West Side Warriors - a Savage Worlds game for 3-12 players and a GM

Think The Warriors, played out in a post-appocalyptic NYC, using the same methods as in West Side Story

New York is a wasteland by night. Vicious gangs run rampant, stealing, vandalising and using unrestrained threatening choreography on each other and any poor bugger who wanders into theater.

The players take the part of members of the mostly unknown gang The Warriors, after gang delegates (the players) have attended a meeting of gangs in The Bronx.

The object is to get back to Coney Island with everyone as undamaged as possible. Unfortunately, unbekownst by The Warriors, they have been framed for the killing of Mr Big, an important member of NY's most powerful gang The Riffs.

The Riffs have put a bounty on The Warriors!

Every gang in NY is looking for The Warriors, and the road back to Coney Island will be a difficult one.

Navigating NYC

The Warriors move across NY using a map broken into zones. Crossing zones takes cinematic amounts of time decided by the GM, but at least one gang must be overcome in every case in order to enter a zone. Gangs can be confronted and overcome by combat, or The Warriors may attempt Stealthy Passage, avoiding contact by EITHER a series of standard group stealth rolls (in which the least stealthy PC determines the outcome) or by Stealth Choreography, which consists of a series of group performance rolls (using the least able performer's skill). Success in either will grant a conflict-free passage into and out of the zone. Choreographed Stealth can also grant bennies.

Confrontation

When confronted by another gang, initiative is determined, and the winner gets to choose the mode of combat:

1. Ultra violence - a vicious no-holds-barred brawl using whatever weapons come to hand (no guns, no-one can afford them). PCs may use a single skill to elaborate on their combat technique, using athletics in conjunction with a descriptive narration, or taunt (with a suitably humiliating descriptive narration) to put opponents on the "back foot" until their next turn. Winners incerease their gang reputation (which affects combat bonuses and penalties) losers lose reputation (as well as getting sliced up a treat). Losing reduces the Warriors's reputation and blocks their way forward on the map, forcing the choice of a new route or a re-match.
2. Choreography - a vicious no-holds-barred dance-off that wll grant the winning gang bennies. (Bennies are used for re-rolls and avoiding damage). Losers slink off or faint away with shame.

Whoever has Gang Initiative decides the nature of the battle - either Choreography or Ultra-Violence. Th GM plays the NPC gang.

Choreography battles are "Dramatic Challenges" of a random number of rounds with fixed initiative. Whoever wins determines the performance troupe size AND dance formation, which must be matched by the opposing gang as best possible. Non-performers sit out and watch. The gang that wins the most rounds of performance wins the choreography battle. If that is The Warriors, they continue on their way and each PC gets a benny.

How it works:

1. The GM rolls for the challenge length, and determines the NPC Performance "target number" to be beaten by The Warriors' performance.
2. The Warriors' leader makes the group Perform roll using their Perfom skill
3. The leader may elaborate their performance with a skill roll for +1, or +2 for a raise.
4. Each member of the performing troupe within 5 inches of the leader rolls their own Perform and adds +1 to the leader's roll for a success or +2 for a raise.
5. Each member of the performing troupe within 5 inches of the leader MUST then use the same elaboration as the leader, granting an additional +1 or +2 for a raise.
6. An un-bennied failure of the elaboration OR the performance roll of a trouper removes them and any bonuses they may have contributed from the performance AND can run the risk of tripping other adjacent performers of their troupe, forcing an immediate athletics check to recover or be removed from the troupe along with any bonuses the tripped PC may have contributed to the performance roll.
7. The losing team must remove one performer from the stage for the next round due to twisted ankles, hamstring problems or histrionic meltdowns.

Most number of wins after the challenge ends determines victory. Winner sends the other gang skulking away and if the PCs are the winners, each member of The Warriors who performed (including those who were eliminated during the performance) gets a benny, and the Warriors may progress on the map as they wish. Draws are determined by single combat Perform challenges Leader to Leader. At this point player might announce that they are opting for a vocal performance, and could describe the nature of this song and what it is attempting to achieve. Extra bennies or other bonuses might be granted for a clever enough use of this tactic.

Any member of The Warriors may contest the leadership if they feel agrieved. This can be settled amicably, by a gang vote or by the above combat methods, PC on PC. Players might be wise to avoid Ultra-Violence challenges for the good of the gang, but the choice is theirs.

This is a musical. No-one dies.

Characters who take enough damage to kill them faint instead. The wound penalties do accrue though.

Players may at any time "chew the scenery" by announcing they are going to sing. They must say what the theme of their song will be, and what they are hoping to attain by singing it. Examples might be attempts to gain sympathy for imagined (or real) wrongs by other gang members, pleas to reconsider decisions already made and so forth. The other players may take the performance to heart or with a pinch of salt, but a simple success will grant a benny if the technique is not over-used.

Bennies are a feature of the Savage Worlds game system. They enable players to re-roll bad dice results, to soak away damage as though it never happened and to change features of the encounter in minor but possibly important ways.

This scenario uses three different colors of benny.

1. White Bennies are used as described above
2. Red Bennies are used either as White Bennies or to add 1D6 to any single roll. Using one grants the GM a benny
3. Blue Bennies work like Red Bennies but do not grant the GM a draw
4. In-game benny draws are done blind, for a random color

More New Purchases

I obtained a number of old school games made by Parker Brothers and Waddingtons recently.

These games were designed by masters of the form, usually complex enough to hold the attention of an adult while being easy enough to play to allow for children to join in (or possibly the adults post Christmas Dinner c/w copious quantities of alcohol). Waddingtons' Formula One was a purchase that was voted a damn good waste of time at my local friendly game store three months ago, and I just picked up copies of Waddingtons' Blast Off, a Space Race game I had played in the early 1970s which was in excellent condition, and Parker Brothers' Masterpiece which is an art collector game where the object is to collect works of art that are highly prized while dumping your acquired forgeries on the other players. Each artwork card is a reproduction of an actual painting, and gets assigned a random value known only to the owner as it is drawn. A very clever mechanic and a game I've wanted to play since I was an older kid. Never knew anyone who had it though.

I also picked up a copy of Waddingtons' Spy Ring, which I had played at university in the mid-1970s but it turns out there are two different iterations of the game. The one I had played was the original. The one I bought turned out to have a different game-play and objective while using many of the same pieces. Sadly, the one I want to play is the other one. Oh well.

Can't wait to get a crowd together for some old-school gaming.

New Purchases

More new purchases, courtesy of eBay.

I've long been wanting to get a look at the Avalon Hill old chestnut Outdoor Survival, pretty much since it was suggested as a resource in the last few pages of Wilderness Adventures, the third booklet that came in the box that held the original version of Dungeons and Dragons. Gary Gygax suggested using the Outdoor Survival map board as a campaign map for D&D, retasking the various features on the board as castles, baronies etc.

When the chance came to buy the game I jumped at it, and scored a copy that by the looks of it had never been played. I, of course, plan to ruin the collectibility of the thing by punching the counters from the sheet and actually playing the game. It looks to be an odd beast, where the players are actually playing however many simultaneous games but not actually doing much in the way of co-operating. The conceit is that players are lost in the Great American Outdoors and must survive and navigate their way to safety. To simulate being lost in confusing territory while at the same time having a bird's eye view of the whole terrain, the players do not have complete freedom of movement, but must move in straight lines largely in accordance with instructions randomly determined according to how dilapidated the player characters are. If a counter crosses a trail, the player may decide to follow it instead of beating through the bush, but that's about all the discretionary movement one is allowed if my cursory reading of the rules is right.

The different counters show the same characters in steadily decreasing state of health, from striding along confidently to staggering and even crawling desperately. It is all very amusing, in a life-or-death way.

The game came with an actual wilderness survival booklet too, the game having aspirations to be a teaching tool as well as a good way to kill a couple of hours on a rainy day.

Looks like fun.

Own Goal

I recently picked up used copies of Panzerblitz and Panzer Leader, two games from Avalon Hill's golden age of bookcase games, which I somehow managed not to buy despite promising every time I saw them that I would.

For those not in the know, these games "simulate" armoured conflicts in WWII, Panzerblitz between Germany and Soviet Russia and Panzer Leader between the German and Allied armies post D-Day. In their time there were expansions available (if you could find them) that could shift either game into new theaters of war. They remain quite popular with enthusiasts to this day, even though neither game has been available outside of a collector's market since the late 80s.

Picturing battles to come with opponents I am determined to scare up, I decided to pen my own version of The Panzerlied - the German song of the tankmen as heard in the movie The Battle of the Bulge. Since I don't speak German, and the point was to needle my putative opponent (assuming I get to play Germany) the lyrics were of necessity in English and inflammatory in nature.

If we see an enemy tank we shoot it to bits!
If we see an enemy truck we shoot it to bits!
And if we see a tank hunter we shoot and shoot until it's blown to bits!
If we see an enemy jeep we shoot it to bits!

The enemy hides in camouflage which we shoot to bits!
The enemy hides in houses which we then shoot to bits!
The enemy hides in trenches which we squish and then we shoot them to bits!
The enemy hides in bunkers which we shoot to bits!

The enemy arrives in landing craft which we shoot to bits!
The enemy arrives in gliders which we then shoot to bits!
The enemy arrives at airfields which we overrun and then we shoot to bits!
The enemy arrives in halftracks which we shoot to bits!

Only thing is, since writing it I can't stop it running round and round in my head. It seems I have written an earworm.

So that worked.

Savage Worlds Kickstarter And More

And speaking of Savage Worlds, a new version is being kickstarted.

Funded in 3 minutes. Oversubscription to this level should speak volumes about the quality of the product line to date. I believe Savage Worlds is more fun than a barrel full of monkeys poking one in the eye, and I recommend it to anyone not moving quickly enough to get out of the way. It is simple to riun, easy to teach and fun to play.This is the most entertaining explanation of how it works that I've come across to date.

You can use it to build your own RPG games or you can bolt it onto any of the many available pre-written settings: Deadlands Reloaded, Space 1889:Red Sands, 50 Fathoms, Slipstream, Flash Gordon, Rifts, Necropolis, Realms of Cthulhu, Sundered Skies, Lankhmar, Rippers, Gaslight, High Space, Kerberos Club, Weird War, Mars, High Space and more. Call it a sort of math-light GURPS in concept.

Two self-contained games don't even require a separate purchase of the basic rule books: Solomon Kane and Pirates.

I can personally recommend Pirates and 50 Fathoms to would-be Jack Sparrows , Flash Gordon and Slipstream to 30s SF serial buffs, Rippers, Realms of Cthulhu and Gaslight to the Steampunk and Horror fan bases, Space 1889 to anyone who loved the 60s movies based on Jules Verne and H.G. Wells stories, and Deadlands Reloaded to everyone - even those with no interest in the wild west, as I found it to be exciting and enjoyable after over a decade of avoiding it. Of the stand-alone games, Solomon Kane is a personal favorite.

Coming soon will be a new mashup Fantasy/SF/Horror setting called "Crystal Hearts", set in the world of this webcomic about an RPG campaign, kickstarting in mid-November.

Figure Flats For Wargaming and RPGs

Like every gamer I like having metal or plastic miniatures on the table when doing grid-based combat¹, but am increasing less enthused when it comes to the job of basing them³, prepping them⁴ and painting them, as this takes time I'd rather use to be playing.

So I've fallen back on an old idea, made new again first by Stephen Jackson (or GURPS fame) and later by several others, of cardboard representations of the figures mounted in some sort of base.

The disadvantages boil down to "not a three dimensional figure" and "can easily blow over if clods abound". The advantages are that the artwork is often superb and large collections can be transported with a fraction of the time and trouble three-d minis cause.

Steve Jackson's Cardboard Heroes were assembled as "tents", so the figures resembled upside-down letter Vs with a base that could be stuck to a coin for heft.

Pathfinder sells collections of high quality thick card "Figure Flats" to match their printed products⁵ that are sort of like cardboard tombstones in shape. They are designed to slip into a grooved set of jaws of the special bases they sell. These bases are not cheap either, because they are quite complex mouldings made, unless I miss my guess, by injection moulding. Dies represent a hefty investment - they have to be fabricated using machine tools, which is why small companies don't do plastic injection very often.

Precis Intermedia make a series of figures that can be assembled as triangular prisms, flats and counters, and also sell a rather nice base to take the flats. These are the bases I prefer to use as they are much less expensive than the Pathfinder ones and actually grip the thinner card likely to be used to make them. Precis Intremedia actually sell PDFs of these figures for download and print-at-home..

Pinnacle Entertainment Group, the company that puts out my favorite RPG system Savage Worlds also make a range of settings for the basic system, most of which (but not all) also have an available line of figure flats for purchase. These are intended to be assembled as triangular prisms and so have three faces, one of which is a black silhouette and the other two a full-color depiction of whatever it is.

I have extensive collections of both Pinnacle's and Precis Intermedia's product lines, but I prefer the figures to be presented as simple two-sided flats, with a rear and front depiction. I also prefer the figures to be slightly larger than either company chooses to make them so that the detail prints properly on inexpensive home printers that cannot get anywhere near the resolution of a professional printing press. So, to get a usable figure collection I have to do a bit of work.

Job one is to import a page of figures into a program like Photoshop or GIMP so they can be re-engineered. The Pinnacle figures are usually presented in a tight matrix that makes good use of the card available but is not suitable for flats to be mounted in a clip-base. I pick out the figure I want, and carefully extract two of the three panels from the original (one side image and the rear silhouette).

Using the rulers and guides in the graphics program I carefully scale the image appropriately. With Necessary Evil, for example, the PC Villains were scaled to be larger than the NPC aliens, which in turn were scaled up slightly so they would print cleanly. For Deadlands I made the figures, which started life at about 1.25 inches tall (including whitespace) 1.5 inches tall. I then carefully added a half-inch tab to the bottom of the character. This is what got printed, on high quality matte paper.

The printed figure art was then stuck to card using rubber cement. This is a decent bond for the duration of the preparation, but won't last long in play as the glue gradually loses its grip.

The figure was then carefully cut out using a sharp Xacto knife, the fold line scored and the figure folded and glued into a flat. It was now a two-sided cardboard affair of decent thickness⁶ with a tab. This I wrapped with heavy duty clear Scotch brand wrapping tape. I started about halfway down the tab on the rear side of the flat, wrapping the tape over the back of the figure, across the top, back down the front and cutting enough to fold over the bottom and cover the initial start point of the tape. The sides of the tape wre then trimmed flush with the sides of the flat.

The wrapping was done for several reasons, starting with the fact that rubber cement does not form a durable bond with the card. Wrapping over the top and bottom not only made sure the paper would not come away from the card backing, it formed a durable point at which the base attached - slipping the figure into the base posed no threat that the paper would be torn away from the card by the jaws of the base itself.

The glossy tape also made the card figure durable vs greasy dimwit player fingers, and gave me a nice erasable surface on which to write with wet- or dry-erase pens to indicate special status or wounds or whatever.

So not quick as far as preparation goes, but oodles quicker than painting.

1. In which the RPG sort of strays into board game territory in the name of clarity and fun. Some hate it and prefer Theater of the Mind², but I see useful applications of both techniques↑
2. In which all combat scenarios are enacted in the players' heads and no miniatures a re needed. All RPG combat was like this at first↑
3. i.e. gluing them to a base and then dressing the base to look nice↑
4. An endless process of removing the casting lines and flash, changing out patrs for others in order to make the figure unique, bending or cutting/regluing to change the pose etc↑
5. Bestiaries and Adventure Modules↑
6. Because two layers of card, yes?↑

New Purchases

I just successfully bid on three Avalon Hill boxed wargames from the golden age of games, when people weren't afraid of rulebooks.

The first was an almost complete "Tactics II", arguably the game that jump-started the market for Avalon Hill wargames. I've wanted to try this for years and a copy was available for the Buy it Now price of 20 bux plus postage, so around 35 bux in total. Not bad for a game missing a couple of counters¹.

The second and third came as a single deal in one auction. "Panzer Blitz" and "Panzer Leader" were games I remember seeing and scheduling for my shelves but money wasn't endless and I had other games that were fun and ... well, the time when these were available new passed when Avalon Hill collapsed and became a boutique name for Wizards of the Coast.

These days it is almost impossible to find people in the same locale as me who are willing to invest the time and effort in playing simulation games like these. The games are designed to recreate the actual physics of driving tanks and shooting at things. Things are intuitive once you get the designer's basic take on what is important, and certain standards were used in just about all wargame-type games so picking up a new one wasn't a steep learning curve usually and things were designed to work the way you expected them to.

The rules are also written in what is called the "Case System" which groups rules in increasing amounts of specialty. You look up whatever you want to do in general terms, then the special conditions that apply as and when you need them. It is a sort of hyperlinking. The key concept is that the players are never expected to be "off book" while playing, so the rules ware exhaustive and easy to navigate. ².

I was feeling nostalgic and decided to chance the condition and component count³ but these seemed in good condition.

I expected to get sniped to be honest and placed my bid in such a way to foil the manual snipers, but there's nothing you can do against software designed to up the bids incrementally before a human can type a counter offer. But after a brief flurry of activity by one inexperienced bidder and a halfhearted bid by someone not really interested I took the prize for around 50 bux. Twenty five dollars per game, not bad.

So I'm looking forward to receiving these blasts from the past⁴. Even now I am picturing the Panzer games in the window of Dungeons and Starships on Summer Row, my not-so local friendly game store of choice in 1981.

Now if only I can find an opponent ...

1. Which can be replaced easily enough by printing replacements from counter sheet images on the web↑
2. Contrast this to game rulebooks today which typically adhere to the RPG standard where it is assumed that the players will figure a way of winging it when (not if) things get confusing or they hit something not covered. The result is often a disorganized mess. Fantasy Flight Games, I am looking at you↑
3. the options for both these games were not great and nobody was doing a component count on the various offerings↑
4. The ancient past in the case of Tactics II, which dates from 1958 I think.↑