You Could Have Knocked Me Down With A Feather, But ...

Planet Mercenary RPG delivered.

About a year and a half late, but it delivered, and nice it is too.

The conceit is that players are NCOs and officers in a mercenary company in the far future, in the universe of the Schlock Mercenary webcomic. Notable mechanical goodies are that each player gets a gang of three NPC grunts to order about, a card-mediated "mayhem" mechanism that purports to put role-playing opportunities back into dice-fest combats and skill blitzes. Looks good on paper.

I Kicked in for a deluxe package containing the hardcover rulebook, a pdf copy of same, A distressed copy of The Seventy Maxims Of Maximally Effective Mercenaries¹ and a pdf of same, a GM screen depicting ships of the universe on the player side, some themed dice, the cards (of course), a dice bag, a challenge coin D2 flipper and some lapel pins. All very nice.

The delays in delivery were mainly caused by overthinking the artwork on the Maxims book and the rulebook as I understand it. This was unfortunate, especially as I would have kicked in without the "ultra realistic" artwork, gussied up from the webcomic. I rather like the webcomic art. No matter, though much of the momentum and expectation I'd built for the game in my pool of players has evaporated in the interim.

I'm taking it out for a test-drive next weekend, so I'll report in on the experience then. if it goes well I may try and convene a regularly occurring game of Planet Mercenary RPG.

I also Kicked into a separate project by the same team for three copies of their plastic "handbrain" things. These are basically frames that can hold a half sheet of legal pad paper created to look like the PDA "handbrains" used by everyone in the comic. They are intended as small gm shields or handout dressing. Once properly distressed and painted up they should look nice, and may be useful for handing out building plans, space station layouts or briefings. Who knows?

They ran a month late too, though that was because of manufacturing problems that pushed into the schedule for Gencon.

At least they honoured their promise to not hold the Planet Mercenary RPG release up until Gencon. I hate Kicking into a game that then delivers at Gencon first instead of to the early-bird supporters that got the game made.

1. An in-universe artifact made famous in the webcomic↑

New Find, New Purchase

Just before we went on vacation to Florida, I came across a game called Splendor, made by Asmodee.

The game is very well made. The components are cards, which are of a nice sturdy quality and printed in many colors, card components on thick card similar to that used by Fantasy Flight these days and by Battleline in the '70s, along with high quality poker chips with card insert artwork to represent the "gems".

Play is very simply explained. On your turn you may do one of the following: Collect three different colored gems into your "personal bank" to a maximum bank of 10, collect two gems of the same color provided that by doing so you leave at least two gems of that color in the pool, use gems to buy cards that are played openly on the table for all to see, and reserve a card for possible future purchasing by taking it into your "hand" and taking a joker gem token (the only way to collect a "wild-card" joker gem), to a limit of three cards reserved in your hand.

Cards are arrayed on the table in three ranks, displayed face up so they may be purchased. Cards offer two features: some have points scores and all convey bonus gems. Cards of the first rank are cheap to buy (typically costing three gems) but rarely offer points. Cards of the second rank are more expensive (typically four to seven gems to buy) and offer points as well as gems. Cards of the last rank are wildly expensive (typically eight to twelve gems) but offer generous points values of 4 or 5 points each. As cards are bought new cards are drawn from face-down decks to replenish the field.

The objective is to have the most points when a player declaration of 15 points owned is made and all the players left in that round have played a turn. Obviously, if the last player on a turn declares she has 15 points, she will win. If the first player in a round declares he has 15 points, the other players have one turn each to pip him at the post.

Players can claim bonus scores by being the first to meet certain criteria and getting a visit from a patron (the game's conceit is that the players are renaissance merchants). Needless to say, this makes for interesting strategic play as players attempt to win or deny patrons to others.

Not only that but the bonus gems on cards can be spent whenever a purchase is made which calls for that color of gem, and they don't get used up by doing so. This means that eventually players are able to claim cards from the first rank without necessarily spending any actual gems at all. This can be a dangerous distraction, or can be a lifesaver when one player has a corner on all the gems of a certain color as a denial tactic.

What I like about this game, and I like it a lot is the overall production values make you want to try it, the simplicity of player options makes it easy to pick up (about five minutes by experience) yet the options available to the player in a game are wide open, allowing for subtle and complex play. Each game is complex, the rules are not. Think of a game of draughts (US Checkers). The moves are easy to teach. But the play can become fiendishly complex. The same holds for Splendor.

I also like the fact that the box holds the components securely so the game can be transported, played and then packed away without losing parts or having to resort to baggies. It drives me nuts when I get a game that will not go back in its box once deployed (Mansions of Madness) or won't stay in it if the box is tilted (Tokaido).

Resources:
Splendor at Amazon.com

New Arrivals

So I went a bit crazy on the PDF acquisition front in the last three months or so.

I began the slow process of converting some paper resources into more space-saving and generally more useful for my commute-friendly RPG research needs by buying Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown pdfs for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, an "old school" RPG very much in the vein or White Box D&D that bills itself as "Weird" while having absolutely no in-game mechanics I can discern to bring on the weird tone at all. I also picked up Hammers of the God, The Grinding Gear and The Random Esoteric Creature Generator. I already had the rulebook. Not sure whether I'll run LotFP. To be honest the game is aspiring to be Solomon Kane is as many ways as I care to notice, to judge by the suggestions in the rulebook itself. The artwork is both disgusting and awesome by terms.

I picked up a metric tonne of original GDW Traveller books in a "Bundle of Holding". Traveller is a game close to my heart and I'm dying to run it in campaign mode again, but I cannot get anyone interested in playing. In any event, the bundle provided the three rulebooks, five expansion rulebooks and a selection of the supplements. Not as complete a set as I would have liked, but not bad at all for what it cost me.

I picked up Stone and a Hard Place and a collection of Trail Guides. These represent episode three of a four part campaign of campaigns for Deadlands reloaded, and a collection of one-off adventures. Stone also contains rules re-introducing the long-gone Deadlands "Hexslinger" character type, and expanded rules that allow a player to play a so-called "harrowed" character. I am still mulling over the content of this volume, and can't say more without spoiling anyway, so perhaps I'll keep a detailed discussion of Stone for another time. In any event, after my attempt to run Last Sons hit player fatigue I am disenchanted with Deadlands campaigns for a bit. Hence the Trail Guide adventures. I'll review those as we play them.

Rippers also arrived, in record time for a Kickstarted project too. Not bad, and people will definitely take to the Gothic Horror/Victorian Steampunk Super Hero aspect of the setting I imagine. There are a few small changes to the original rules (which were included in the bundle but which I had bought recently anyway) alson with some modification of the settings backstory. The ancilliary products that were bundled in, like maps and adventures, were a welcome addition. The usual high quality graphic design is front and center but to be hinest I preferred that used on the older version. The deal included a set of inserts for the GM screen too. Nice.

I picked up a copy of Microscope, a co-operative game involving RPG elements in which the players work to build a history of, well, whatever they decide. It has an innovative approach to what would seem to be an anarchic process, and it can be used to play just for its own sake or, perhaps more interestingly, to arrive at a setting in which to place a home-brewed RPG, especially one in which the players share GMing duties. I'm looking forward to trying out this one, though th eidea is harder to convey as an exciting prospect than I imagined it would be.

I bought Weird War II after ignoring the Savage Worlds setting for years. I was trying to build my own setting and realized I might be re-inventing the wheel, so decided to take a look. The pdf is a far more lavish affair than the last paper copy I had in my hands, with color illustrations to boot! I'll be reviewing this one in more depth at a later date. Given the way the Weird West caught my attention after years of "meh" I may have a new fad on my hands.

While on the subject of Savage Worlds I decided to buy a pdf of the Kerberos Club setting, which I have in paper form and have not really taken much a liking to, but on re-reading find a little more interesting. The setting is Victorian England (my original reason for buying was to increase my library of Space 1889 resources) and the conceit is that of the Victorian Costumed Hero. Think League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and you are in the right neighborhood. The paper copy is of rather indefferent quality to be honest, far below the general Savage Worlds accepted standard. In pdf these things matter less. More to come later.

I finally weakened and bought The Vorkosigan Saga, a self-contained RPG set in Lois McMaster Bujold's "Barrayar" universe and a gorgeous production. It took so long to bring it to press it became that rarest of things, a fourth edition setting book for GURPS (for the rules in the book are GURPS-Lite). This is a great thing if you are a buying in hardback (I was an early adopter). Buying the pdf perhaps will inspire me to run a GURPS game for a bit, though I find the though terrifying. It's like trying to interest people in tax instructions. The base rulebooks are hysterically funny, insisting on the essential symplicity and stripped down feel of fourth edition GURPS in a sidebar on a page containing dense type explaining how to calculate fractional characteristic values. But nobody does a setting book like the GURPS guys do, which makes the idea of porting the thing wholesale to a different engine if not easy, at least not a herculean task.

Please note that while I find GURPS unattractive for many reasons as a GM I do acknowledge the awesome flexibility of the engine itself and also the people who built it. An achievemment that is underappreciated by many, including (of course) me.

Perhaps the most unlikely new purchase for me has been that of the Firefly RPG and a couple of scenario books for it. I got one of these in a "for charity" bundle I coughed up for, and was intrigued despite never having been a fan of the Firefly series or the Serenity movie. Some reading, and I was hooked. Hooked enough to start planning a game and start researching by buying and watching the series and the movie on Blu-ray, both soundtrack albums for planned background music (I rarely use music in my games as it usually becomes a distraction, but the "feel" I got from my reading was that it might work positively here. And I buy and listen to soundtrack albums anyway. I also felt the need for a small model of the ship as a focus item for the table. The cheapest way to that goal was the Firefly Yahtzee set, which has a very nice model of the Serenity as its dice cup. So yes, I bought in to the FIrefly game bigtime and can't wait to run it.

And despite my feeling that the Sixth Edition of Call of Cthulhu is the least accessible rulebook for the game ever published, making what should be a simple and quick assimilation by a new GM a tortuous trip through contadictory and confusing nonsense, I bought that in pdf too. I was about to start running Call of Cthulhu again from the BRP rules (I've been running a Delta Green game using the much-maligned D20 rules for more than five years for perhaps the best Call of Cthulhu gamers I've ever had but missed the 20s and BRP experience) and needed an electronic form of the book. I'm using 5.2 for the game itself, but couldn't source that as an e-book for luvner money.

This brings me to the lamentable quality of comparably high-cost Chaosium e-books. Chaosium have been coasting on their quality for some years, with customers acting as appologists for the horribly dated look and the fact that the lack of production values has resulted in every case I've paid for in a book that is functionally useless as an in-game resource.

The products are consistently higher priced than lavish equivalent products from other publishing houses, lacking any sort of relief from the tedious greyscale. Compare, for example, the monochrom but much more interesting Trail of Cthulhu with Call of Cthulhu and you'll come away with a sour taste in your mouth.

Forget the artwork for a moment. Let's look at the way a pdf is navigated. Hyperlinks from the table of contents to the content itself is best, but not essential. Bookmarks are absolutely essential, the more granular the better. These become most useful if they approach index levels of depth, but don't have to go that far, as long as they can be used as anchors in which to page back and forth as a game progresses.

Not one of my Chaosium pdf products has bookmarks, meaning that one is reduced to using "search", just about the lousiest, most useless way of using a rule or setting book in-game. And I'm not talking about old products here. Gold Book BRP, Cthulhu by Gaslight (the latest one that was delivered by the author as an electronic version for Hastur's sake!), Beyond the Mountains of Madness (a magnificent but most of all HUGE book that cries out for bookmarks), House of R'lyeh and, of course, the Sixth Edition Rulebook. All came without bookmarks.

And Chaosium are not alone in "not getting it" when it comes to how pdfs get used by GMs. Wizards of the Coast finally published pdf versions of their D&D 3.5 core books. As locked-down pdfs.

Now you may be wondering who would lock down a pdf of an obsolete version of an RPG which for all intents and purposes is available at a fraction of the cost under a different name in an unlocked format, and so am I. The locking of the pdf means that the GM cannot annotate the rulebook they have just bought (and not cheaply either I might add; Pathfinder is a better buy on cost grounds too). So no highlighting and no post-it notes, something I have come to understand is more than just extremely useful to me as a GM, it is essential. Way to protect your IP, Hasbro. On a game nobody wants to buy anyway. Pfft!

I am told that the Seventh Edition rulebooks (plural, there are now two sold for the game) for Call of Cthulhu do have bookmarks, but I am not remotely tempted to pony up almost thirty dollars for the GM manual to find out. Chaosium have burned out all the customer brand loyalty from me with mediochre and half-hearted attempts to "serve" their audience. There has been a change of management there of late in an attempt to revitalise the company still reeling after a financial misstep in the 1990s (!) but we can still see self-defeating behavior such as floating the Seventh Edition Kickstarter before they had fulfulled the long over-running Horror on the Orient Express Kickstarter, with predictable results wioth respect to both products and unhappiness in the backer ranks.

Oh, and I picked up Legend, the pdf that replaces Runequest in the Mongoose line of products (lapsed licence) so I could contemplate running an Elric or Hawkmoon game, but that is way off in the nevernever future.

Fall of Magic Arrives

About two weeks or so ago I took delivery of The Fall of Magic, a project I had kicked into in late May, and a nice item it is too.

The box it comes in is reminiscent of the sorts of games my great grandmother had hiding in the back of her closet. More like the box in which you'd find a tenor recorder than a game. Inside is a really neat idea.

The chief component of the game is the map, which is presented on a linen scroll that the players unroll as they advance through the game, depicting a road and towns along the route, each with four locations picked out. There are counters for the players, cards that extend the map when the players reach "the islands" and a die for the rare random number needs.

The conceit of this GM-less RPG is that the magic in the world is dying. We don't know why. The players are students of The Magus. The Magus is undertaking a journey or pilgrimage. We don't know why. All the things we don't know about the magic, the Magus, the journey and the other players will hopefully be made manifest as the journey progresses.

Each turn a player can move his/her counter along the road to a new location or move the (non-player) magus to the next town. As each player moves, he or she adds a little more detail to the story of the journey, prompted by hints determined by that player's location.

There's a bit more to the game than this, but that is the gist of what the game is about. It is a cooperative storytelling, a cross between Fiasco! and Tokaido to put it entirely too broadly.

This game also represents something of a rarity: a game Kickstarter project that ran for less than a year and delivered what it said it would only about three weeks late. That should make it eligible for some sort of Kickstarter award.

I can't wait to play.

Pictures to follow later when I have time to arrange them; Watch this space.

New Arrivals

Pathfinder core rulebook (okay, I'm a late adopter, so sue me). I had been told that this thing had a bestiary in it and it doesn't, so not quite a game in a book. All the D&D 3.5 monsters will work in it so I guess if you are transitioning it still works out. Why buy? I'm hoping to get involved in a game soon, as a player. Piked it up in paper and pdf becasue that's how I roll - redundantly.

Redshirts: card game from Weaselpants dotcom. An amusing little number that involves giving missions to members of "away teams" with the objective of getting the other players' teams to succeed and your own to fail miserably. First one to kill all his/her Redshirts wins. Much fun, superbly funny artwok and every time I take it out I see something clever I missed the last time I looked. The expected puns are to be found aplenty. Rulebook is horribly vague in places. Even so, highly recommended.

Seven Dragons: card game, in which the object is to play cards in a two dimensional array to make a sequence of your color before the others do so. Fun and challenging.

Cthulhu by Gaslight: expansion for Call of Cthulhu. A new edition of the Victorian setting sourcebook. New scenarios and a little new material, but if you have the original the pdf will probably suffice.

Savage Worlds Horror Companion: An explorer's edition format book that provides setting rules, suggestions and a bestiary for running Dark Horror games (or adding a dash o' dark to any other setting). Recommended.

Smith and Robards' Catalog: Another Explorer's Edition book, this time for Deadlands:Reloaded. Inside there is a huge inventory of Weird Science gadgetry and the rules on how to order it from Smith and Robards. There is background info on Smith and Robards. There are some new rules for mixing it up with Weird Science. A very desirable addition to any Marshal's toolbox.

Another Amazon Box Arrives In The Mail

This one contained the Basic Role Playing hardback (the so-called "Gold Book") and the pocket edition of A Song of Ice and Fire.

I normally buy my stuff locally, but I wasn't really jonesing for BRP badly enough to pay RRP and the deals on each of these were so good it was too good to pass up.

I've been using BRP, or one version of it, for about thirty years now in my Call of Cthulhu games. I used to keep a copy of Runequest with me for those times when the Call of Cthulhu version failed to deliver (typically in combat). Runequest was the original game from which BRP was derived.

I started a voyage of discovery about a year and a half ago in which I deliberately sampled many new game systems. GURPS, Savage Worlds, D20, these were the initial focus of my experiments.

Savage Worlds was a spectacular success. I have reservations about some aspects of the system, but the benefits it offers as far as easy adoption and rapid assimilation along with the obvious enjoyment of the players have made his a new favorite with me. I have become known as something of a Savage Worlds evangelist at my LFGS (Local Friendly Game Store).

GURPS was fascinating but scary. Characters take forever to build in this system, but the realism possible using it is incredible and the flexibility of the engine for powering the incredible number of settings is legendary. It seems that Steve Jackson Games is not in the business of Setting books any more - there's only one I'm aware of (Vorkosigan Saga) in a fourth edition, er, edition. In any event, the rulebooks are terrifying to me now. When I was thirty I would have lapped this stuff up. Now, I don't have the time or the mental agility for it.

D20, the old workhorse, has proved surprisingly flexible while at the same time proving that the GM must be aware at all times of the level-based abilities, even in a game where XP are sparse. D20 Call of Cthulhu has proved popular, but I think I may be close to breaking the game because of my earlier carelessness in adjudicating advancement awards. We'll see. I'm not scared of D20, but I think Savage Worlds offers much that D20 does at much less cost in brain cells.

But of late I found myself wondering what all the fuss was about with the Gold Book. The price was right for me to explore BRP in depth again. Who knows where that will lead? As I skimmed the book I found myself pondering different games I could run using BRP...

Maybe I'll do a port into BRP that I was intending to do as a Savage Worlds port.

In any event, I'll post my thoughts here as I browse.

A Song of Ice and Fire was purchased because I signed up for a game just to see what the fuss is all about. I'll let you know what I think after I've had a chance to digest it.

New Arrival

Bookhounds of London, a Trail of Cthulhu campaign book from Pelgrane Press.

Hardback, with the same production values that have made Trail of Cthulhu the most popular alternative to Call of Cthulhu for the world's Mythos Fix.

Priced at the extreme range of what I'll pay for a setting book these days, $35.

The idea in this one is right out of The Ninth Gate, with the players taking the part of less-than-squeaky-clean types who hunt up Mythos Tomes - to sell them for profit to the bad guys (and occasionally stop them using them)!

This is a nice idea from where I sit. Players often like to explore the ambiguity of their Call of Cthulhu characters, but the truth is that in all the published materials the players are essentially the Boy Scout types, the cavalry that will ride in and save the day if it is at all possible, with the shady characters firmly on the GM's side of the screen.

Not only that, players usually never get to play the really dirty swine on account of they are typically mad, dead or mad and then dead before their morals are truly irrevocably compromised.

I did manage to get some players to sacrifice to a Dark Young a few months ago, but they did it for the good of the community and the players were appalled when I casually pointed out that they were now, in point of fact, Cultists. Cultists were to be fought, killed, stamped out because they are the bad guys!

Bookhounds of London doesn't so much turn this idea around as discard it as irrelevant. There are no bad guys, just customers. Okay, some of the customers need to be dealt with but mostly because they represent a significant threat to the bottom line.

I'm trivializing the great idea at the core of this wonderful campaign, and I urge everyone to buy it, read it and judge for themselves.

There is much in the Trail of Cthulhu line for the trad Call of Cthulhu GM (with a little work) too, though I'd personally urge Call of Cthulhu GMs to look at the Trail of Cthulhu rules with their knee-jerk circuits offline. There was a time - a long time - when I would have sniffed at going "off the reservation", but I know better now.