New Campaign

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a good campaign needs a really cool title.

And I don't have one. Yet.

I know what I want to do with it - an Aeon/Trinity campaign set (or at least starting) in the colonies established on the Jovian moons and all the cool stuff that can be done with Io, Europa and the other awesome parts of intrasystem space, but I don't have a title so I'm still a little anchorless.

There is a working title - 'Ethereal Skies' - but it just doesn't seem to give justice to the epicness of what I'm planning. I may need to brainstorm a bit...

Sneaks back to the blog...

Finally have stuff to write about! Woohoo!

Firstly may as well fess up about the Beat To Quaters campaign. It was fun, going to Mars, beating up Tripods, however it was kinda ruined by the general fact that one of the players cheated. Constantly. Rearranging the deck every time he thought I wasn't looking. It created something of a bad atmosphere around the table. So a word of warning to anyone else running Empire!- make you players put down the cards if they're not actually supposed to doing something.

Kinda put off by the whole thing I decided to go back to fantasy for the next uni yearand ran a fantasy version of the Leverage system. This worked ungodly well and an extremely fun time was had by all, especially the PC who turned out to be 'Tyler Durdan'ing the entire thing by actually being the bad guy and not knowing - and, of course, me not knowing until the players sprang the flashbacks on me that backed this up. Dear $diety do I love the players for that game!

This year just gone I've ran a Conspiracy X/Laundry Files crossover campaign - basically ConX in the UK. There has been much fun - diving out of a moving plane over Albania, setting off an EMP that took out the electricity stations across the majority of East Yorkshire and discovering what the golfballs at Fylingdales are really doing.

Currently in planning as I've had a request to run Aeon Trinity (the White Wolf SciFi setting) for this coming uni year. More on that to come...

Brace For Impact! The One-Off Pilot Session

Ran my one-off Empire! game for the start of the university rp society year yesterday and it seemed to go well. Not particularly high concept, I admit, but Edwardian Steampunk meets War of the Worlds seemed to fire up the imagination of the non DnD players so I had a the maximum number of players I had planned for (six).

General premise - Scott's first Antarctic foray coincides with the arrival of the Martian cylinders. Having no red weed to give the game away nor a major spread of bacterial life to kill them off the Martians set up a resupply base using the personnel at McMurdo Station as food until Scott's expedition disturbs them. Much derring do ensues.

Player characters were Scott, Shackleton and a number of their expedition regulars (a doctor - MacKay, engineer - Skelton, dog handler - Crean and navy officer - Royds).

There was much fun had at the general presumption of 'Prussian Mechanical Monstrosities', the heroic death of the dog team as Crean sent them careening off into the night to cause a diversion and save the lives of the expedition and the finale which involved the PCs taking control of a now unmanned tripod (after fitting the base's Colours to the machine and attempting to play 'God Save the King' through the 'sound funnel') and coming to the rescue of their incoming supply ship HMS Pandora.

The quote of the night was Scott's magnificant deadpan understatement as the signaling device they'd whipped up using a bucket and all the reflective material they could find was destroyed by a tripod tendril in the groups first glimpse of the Fighting Machines: 'Damnation, there goes the shaving mirrors.'

Stop That Boat! Part 1

So they PCs get word that Naglfar has sailed and it on it's way through the nine realms up to Asgard. Not the best of news but the PCs have got a plan. Several plans. OK, more plans than any sane party should ever have...

They start out with Sheep Heaven. Simple really. They want to tap into the Odysseus trope by kidnapping a Cyclops (and his sheep - he'd been living as a farmer in NZ, even had his 3 year 'no fatalities' badge from Murdering Monsters Anonymous) then taunting the Fire Giants into killing him so Poseidon would damn them to roam the seas for nine years rather than nine days. Nearly worked, but the Cyclops was kidnapped rather than killed. They didn't take the sheep, however, who now rule over their own terra incognita.

Having spied on Naglfar docking to resupply in Muspelheim Operation Ergot was put into action. The PC god of balance and harmony enchanted about a third of the food supplies on board to start sprouting again, making them completely unpalatable to the charcoal munching giants. Resounding success.

Operation RyanAir span off from that. Having spied the tensions between the Giant warbands, the PCs had made sure that Operation Ergot had only affected one particular tribe creating a lot of hostility between the various clan chiefs. Ryanair was designed to exacerbate these hostilities to fatal levels on a cramped voyage. Didn't work entirely but certainly had an effect.

Operation Baldurgate was a late addition once they'd discovered that one of the souls kidnapped to row the ship was Baldur, the Beautiful. Having got on quite well with him the last time they met (and him and Hod being crucial to the plan to the effect that Hod stopped being the god of emo kids and started being the god of sabotage) Baldurgate was designed to get as many rowers off the ship (slowing it down again) and, of course, rescue Baldur and his wife, Nanna while the ship was docked at Jotunheim. Worked very well.

Having decided that they needed a distraction capable of being launched by their mortal special forces allies but that molatovs weren't really an option, Operation Heston's Kitchen was the invention of the anti-molatov - liquid nitrogen encased in polystyrene. It gave the mortals enough of an edge that they didn't die the moment the battle started.

And the final act within the Giant realms was Operation Pimp My Ant. On their way out of Naglfar's hold the PCs dropped off an ant hive 'borrowed' from a Nigerian ant god with dominion over artistry. The ants started dismantling Naglfar's internal walls one tiny sculpture at a time...

TBC

I Dropped A Meteor On Muspelheim and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

The start of the true epicness of the campaign, where everything started to gel at a wonderful level, was Mjolnir II. As a side effect of stopping a child kidnapping ring working for the Erl King the players dropped a meteor with a 20 mile diameter through a portal between Midgard and Muspelheim. Yep - a random side quest wiped out two thirds of the entire population of Fire Giants. All because the players take note of interesting magic I'd set up as canon for the setting several months before.

Operation Surtr's Patio was set up to deal with the aftermath of Mjolnir II as dropping an asteroid on Muspelheim had fairly large side affects - specifically most of the volcanoes in Midgard erupting as all the mystical gates between the two realms get flung open by the impact. As a method of solving the problem of lots of magma all over the place the players got a bit ambitious - and started to plan creating their own planet. With the portal tech they'd used for the asteroid itself and a canon piece of mystic wooga (I had previously set up a meeting between different bands of Scions that occurred in it's own little pocket dimension with its own way of dealing with time while you were inside it) they engineered the magma to some spilling out of the other end of the portal in ten years time - after it'd been fired out in the depths of the solar system by the Russian space program. The patio's a bit chilly but it'll have a nice view.

And all of this set up Ragnarok quite nicely. Odin, never one to miss a trick, forced Ragnarok into happening early while the Fire Giants were still massively depleted so the Aesir could fight for the win. Of course, that wasn't easy either...

TBC

The Saga of the Wanderers

It's finally finished.

After 123 sessions, 10 Legend and the best part of 900xp the epic Scion campaign of epicness has drawn to a close - Ragnarok has been 'diverted' and the Wanderers have finally hung up their boots to take their place among the greatest gods of the Aesir. After sacrifice, betrayal, love, honour and, of course, the dropping of a 20km asteroid on Muspelheim the campaign notebooks have finally been hung up.

I'm somewhere between absolutely exhausted and incredibly bouncy and elated.

From The Ground Up - Maybe Not the Best Way To Reach The Stars...

I've been having a significant amount of trouble with this setting - it's just not gripping me, just niggling away and world building for the sake of world building. It doesn't have the sense of fun I really enjoy creating for my players.

Maybe it's the fact that it just doesn't have a hook. If I tried to pitch it as a TV series it feels like something that'd either get cancelled after three episodes never to be seen again because the ratings were so abysmal or a series that would struggle on for half a series slowly petering out.

I'm of the general opinion that if I can't sell a concept to myself I won't be able to sell it to a group of players and make it in any way as enjoyable as the current one. As a GM I feel that I have duty to not make roleplaying boring or turn it into some sort of lecture rather than an enjoyable interactive experience.

I still adore the Duty and Honour/Beat to Quarters system (Empire!) and it's been rattling around my brain trying to attract my attention with a big flag that says 'Go With Your Instincts!' since I wrote part 4 of the blog. So I think I will. Currently I'm thinking of combining Empire! with epic space battles and going for awesomely cool steampunk spaceships. And possibly Martian Tripods. And death rays.

Yay! I can have Skullduggery back!

From the Ground Up - Homebrewing a Near Future Sci Fi Setting : part 5 : Power

Power drives our civilisation. Without power our lives would be changed utterly; the dawn of civilisation was defined by the discovery of fire, most of it by the harnessing of beasts of burden, then our current age brought about by steam, coal, oil and nuclear power with solar and windpower nipping at their heels. With the current global power problems and global warming prowling in the shadows a change in power source would be a massive change for society.

I think I've decided on three...

1) An interim fuel source between now and near game time. I'm currently meandering through the GURPS Transhuman Space sourcebooks to steal borrow cool ideas and it's realistic use of helium-3 as the major power source of this century is something I'm going to keep for a while.

2) Plot-driven stellar-travel spaceship fuel. Caught by skimming solar winds and harvesting the matter expelled by stars. Really powerful but only viable in actual spacecraft.

3) A cool new fuel source to fight over. No nation would ever regard having too much fuel as a bad thing and if there's a new improved source on the block to fight over then you can bet that tensions will be high. As I ended up at a lecture on antimatter at last years British Science Festival that substance jumped to the top of my list. Certain isotopes are currently used in modern medical PET scanning because they decay and release antimatter - carbon-11, nitrogen-13, oxygen-15 and fluorine-18 - and this by itself lent itself to lots of fun possibilities for discovering antimatter on other planets. What happens if within a certain ecosystem one of these isotopes is bound in molecules which stabilise them until the molecule bonds are broken down? Antimatter is annoying to store for anything more than a few minutes without a penning trap, and even then the amount you can store in one is tiny but if you can ship out tons of the compound then separate the molecules...

From the Ground Up - Homebrewing a Near Future Sci Fi Setting : part 4 : Skills

From a purely thematic viewpoint the skills in BtQ invoke wonderful images, after all just seeing the 'Skullduggery' skill brings to mind piratical exploits on the high seas and Dickensian urchins racing through the streets. While the insane part of my brain is screaming 'run Oliver Twist in Space!' at me I'm ignoring it and trying for a more modern feel to the setting.

First off I decided on the skills I was going to leave happily alone. 'Awareness', 'Command', 'Diplomacy', 'Gambling', 'Haggle', 'Intimidate', 'Profession' and 'Scavange' all seemed to be perfectly suited for the setting as is.

Leaving aside the wrestling match with linguistics for the moment I had to make a decision on new skills to reflect the changes in society, especially the importance of the sciences. With a bit of mulling over a few of the other space based games I decided to go for the three way split - 'Life Sciences', 'Technical Sciences' and 'Social Sciences'. I was tempted for a few minutes to add in the 'Theoretical Sciences' but that seemed like pushing the system a bit. Maths for the sake of maths is only a challenge if you're sitting an exam - somehow I don't think that wouldn't make a particularly fun session.

Now for the renaming. The non-military skills were less likely to break the mood than the military ones so I started with them. Firstly my beloved 'Skullduggery' had to go, 'Subterfuge' being the obvious choice to replace it. With the meshing of 'Music' and 'The Arts' was born 'Media' which more accurately reflected the current state of artistry. 'Romance' is a dirty word these days with 'Seduction' being closer to reality. 'Intrigue' was slightly more problematic but after having a good look at what the skill represented I decided on 'Investigation'. 'Courtesy' also led back to bygone days and it was a toss up between 'Charisma' and 'Presence' with 'Presence' winning afte a small tussle.

The military skills were what I was most dreading. So much of the atmosphere depended on getting these correct. 'Purser' was fairly straightforward and immediately went to 'Logistics'. Likewise, 'Gunnery' made perfect sense to go to 'Ordnance'. 'Soldiering' renaming to 'Military' and seemed to feel right. The others were less forthcoming. I had some reservations about combining 'Seamanship' and 'Maritime' but in the end compromised by replacing the two of those and 'Riding' with the combo of 'System Ops' and 'Pilot' - one for large vehicles, the other for personal/small scale craft.

Now I had to figure out if anything was missing. The only thing I could really see needing was some kind of skill to simulate the challenges of working in different gravity conditions. 'Athletics' was the first phrase of choice but it gave off too many allusions to sports so I opted for 'Agility' which didn't have the same type of overtones.

Now I have everything system-wise but traits and ships, however how they could manifest depends entirely on the setting and tech level so I'm off to get some research done.

TBC...

From the Ground Up - Homebrewing a Near Future Sci Fi Setting : Part 3 : Measures

Linguistics, language and literature have always fascinated me, especially when trying to choose the right words to portray the correct theme. The idea that two words can technically mean exactly the same thing but invoke completely different moods has always endeared me to a love of the English language. With that in mind I knew I'd have to do a bit of tweaking with the skills and measures of D&H to portray a futuristic setting.

The measures were mostly kept as standard - 'discipline', 'influence' and 'charm' are as important a measure of a man as they ever were. 'Guts', however, gave me a bit of a problem. Having played Deadlands previously the term brought back memories of the wild west, mixed with some overtones of pirates on the high seas. While perfect for the Napoleonic era it was not giving the impression of a modernistic setting.

So, what felt right to replace it?

Going back to my old haunts 'Stamina' was always a good fit for general fitness and health but here it didn't seem right. It came across as too light a term for a weighty measure, more associated with gym fitness than the heat of battle.

'Endurance' was another possibility but came up against the same problem.

'Health' just didn't seem right.

Eventually, after messing about with various phrasings, I decided on 'Resilience'. Formal, impressive, modern and few preconceptions about its scope.

Happy with that I then turned my eye to the skills...

TBC