The Last Of The Summer Whine

Things in the official Call of Cthulhu publications that ruin the atmosphere and make the Mythos more ordinary at a stroke:

Calling members of the Great Race of Yith "Yithians".

"The Great Race" a) is more authentic - that's how Lovecraft referred to them, and b) retains the overblown ponderous pomposity of the background. "Yithian" sounds more 1970s than antediluvian, robbing the race of all it's mystery. I might fear a member of something everyone calls "The Great Race". A "Yithian" is as scary as a "Smurf".

Calling The Insects from Shaggai "Shans". It seems obvious to me the plural of Shan would be "Shan" - as in "Fear The Shan". I don't know precisely why, but pluralizing "Shan" makes it ordinary and unscary. Probably because is sounds less pompous.

Calling a Hound from Tindalos "A Tindalos". It should be "A Hound" or, if one absolutely must trivialize the most dangerous thing you could ever have tracking you "A Tindalosi". Again, it has to do with the pompous sound of the name.

Trivialize the name and you trivialize the monster and the threat it is supposed to pose. That is why we routinely make the first order of any war the coining of a dismissive diminutive for speaking of the enemy.

And the Threat of The Mythos should never be trivialized.

Precis Intermedia Promo

I'd like to give a shout-out to Precis Intermedia who offer paper minis and plastic stands to hold them up (they also offer a range of RPGs).

So, you've seen Jackson's Cardboard Heroes before, and possibly run across PEG's Cardstock Cowboys. Meh, right?

What makes Precis Intermedia such a great option for those making the jump to Cardboard Miniatures is that they can sell them to you like the others do, as sheets of cut-outs in PDF format, or you can pick the miniatures you want and only download them.

So if you need, say, an army of Confederate troopers, perhaps thirty to forty of them, and maybe half a dozen NCOs and an officer, you download the NCOs and the Officer and you also download the trooper in what's called an Army Deal, basically a print of multiples of the same mini on a page.

Let's say you are running a game of Deadlands:Reloaded and you would like for the players to go tactical (as in start a combat on the grid on the table using perhaps the excellent Chessex Battlemat) but then get overrun and caught up in the equivalent of Picket's Charge, you can do that.

Savage Worlds offers a great way to have umptytump figures on the table without it taking all day to work out what they look like and what they can do. The officers and NCOs are special cases but even they are just modified mooks ("extras" in Savage Worlds-ese) that take no time at all to stat up.

And now Precis Intermedia offers a way to get the figures you'll need on the table without the need to set aside a year or two for sourcing, buying and painting the army.

Because, lets face it, you are hardly going to need those minis very often after this. You aren't a Civil War wargamer, you are a Deadlands:Reloaded GM. And most of those minis are on the table in order fo rthe players to kill them. Why waste hours or days painting a mini that is designed from the ground up to last maybe less than one game turn?

The bags of plastic stands can come with some sticker shock, but a bag of a hundred works out to just under 2.5 cents each, and they'll be misplaced before they wear out.

Everyone loves a well-painted miniature on the tabletop, and there are some beautiful miniatures that make every warm-blooded GMs juices start flowing. I have boxes full of 'em.

What I don't have in much supply is painting talent or time. Or, if I'm honest, the desire to paint minis any more. I collected GW armies in the past and the assembly-line technique that is required for them pretty much killed the pleasure I got from the finished articles.

Yes I still buy evocative Zulu War-era British minis because I love them and can visualize them making a brave last stand against a horde of savage High Martians (in a Space 1889 game).

But most of those actions that have seen the tabletop have been fought using the cardboard minis that came with the Space 1889 supplements.

Resources:

Precis Intermedia

Pinnacle Entertainment Group (PEG) - home of Savage Worlds

Chessex Battlemats and Megamats

Blast From The Past

Yesterday, while waiting for the guy with Mars Attacks to show up (he never actually did due to his inability to understand the difference between afternoon and evening) I showed the proud owner of the Ogre reprint how to play his game.

This game was famous in its day and still has a strong following (a recent Kickstarter campaign for a huge version was extremely successful and you can find Ogre in a box the same size as they pack G Scale train sets in if you look), but GenCon saw a reprinting of the game in its glorious no-color original baggie version.

Actually, as I told the proud owner as he watched me showing his friend how to play it, the set he had was much better than any of the monochrome versions put out "in the day" since it featured real wargame thickness card counters that were pre-punched a-la SPI, not two sheets of thin card you had to cut up with scissors.

It was fun to watch the faces of the others as I explained that one side got only one unit, the eponymous Ogre, and the other a slew of infantry, tanks and hovercraft (aka "G.E.V.s"). Then it was fun to watch again as they absorbed the stats of that one unit and realized it was a damn-near unstoppable leviathan bristling with weaponry.

Jackson did a really good job with this game, crafting something that was fun and easy to pick up and play, highly portable (it packs down to about the size of a large phablet), and balanced so that two players of roughly equal ability should find it tough on either side of the battle.

The "balance" part of that is a very hard thing to do, but is vital for an enjoyable game. No-one enjoys a game that provides an easy win or easy loss.

The game has a hex-grid map, mostly blank but for the features that block movement (but not line-of-sight). The army player must try and take as much advantage of these as possible while not boxing his own units in. He must also understand that the infantry, tanks, GEVs etc are expendable in the long term, yet must get as much damage infliction out of them as possible before ythey are inevitable ground under-tread.

The Ogre player must trundle ponderously down the board and around the craters and ridges (one version of the game had a color map that depicted these in glorious color and isomorphic three-d), trying to stay in the game until he gets within range of the command post, which is his first objective. When that is destroyed he must then exit the map at the bottom (so that the Ogre has crossed the length of the map).

The army player must decide whether he will attack the mobility of the Ogre by targeting tracks or go for the weaponry mounts. Leave the Ogre too mobile and it will ram the CP and gain at least a marginal victory. Bringing it to a standstill will involve being in range of its formidable weapon arrays and that will result in fast attrition of the infantry and armor units you need to get the job done.

As we played, the younger guys, who had never played an old-style card-and-counters wargame and so had never been exposed to the concepts that once were staples of almost all of them, marveled at how straightforward the game was, how playable it was, and how rich the tactical possibilities were.

For me it conjured 1982, and meetings of the Coventry Wargame Society and the Lanchester Polytechnic Game Society, both of which were the source of many hours of pleasant company and interesting conversation in addition to demon wargaming.

It also served to demonstrate the truly diabolical die-rolls I could get - I had boasted of these to them but could tell they thought I was laying it on thick. After one round in which ten consecutive attacks were miserable failures, even the "sure thing" ones, they became believers in my power to distort the local statistical field.

Anyway, if you want to try Ogre in an affordable and portable form,  I recommend looking for this version. It costs, I'm told, less than 4 dollars. I saw it for a shade over 6 bux at Amazon. The semi-portable version will set you back about $150.

Resources:

Ogre, Pocket Edition

Ogre, Over-The-Top Edition

Well, It Has Been A Quiet Year Here In Deer Park

I really have been too busy playing games to talk about them much. Sorry.

 I currently run a once-a-month Delta Green game that is crowding on four years of slithery fun and a twice monthly Deadlands:Reloaded game (currently running The Last Sons campaign). They sort of suck a lot of time out of my schedule. Not only that, I finally managed to get into a twice-monthly game of Pathfinder (Rise of the Runelords campaign) on the other side of the screen, which is proving a lot of fun too.

I didn't get to play Numenera because every time I scheduled it something happened to screw it all up. The last attempt was scuppered because someone changed the event time on a meetup calendar and half the people showed up for the earlier time and half the newer, later one. I've become less enchanted with the setting, the game system and Monty Cook's writing over the last year anyway and am entirely unworried about getting it played now.

A shame, as the setting has a lot of potential. Cook just doesn't want to use it intelligently. He sees the process of adventuring in a fundamentally non-understandable milieu to be fascinating, which would appear to be at odds with the opinion of the rest of the world plus one dog. He also developed the setting as a scattering of ideas with no real framework in which to knit them together coherently.

Neither did I get to play in the much anticipated Metal, Magic and Lore game I made a character for, because the game folded after one session and I was scheduled to enter on session two. Oh well. I doubt anyone will run it now either. The momentum for what is a limited-audience game has been lost.

I was in Canada in August for what may well be the last Retcon - general attendance was dramatically down on previous years apparently, which is beyond sad. A small local game con is an ideal place to meet new gamers and promote the hobby. But it seemed this time that the organizer was distancing himself from the affair, and if he isn't engaged he shouldn't expect others to be either. Promotion for it was minimal too, to the point I doubted it would convene at all for the longest time.

A local game store has closed its doors, a victim to hard times, failure to understand the financial realities of running a game store and the clientele looking in the store but buying on the web. Congratulations people. You saved a few bucks on your game. Only problem is you have nowhere to play it now.

So what's new?

Board game-wise I obtained a few little gems.

Red November, a rather hysterical game set in a Gnome Submarine in which everyone runs around trying to stop the wretched thing sinking before the game ends. Lots of fun. Uses a neat mechanic wherein each player can do whatever he wants in a turn, but then has to advance his personal clock to account for the time used, which precipitates (usually dire) events that the others must usually deal with. These include fires, floods, drive malfunctions, powerplant malfunctions, missile payload malfunctions and, later in the game, the hull being hugged to death by The Kraken. Good for kids over, say, six too, with an adult to decypher the usual godsawful rulebook.

No-one writes proper rulebooks any more. What happened to the rulebook writers from Parker Bros., Waddingtons, or (for the serious gamer) Avalon Hill or SPI? Post-RPG rulebooks are a nightmare to use in-game for special case rule resolution.

Tokaido is a placid game for up to five people based on a traditional pilgrimage to Edo in which one gains points by collecting souvenirs, eating fine food and conversing with interesting people. I like it but it may lack oomph for some.A good game for a crowd that hates conflict games and cannot take the complexity or time-investment for Catan.

King of Tokyo is a light-hearted game about warring giant monsters seeking the rights to call Tokyo their own. It uses a dice mechanic and simple rules, augmented by the inevitable cards to mix things up. Not a fan of the over-use of cards to futz with the rules of a game, myself. That said, King of Tokyo is an excellent way for 3-6 people to waste twenty minutes or so. The rules are simple, the rulebook only mildly annoying in its lack of clarity (the artwork is a bit noisy) and the game fun.

I can't remember if I mentioned Schlock Mercenary: Capital Offensive which is a nice two player game set in the world of the webcomic Schlock Mercenary. Not hard to learn and quite enjoyable, it stands out by being a game that gives the buyer more playing pieces than there are rules for in the game. They say it's so you can DIY some stuff of your own. I reckon they ran out of time. Fun, like I say, with diced movement allowance and a simple, quick combat mechanic. Expensive to obtain, though, with a post-kickstarter set going on Amazon for about $45.

I played a game of the new Mars Attacks board-come-tabletop-war game over the weekend. This uses a printed map playing surface divided into large squares (they looked like three inch squares to me, but I didn't measure them) and miniatures of Soldiers, gifted civilian heroes and heroines, and , of course, Martians to depict battles from the rare gum card series of the 1950s.

It is a lavish production with high quality art on the map and the inevitable cards, great sculpts of each subject, clip-together terrain (busted walls and improvised barricades) and eight-sided dice.

Each square can hold up to six minis, attacks are figured on a base of dice pools. Three dice for an attack, four if the target is "in the clear" and more if you have cards and use an action to aim. defender rolls three "survival" dice and adds more dice if he/she has cards to play. Each player is striving to achieve the number on their mini's stat line - usually a five for shooting attacks by a soldier and six for survival - or better. If the attacks beat the number of survivals, the mini is dead.

Where the wheels start to wobble a bit is in the fine details. The designers couldn't decide whether they wanted a board game with movement demarcation/ranging squares or a tabletop wargame without them. So they encumbered the game with some of the worst clutter lifted from the Charlie-Foxtrot of Warhammer 40k. "If you can see part of a model you can shoot it".

Models may be anywhere in the square but if you move one to a different place in the square - to avoid the consequences of that quoted rule - it costs movement even though the model has gone nowhere and since there are no "sub-squares" the rearrangement cannot be checked or verified. So dispute is possible where none is called for - in a board game.

People play board games for a different kick than they play tabletop games and a different kick again when they play RPGs. In a board game there really is no excuse for introducing uncertainty of this nature as it can only ever lead to dispute. Just look at the arguments that games of WH40K precipitate. Those blistering rows eventually inculcate a ridiculous mindset in which people cannot, for example, agree that four inches is not less than four inches (an actual dispute from an observed game of WH40k between two college science undergrads).

With board games it is possible, desirable and I say mandatory to tie down everything with all cases covered by explicit rules. How many "explanatory" examples could have been saved if the authors of Mansions of Madness had simply said "there is no such thing as a one-ended ladder", or the writers of Mars Attacks either called for printing of a finer grid of squares inside the larger and insisted each model occupy one of them for purposes of line of sight or simply said "if line of sight is traced through an obstacle, cover is granted"? Did they learn nothing from the various iterations of WH40K and the authors' struggle to write a coherent LOS rule that worked without causing fisticuffs?

Anyway, once sensible house rules have been instigated to counter the lack of having a pair by the game designers it plays well. The cards introduce too much randomness in my opinion but I am in a very small minority. I still had fun playing it and look forward to doing so again.

Unfortunately, it is a Kickstarter-funded game and so is likely to be expensive for the aftermarket.

More to come.

One day.

Resources:

Mars Attacks Boardgame

Schlock Mercenary:Capital Offensive Boardgame at the Schlock Mercenary webstore

Tokaido explained by the designers

King of Tokyo at IELLO Games

New Purchases - Numenera

So let's have a decko at some of the stuff I've picked up in recent weeks in the game line.

Numenera, the new Monte Cook RPG.

Set in the Ninth Age, with eight previous world-spanning civilizations dead and buried, nanotech loose in the world and the people living in the period when civilization is just getting restarted. Sounded like a great idea (I'm a sucker for Dying Earth settings and this screams Dying Earth from the description, no?).

The rulebook is lavish. Full color, with lots of maps. Two major geographical areas are fairly well described, the Steadfast, where civilization has a toehold again and The Beyond which is a tad less organized.

Sadly, it all starts to get a bit mundane on further reading.

Firstly, the game system uses three stats to describe characters (which allows for a rather nice damage scheme) and has an inherently un-griddable tactical description model. The GM gets no dice at all, the players are the only people who roll. So they attack, then they defend against fixed values using a D20.

The GM sets a difficulty for any task (including combat) between 1 and 10. Various factors lower or raise this number but it is essentially arbitrary in that the original value is GM selected. The final number is multiplied by three to give the score that the players must equal or beat to succeed.

So not that radical really.

XP get earned the usual way but also for allowing GM intrusions into the story. The GM suggests an intrusion and everybody affected gets to decide if they want to have it. If so, two XP are handed out, one of which must be given to someone else. This whole process makes me cringe to be honest. If I wanted to play FATE I'd play FATE, which does not encumber itself with XP and leveling.

For yes, Numenera is a leveling game.

There are only three (as yet) character classes. This does not worry me because this what what we had in White Box D&D and EPT in the old days. We have Glaives (fighters), Nanos (Magic Users) and Jacks (Rogues). Why this was necessary as opposed to (say) a completely class-free advancement scheme is beyond me.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of the whole thing is that when all is said and done, this is really just another Bronze Age fantasy adventuring game with little of substance to separate it from Tekumel (which has a richer background) or Pathfinder (which has a mature game system and very few misprints).

The background has a lot of potential but there is so little meat on the bones when it comes to the state of Ninth Age civilisation that you could take the setting in almost any direction. Except that there are suppositions built into the published material - and these will also be in any expansions - that hint that the writers have a very definite idea on how it all fits together, they just aren't telling.

The character backgrounds offer three different ways that each character type could become the super post-humans they so obviously are and progress through the tiers (Numeneraspeak for levels). The issue is the overall Bronze Age level of the setting compared to the extremely sophisticated bionics suggested in the character progression.

Now I can get this to work, and do it in a satisfying way for me and,, I think, anyone playing a game. Like I said, I love Dying Earth settings and Empire of the Petal Throne had the same centuries lost tech-as-magic mcguffin and that is my all-time favorite world to adventure in). But when I play in someone else's Numenera game that structure won't be there and that will be a pain in everyone's ass.

Maybe I just take this sort of thing too seriously.

The game was crowdsourced, and it kind of shows because there are some really nifty misprints. One of my favorites is the missing special term in the Glaive and Nano character sections. Each section wants to talk about feats, but also needs to change the name so we aren't playing D&D or Pathfinder, right? Only thing is, the author obviously hadn't decided on a term yet and so just left it blank. The result is a sentence that paraphrases as "as you progress you gain inherent abilities called ." It can all be figured out, but it shows that the proofreading was probably limited to people familiar with the material which is the worst way to approach the task.

And, surprisingly for such a mature worker in the field, the writing is not great. The color story at the start of the book is execrably bad, toothache-inducing. For the second edition this should be erased and a replacement farmed out to an established fantasy author.

I'm actually keen to try this out and will be doing so in a couple of weeks. The setting has lots and lots of potential and the game system could be a winner despite everyone's fear of the unknown (many reviewers of the game were obviously expecting a D&D clone).

I'll post more on this later when I have time and am more read in the material.

Resources:

Numenera Web Site

Islands of Ignorance - TheThird Call of Cthulhu Companion

I kickstarted into this project about six months or so ago.

I happen to be acquainted in a small way with the project leader, Oscar Rios, and was very excited to see what he was planning, and so reversed my "never again" policy as far as game kickstarters go.

I'm ambivalent about Kickstarter and it's imitators. Crowd-sourcing is a very oughties touchy-feely-web-2.0-ey thing that sometimes gives me stomach ache when I see it "abused" by people who have avenues of funding and support that means they don't need to use crowd-sourcing.

However, Rios is Old School Call of Cthulhu enough that I couldn't resist helping out and helping myself to a first edition into the bargain. Besides, I have the other two companions, one of which was the second published accessory to Call of Cthulhu and such a high quality item it (along with Shadows of Yog Sothoth) changed my feelings about after-market publications for RPGs completely.

You'll find me in the backer's list in the publication, when it becomes available, under my web moniker "Roxysteve" (a name chosen during my AOL years when I found my first and last names were an unbelievably common combination in the western world).

If you are in there, shout out.

Visionaries should stick together.

FATE Intervenes In My Life Again

The Dresden Files RPG game I ran a couple of years ago was a bit different to all my other prefered games in that the DFRPG character generation system incorporates that tooth-achingly awful part of a GM's life, player backstories, and so the group needs to meet just to get that sorted out¹ but there is also a touchy-feely phase where the players get to decide what the world should look like. I see the point but my players then decided they wouldn't share the load of administering it which was counter to the DFRPG rulebook guidelines and a bugger for me to manage due to the information load that had to be acquired just to run the game.

So I came to distrust the FATE system on the basis of what I had experienced. While I believe that FATE can deliver a rich experience for everyone, and that DFRPG in particular may do so in a robust fashion under challenging ground rules³, I never did understand the so-called Fate Point Economy and neither did anyone who tried to explain it to me⁴.

Fate points are a way in which the GM can intervene in the PC's lives, and by which the players can intervene in the NPCs machinations and intentions. There are various problems for me in this system, chiefly that the way wounds work hinges on players spending Fate Points to make the wounds hurt, and what happens when the players have inflicted grevious wounds on a Bad Guy but have spent all their Fate Points to make that happen? It is now down to my sense of fair play to make a crippling wound actually cripple the antagonist because according to the strict letter of the rules the players cannot switch on the hurty wounds because they lack the coin.

There's an actual example of the set-up to this situation in the DFRPG rulebook, taken from the Dresden Files fiction, in which an insanely powerful Black Court Vampire has been wounded and rendered "extra crispy" (Fate games are powered by adjectives). The example stops there, but should have gone on to discuss the most likely scenario in an actual game in which making the Vampire "extra crispy" had drained the players' Fate Point bank of its last red cent. I should add that every player would get one and only one free "tag" of the "extra crispy" Aspect⁵ to make the Vampire slow down, limp, go "argh" etc., but once that one round is over Mr V. Ampire straightens up and strides from the room as if unwounded. It's all very counter-intuitive for me, having cut my teeth on systems that have wound management as part of the wounded character's liabilities.


Now obviously I wouldn't allow the baddie to just ignore his crippling wounds like that on a normal day, I'd role play the singédness to the hilt, but what if I'm feeling mean on account of player intransigence and not in the mood to throw them a bone? What if they've been dbleeping around all game and I'm not their friend right now? Where is my incentive to screw with the rules of the game and give 'em a freebie when they've unwisely spent all their Fate Points before the Job Is Done?

Normally I'd just walk away from something for which I have such a demonstrably poor connect, but the thing is I can see how powerful the DFRPG system is (and by extension the FATE system from which it was carved). I want to understand DFRPG's engine, and the people who claim they do are not able to explain it in the context of the rules in the book - which leaves me wondering if they understand it any better than I do. I can just wing it like anyone can, but I don't want to do that because, speaking personally, I like to understand what an author was getting at with a given rule before I toss it⁶, and this has me going back to the well probably too often. Sometimes you should just walk away.

But then again.

One of the least useful bits of "advice" I've been given with respect to DFRPG has been to "study the FATE core rules"⁷, which are free to download, or were last time I checked and downloaded them⁸ just before I read DFRPG. DFRPG may have started as a FATE system, but the various mechanics used to mung physics in Dresden Land bear little resemblance to the parent material. I usually throw anyone who says this into the "parroting Everyone Knows™ but doesn't own or play the game" box.

Harsh, me.

But I was at my LFGS on Sunday⁹ and spotted my good gaming buddy Will running a game in one of the rooms. Will runs FATE (amongst other indie-heavy game systems) and I saw a rather nice hardback FATE rulebook on the table. I have twice sat in on one of Will's FATE games; one "heist" scenario of his own devising and one DFRPG session, and both were enjoyable experiences (that did nothing to answer my questions, oddly.

Long story short, I picked up a copy of this new FATE rulebook myself. For $25 is was a bargain. Hard covers faced in a robust colored material with an almost rubbery feel to it. Glossy white pages with black printing. Large enough font to read with ease. All in a package about the size of a novel (smaller if you allow for marketing idiocy), about half the frontal form factor of your usual game book. It is rare to get such quality for such a low price these days. This is a book one could tote to games easily and expect it to last for years if you don't let clods who think greasy foods mix with paper products get their pizza-smeared fingers on it. Yes, you can probably still get free versions, but a wad of printed pdf pages does not have the robustness or gravitas of a proper bound book for me.
The contents purport to be a more streamlined version of previous editions.

 Maybe this time's the charm and I'll finally understand what the designers were getting at. Stranger things have happened. If not, well I can sell it or gift it or leave it on the shelf since it is a good-looking product.

If a highly improvisational RP game framework is what you are looking for, you should take a look yourself.

Resources:
Evil Hat Productions

1. Actually it doesn't. The whole thing can be done over e-mail if the players are adult about it but the one time I tried to get this done in a game in which I had the chance to sit on the other side of the equation I was subjected to whining from the GM who threatened to quit the game he wasn't yet running. I didn't feel that was fair to the others, so I quit, and was then bad-mouthed by this Big Girl's Blouse and another prospective player who has made a habit of bad-mouthing me when I'm not around to hear²↑
2. Because he dumped a game of mine without notice and didn't like that I flagged him for doing so in payment for us holding the game for an hour in case he showed up↑
3. Namely, that if a player does what Dresden does under the same conditions he does, the same result should be the most likely outcome↑
4. Explanations converged on "give out more Fate Points" which means the damned things are worthless rather than a resource that should be valuable, meaning challenge is ever, when you get down to it, challenging↑
5. Key FATE word there↑
6. Everyone Knows™ that D20 is a system that results in unkillable Godlike PCs, and that even a point blank shot to the head of even a minor character is not a guaranteed kill, except there are rules in the system that make both those things not true. It's just that most people turn those rules off without a second thought - only to start whining six months into their campaign about Godlike characters and ineffective pistols↑
7. Both FATE and DFRPG are Evil Hat products↑
8. Version 3↑
9. For the MM&L character generation session↑