people, steal!) While investigating, Hassenfeldt trips through the gate, and knocks Bose with him.

On the other side, it almost looks like they are in the Yucatan. The ground curves away for some distance…a massive valley? and they spot some kind of huge creature circling them in the air. A single shot from Hassenfeldt’s .375 magnum brings the creature down: it’s a pterodactyl!

Realizing how alone and possibly endangered they are, Bose convinces him to go back through to the ape city and the gate shuts down.

That was where we left, with two possible PCs for the vacationing player — Ansom or the Jewish doctor with Atlantean blood that allows the gate to work. The play was swift and the players quickly learned that sometimes “taking the average” was much more efficacious than rolling dice, and it was decided by the players there that the system was one that “did not get in the way” (about the best you can usually hope for with RPGs; they rarely enhance play, I find.) So now we have a great opportunity for ’30s pulp that seems to appeal to the entire group…

All because I needed to slap together a quick two-night adventure and chose to steal from an old piece none had played through.

 

7 June, 2015

Quick Review: Revelations of Mars Sourcebook

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: , , , |
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Almost two years after their successful Kickstarter, Exile Games has finally rolled out their PDF for Revelations of Mars — their planetary romance supplement for Hollow Earth Expedition. The e-book is stil in proofreading (it’s being done by the people that crowdfunded the book) and it should be up for general consumption soon. The physical book should be available at GenCon, or so Jeff Combos — the head developer at Exile — claims.

The book has a similar layout and look to the other Hollow Earth Expedition products — a nice full-color cover and map of the RoM Mars in the endpapers, and color character example pages, but grayscale drawings throughout the rest of the work. It’s got a nice clear font, and the slightly gray pages are easy to read on my iPad in low light conditions without causing eye fatigue. I suspect the physical book will be hardcover, but I could be wrong about this one, and will have solid production values. Most of the HEX line has been very high quality.

The book has an opening fiction to set the flavor of the game, and does its job well enough, then after a short introduction to give the reader an idea of the goal of the setting, they jump into character creation. There are specific motivations, skills, traits and flaws to fit the creatures on Mars, as well as a selection of examples using artwork from when this book was first supposed to be coming out (five years or so, if I remember correctly.)  There’s a new skill: armed combat, that has a big blurb about various styles of fencing, etc. One of the things this brought to mind is that Ubiquity — the system Hollow Earth Expedition uses — feels like an older generation game, something from the dice pool era of the 1990s. This is not a bad thing — I’ve not been overly complementary of the new hotness of very rules lite games and shared narrative responsibility. Ubiquity feels lighter than many rules sets, but compared to Fate Accelerated, is a bit beefy. Or maybe “crunchy” is a better term. There’s a chapter of new psychic powers to fit with some of the new Martian races.

The equipment chapter give the players a nice anachronistic flavor — melee weapons galore and “blasters” — quasi-energy weapons that shoot energized slugs — and other rayguns. The skyships of Mars use sails to get around, but mysterious ancient Martian tech to fly. The how isn’t really addressed, or how new lifter systems might be manufactured (or perhaps I glossed over that bit) — something that should have be addressed, if even to hand-wave it off. This is followed by a chapter on vehicle combat that expands on the material in Secrets of the Surface World, and primarily deals with skyships, as one might expect.

The next chapter deals with the natives of Mars, and the flavor of this chapter, together with the equipment and vehicle chapters, evokes the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs mixed heavily with the more glitzy (and underrated) John Carter movie. There are the Chitik, beatle-like bugmen; Dheva, the four armed green-skinned human-looking Martians; the Elosi, more traditional “gray aliens” that are tied to the Atlantians — the ancient race that one ruled the planet and who tie this setting to the Hollow Earth of the other sourcebooks; the Grodh, four armed apemen of Mars, Praelor, four-eyed purple “smart” Martians; and Sauren, dinomen of Mars; Vrii, giant crystal humanoids that guard and feed “the Great Machine” that is breaking down, but used to keep Mars alive; and lastly the red-skinned Zhul-ya, the “demi-god” children of the Atlantian “God-Kings” that are alleged to be “sleeping” after an Age of War.

After this is a guide to Mars, including several important cities, the Great Machine in Olympus Mons, and descriptions of the wastelands of the planet. Also, they talk about how to get to the Red Planet — by rocketship, abduction by the Elosi’s disk-shaped spacecraft, an astral projection machine that lets people transport their consciousness to Mars while their body slumbers (John Carter-like), or Atlantian portals. This is followed with Atlantian History on Mars and defines the various God-Kings and their differences. There’s a chapter of NPCs for the GM to use and a bestiary.

The book ends with a Revelations of Mars adventure campaign that I haven’t read through yet; I tend to ignore these as they tend to interfere with the vision of running the setting I tend to get while reading the material.

So is it worth it? Yes — it has a nice Burroughs-esque flavor while cutting its own path in creating a planetary romance setting for the Hollow Earth Expedition game world. Comparing it to Space: 1889 (especially the Ubiquity version recently released), it has some very strong points — much more alien creatures, for instance. The look of the book is up to Exile’s standards, but it’s also obvious they had to go with another set of artists for their interior work, where the other books were very consistent in their look. The writing is solid, the system mechanics well thought out, if a bit heavier than is popular these days.

I haven’t gotten pricing for the ebook or physical product at this time, but my Kickstarter contribution entitled me to a physical book, some dice, a Martian Princess figure, and a map of Mars for $75. So yeah, it’s worth it. I assume the book will run about $50 for the physical book.

It’s a buy.

 

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