Saturday, January 27, 2024

Oh yeah, Spacers: 180°

In 1997 I really never planned to work with D20, but now? Wow.

I apologize. Yet another edition of Spacers(TM) has been released. My little sci-fi niche for nuts and bolts (and whimsy) just won't leave me be. Blame Bernard Assif, Ben, for encouraging me. He became a co-author as well as an editor. I've actually become a co-editor as well as an author. I just bet the man is wanted for crimes against complacency in Belgium or some other place. Seriously, his love of gaming and roleplaying is a treasure that anybody in the hobby would do well to emulate.

So Spacers has moved past 2d6 mechanics and venturing into D20 and its accompanying polyhedrons. Spacers: 180° is out. Still there is a lot of "winging it" because this OSR-style roleplaying game is not afraid of using the other dice that make up the term "polyhedron." It fails to incorporate odd-sided dice, that games promising to be "gonzo by design," so it's not that daring. The dice we do use are going to be used.

Types have become "Classes." Four of them. The Scrapper, the Spacer, the Solver, and the Synthesizer. With that last one, I think we've mastered the tropes needed for a good start for space opera. Thank Ben for the Synthesizer, I'm not that hip. Then there is the player-Character with psychic abilities. All things Psychic may just take over that Character's role. Quick note, it hasn't happened yet since 1997-- Even psychics still have to turn wrenches in Spacers-Verse.

For all the pressure on him to do otherwise by, well, others; Ben, has helped define how narrative Spacers rules should be focused. While the Playtest edition of Spacers:180° is out, the rules that will be added will hopefully be helpful not defining.

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Not Everytime at the Table Jan 2024

 

Deep winter is so great for Spacers.
Image copyright Simon Tranter and Peryton Publishing

So the usual suspects, Just Ben, Peryton, Iron Curtis, and myself have started playtesting the D20 rules for Spacers, (Spacers: 180 °). We were joined by Ben's brother William. This year's sessions promise to be quite fun. First off, Ben has agreed to, with his usual unbridled enthusiasm, to run scenarios. We will be alternating the GM spot and playing the space lizard, Gal Qix'tar. I hope this has the feel of an episodic SF TV program for everyone playing. I get to play a bit. The tone and atmosphere changes from session to session. There are no negatives here.
    The Spacers, Alezander Delu, Nextremi 37, Gal Qix'tar, were joined by Punches Pilot, aka "Co-Pilot" because Alezander feels a little insecure about being a mediocre pilot while he is "the Captain" of the ship. Co-Pilot is a replicant. Being an imposter for a human, he was discovered by the human colony he was the governor of, so he had to get out of town quickly. Now he is getting by as a pilot-for-hire aboard the Arcadia. Nextremi did some deep Character development and added a scarf to go with her hat from last season.
    The cast of Characters assembled, the Arcadia, was in the Earth System. Specifically where the Pluto-Charon settlements (collectively known as "Karen Complex") wasn't too far away. They were receiving a low-energy distress signal, from a ship supposedly in the Alpha Centauri system according to last data dumps. So the crew set about trying to triangulate the signal, where I got to shine as Gal Qix'tar of the Gykko Clan of the Devvah species. I tried to sell insurance to the Oort Corps' Pluto Emergency Response Patrol (P.E.R.P)...
    I can't go into too much detail here. The work is going to be published in the "playtested" version of Spacers: 180°. Let's just say topical jokes and ridiculous abbreviations as well as nuts and bolts science fiction flowed like milk and honey.
Woo. Nextremi has grown up.


Robin, Curtis, and I were needing some Red Bat this last weekend. I billed it as "Rev" as in revised Rat Bat rules, but it ended being the regular rules-- I mean I've got this whole D20 thing going on these days. I wasn't feeling too pulpy, more gritty urban fantasy, so to start things off I went with a scenario called "Low Bar: Six Zombies Walk Into a Bar" .

    Iron Curtis developed Cyd Cyne, a bartender at the establishment known as the Low Bar. Unbeknownst to the PC he has demon blood in his veins. This might explain his failed career as a city medic and proclivity towards violence. The Wednesday night gig, six muscle-bound dudes in leather claiming to be "Men at Work Down Under" were scheduled to do their dance act. They were intercepted by a Dr. Patrick Neal Benson (Neal Patrick Harris in appearance) and given a celebratory drink. As they walked into the bar, they, well, um... they turned into zombies. So six zombies, supposedly from Australia, walked into a bar. What they didn't count on was that the twenty-four patrons there were martial arts instructors, cops, body-builders, and other physical fitness enthusiasts. Five were quickly subdued. Cyd had to kill one, because it was attacking him and going for the cigar humidor-- Jeremy, the Low Bar's owner, would have a fit.
    The second act of the night, Liz Kroft, shows up as the police cars are everywhere. Peryton had showed up late and started developing her Character during the fight scene. While she is a successful Insurance Fraud investigator, like actually working for the company and not just contracted, her passion is singing. Her seeing Cyd and her neighbor Jessica T- consoling each other, she got the story. Taking a clue from the homeless guy that recognized Dr Benson from the plasma donation center down on Tulsa Boulevard. Jessica revealed that she was bitten by one of the zombies.
    In the ER, where Jessica was treated, Cyd just knew, that she wasn't going to get better. He and Liz only talked about it half the time that she was in the same room (Cyd is not that subtle). It is here that Jessica insisted they find the bastard behind her ailment and fix things. Some serious on-line research commenced. Liz pulled her Obscura Perk and got more than GobbleTubeFace blather. He wasn't living out in suburbs, he had a small mansion off a "city-rich" street, Golden Dawn Drive, just half a mile away from the Plasma Center.
    Going a bit Meta here. Figuring on Peryton and Iron Curtis's tendency to not indulge in my dramatic pacing, I had a whole "Watch-and-Wait" script worked out for the two players to observe.
    So while Jessica waited in the car, Liz and Cyd were debating climbing the iron-pole fence surrounding Dr. Benson's lot. Meanwhile three SUVs full of tactical-looking guys crashed the doctor's gate. One was left to watch the still running vehicles.
    Liz decided to sneak forward and get a license plate if possible (NO WAY! DID THAT JUST REALLY HAPPEN?). While she was scribbling down the plates, a hearse from like 1960 pulled into the driveway as well. The guard in the driveway started shouting about a "Zip" into his radio and started shooting with a silencer on his Ithaca, as an Eyeball-headed humanoid stepped out. It would wave its left hand and the man would clutch his chest and keel over. It would then proceed into the house.
    Flashes would indicate that gunshots were happening, all the weapons had silencers, and screams would happen. Two people would run out of the back of the house, observed by Cyd still in the bushes next to the iron fence. Neal Patrick Harris,... err Patrick Neal Benson would scream and the house would go dark. The two survivors would get into a black-clad SUV and peel out. A minute late, much more casually, the Eyeball would get back into its hearse and leave.
    Our "adventurers" would need my NPC to prompt them to search the house. Jessica reminded them that she did not want to be a zombie. They discovered in a house full of corpses, a secret closet with a red book, indeed the Liber Rubrim. They'd hear noises at the front door.
    Slipping out the back door, the PCs moved into the woods around the house.A dozen people in tactical gear would be all over the house. Bodies would be removed from the house and loud radio exclamations of "It's not here!" would mark the scene. An hour later all the SUVs and a fake ambulance would leave.
    Sneaking away, our PCs would end up back at Liz and Jessica's apartment building. Cyd would still be saying that things were not going to end well. Liz steadied things by mentioning that they should take a look at the phone book-sized journal in front of them. While she and Jess' would only see patterns on each page, sometimes a a hand-written note with an ink pen on the margins, they just couldn't make heads nor tails of it.
    Cyd though could.
    He brewed a weird concoction into a tea and had Jessica drink it. He sent Jessica to her bed and told "Everything is going to be good now." He was going to sleep on her couch. Liz would go to her apartment across the hall.
    In the morning, Cyd would knock on Jessica's door. Opening it slightly after a rustling sound, he'd face Jessica in full on ZOMBIE MODE...


Tuesday, November 7, 2023

A Few Times At the Table Since: the Halloween Special

 Well, I was going to summarize the Wobble mini-campaign, Wobble: Espionage on Prime Earth but Peryton has asked me to recap last Tuesday nights ICONS scenario. Iron Curtis and the gal decided between a choice of another Crawlspace session or a continuation of eight year-running superhero setting. We rekindled the four-color printer and got up to some play. Return To the Townhouse of Terrible it was.

A bit about the Terrible Townhouse in my supernatural super-heroics additions to the shared Beta City setting. It is sort of my answer to DC's House of Mystery. Instead of say time-travel and hell being the mainstay like for the TV show Legends of Tomorrow, ours is more based on Robin's first ICONS campaign about dimensional shifts and incursions from other realities. I, being a fan of the supernatural superheroes from DC, as well as Marvel and even Charleston, has worked plenty of of those elements though. So when last we met, Santo Luna, or Jay or Landshark's boyfriend err husband, as we tend to keep calling him, he was taking over stewardship of the place. It being not only a nexus to many locales in the multiverse, it is in the Archway Neighborhood of Beta City, where other nexuses are as well. He was taking over for Professor Hemm who had taken over for Doctor Philosophy before him.

Okay, Terrible Townhouse is modeled after a row house complex where Peryton lived for fifteen years in Cleveland, Ohio. I actually lived in three out of the four apartments available. So while the rooms and abodes change to the inhabitants, there are certain areas that never do though are warped due to the time and experiences shared by past residents. Many of the villains are former bad neighbors of our days in place. The locales around the residence are often running jokes made by the wife and me. On with the story...

Across the street is Ralph's Ant's House. Ralph is an NPC that is always obsessed with whatever Character Robin is playing, his aunt, whom he lives with, is The ANT a mystical termite gnawing at the Tree of Existences. In an earlier adventure, some supernatural heroes, including Santo Luna, defeated the minions of the Ant. Well new neighbors have moved in. From the chaotic dimension known as Fairy Tale. 



Jessica Jones, yes, from Marvel's Netflix saga, played by Robin, happened to be helping Jay move in. Bruce, or Landshark, was out of town visiting Jay's family. Professor Hemm was there to hand over the keys to place, then was zipped out of existence due to some trans-cosmic emergency. From next door a clan of goblins, the Garski Gobblers, have moved in. Being burglars and miscreants by nature, they of course started breaking into the Terrible Townhouse, mostly to steal its copper. Well, the man-witch now had to do something about that. For every time he and scrapper got the last couple out, others would appear elsewhere. So a mystical solve was required.

Poor Curtis, his up and coming superhero wizard was at loss. I absolutely refused to solve the problem for him, but I did overwhelm him with information about my mystical milieu of our ICONS setting. We brought in various NPCs, including Robin's Wisp character, to act as advisors. Landshark even came home to help Mz Jones whap the buggers. Still no solution. I created a Peck goblin, a variation on Pechs, named Jamboree to start acting as the Handyman around the place. He vaguely suggested "Sex Magic," I'm sure our passed on friend Charlie Wylie would've been all over that, but Iron Curtis was more embarrassed than anything. Finally a barrier portal for anything mystic was designed and constructed by Jay, Wisp, and the Peck. It would ward off anything not more powerful than the three of their Magic Skill levels combined. This thwarted the break-ins. Wisp returned to her Laboratory of Whimsy up by Greenbay, Wisconsin-- Robin did a great job with her cryptic dialog.

Oh there was some outrage in the Ant's House because no one pushed them around, or something. The Yagga, witchy den mothers to many a Gobbler goblin, what the Garskis are, clan did some conjuring to summon some trouble to help them out. The entity known as Ogre wandering around our world after being trapped here six years ago in another game session. While not particularly a villain, Ogre, looking like a very tall, buffed-up goblin, likes a good fight. With a little persuasion he'd join the ruffians in an assault on the Terrible Townhouse.
Out in the street, the Garskis and Ogre started throwing things at the magic-laden structure. Ogre was throwing chunks of street pavement no less. Mean Yagga was conjuring up a storm to assist them as well. Of course Jay, Landshark, and the visiting Jessica Jones would not let this go unanswered.
So it was working class fighting in the street with alcohol more than likely involved.Ogre and Landshark took one look at each and immediately got locked in a battle of strength, looking a lot a game of Mercy from High School.Santo Luna was really annoyed at this point. He showed the Yagga how to cast lightning without any theatrics, she was down for the count first round. Meanwhile Jessica would be trying to curtail the two, no, three, no, four Garskis popping in and up around them.
I was proud of the challenge my combat setup was for the Players. Landshark had bit off a bit more than he could. Jay had to deal with a goblin or two that were trying to get him. Jessica was frazzled by the goblin tactics but was steadily taking one of them per combat round. When all the Garskis were foiled, the two heroes piled onto Ogre to help out their buddy, in true Marvel superhero fashion.
Ogre tried to run but was stopped by Jessica leaping in front of him and punching him backwards. Jay would then sizzle the beast with another lightning strike. This left Ogre's alter-ego, Jeffry O'Garsky, a 17 y/o boy dazed, confused, and more than a little bruised.
Now the cops generally don't come to the Archway Neighborhood. More occult-dealing means govern the place. The Ant's House slipped away to the lot next the Gas Station at the corner, right next to Block House of Cacophony Every Weekend almost a mile away. Meanwhile Zodia Atrologa's (a new NPC) Duplex of Diabolical Dealings replaced it. The fortune-teller sorceress knew Jay's grandmother, indeed they studied together. She took the teenager O'Garsky into her care and promised to help return him where ever he'd like to go. Poor kid thought it was still 2017.

Meanwhile, I presented a cut away scene. Somewhere else in the depths of the Townhouse of Terrible. There the enigmatic Wandering Pimp, adorned in his golden suit and matching homburg hat, spoke to the shadows.
"They've been distracted long enough." He said. "You can come out now."
Stepping out was a rip-off of Darkseid, but red, Arkon.
He would look around him, wave his hands, and a massive collection of poles, looking like a Festivus Pole, but with branches.
"It is time for the X-MASS TREE to begin its work." He'd say in a gravelly voice.

(GM's note, Arkon was originally named Sidedark, but you know, that sucked.)



Wednesday, November 1, 2023

A Few Times at the Table Since: Tales of Keen Excitement (unfinsihed)

 Since GenCon, we've been some gaming online. I've been a little too distracted to recount the sessions like I normally do, so here's part of a digest of this Fall's events.

Tales of Keen Excitement: Set in the World of Keen Excitement, my little foray into politically charged allegory as a grounds for fantasy RPG, has mostly been focused on the agricultural and food distribution systems here in North America. That said, boy has the title alone triggered a lot of alt-right froggies. Though that was already expected, it's still quite satisfying.

So the story so far has been Iron Curtis and Peryton playing themselves fall into a world beyond their own after they are lured to a Renaissance Fair by a dark entity, known as a Sock Specter, imposing as me. This is done when Vankoff, the Wight-Russian, the villain, shows them a large lever with the sign "LEVER THAT MUST (BLOTCH) BE PULLED." So without a pause, any woman (Pery) just had to pull it.
At this point, I had the players develop their Characters using my TOG rules. Curtis became a Warrior, a dark-haired version of Prince Adam from He-Man, and Robin became a witchy-looking Wizard, complete with the pointy hat. They found themselves in a very hot jungle of giant cornstalks, where the corn grew in batches similar to bananas. They were in the edges of what is called The Stalks, and the flora around them called the Cob-Stalk. The corn-looking fruit of these trees are actually called "cobs" not corn. They felt that they were being watched.They made their way to Crashland.
"Landing," as it's called by locals, is a small town, or a "patch" in local parlance, where the houses from other worlds tend to land when captured by mystical tornadoes. Here humans and other creatures, mostly Green-Backs, like very racially diverse hobbits but with green torsos, dwell. Seeing newcomers, they of course broke into song. Curtis would start to join in. Seeing a music unfolding before, Robin retreated back into the Stalks where she saw what had been watching them, the Eye of Ogre. She was scooped up by one its minions and carried away.

The musical set complete, Curtis heard Robin's cries for help as she was abducted. Townspeople came around to give some expository explanation of the place and one of the Green-Backs, named Looker, (NPC Thief) came forward to help the newly arrived Warrior out.
Meanwhile our Wizard was taken into a keep of Ogs. Here piltdowners (hobbit-sized ogres), and the Og (neanderthal men and women) lived and served their master ogres because they had no choice-- they were designed that way. Robin was thrown into a bin with a couple other women. One was being force-fed Cob-meal and mutating into something that resembled a pig, the other was only being given bread and water and being sized up for bridal gown. Maw, the She-Og which basically runs the place, decided that she was "Feeding not breeding." The ogre, not The Ogre, that owned the place Khan of the Cob was returning that evening though.
The wedding night, was approaching. Of course, the pig girl was the feast and the starving chick was bride.

Robin developed her first spell. Meanwhile Curtis and Looker started their plan to free her. Robin said they had stay to save her fellow two captives of course. So using some cobb-syrup alcohol and wheat chaff they blew up a wall to announce the wedding was cancelled... .

In real life, Peryton announced that her work schedule was going to be tough for a while and our RPG sessions on Friday's would have to slow down. So one day I'll get to run my first D&D combat in 35 years. One day.

Friday, October 27, 2023

The Dungeon: the Sweeping Saga or the Bunker

 So I am responding to game-bud Ivan Richardson's "Dungeon Crawls to Stories." In this video essay gets into the ubiquitous question of why do these monsters live by each other? He uses the scenario "The Caves of Chaos" as his choice to show a working grid-grind type of work. He touches upon the concepts of gamism, narrativism, and simulationism, but mostly sticks to the point that disparate entities can be lorded over to explain why they live next to each other on a map with a bunch of rooms within a few meters from each other.

I'm not as he put it '...not criticizing, but critiquing.' I am taking up the subject the "dungeon crawl" versus its proclaimed opposite the story-driven scenario.
Sorry folks but narrative is going to happen. Whether it is because the GM has a narrative, or the roleplayers around the table get into the goofiness of the play-pretend that they are engaging in. It's what keeps people coming back to the table. The connecting thread can be based off of a rather linear direction and flow like say Ravenloft. It can be more haphazard and unrelated occurences in say In Search of the Unknown. It is because of the shared obstacles between the players and the GM stringing that into the yarn of whatever tale gets knitted together. It's not a compelling "ecology" of the encounters, or a detailed understanding rules and implied in-game physics, though those elements make for strong sessions.

Anybody that has had experience with even just a handful of GMs has probably met the Crawl-purist. They're the dude that insists that everything is random yet not arbitrary in the roleplaying session that is going on. Any story that occurs is because of the players' delusional belief that things are connected. This is despite the text of this of that classic dungeon being presented as the get-together's promised tale. If this last over more than a vignette of a room or two, they will then come up with a gladiatorial match where they want the PCs to fight one another or an all-powerful deity will demand that the group eats dog poop, or something similar. In their mind this visceral experience will restore balance in "roleplaying" and get things back to the war game details of a room by room collection of puzzles and Stat-attackers. Sure.

This is fine if you're this sort of GM. Fine if you want your players to get bored of roleplaying and finally move on into collecting card games maybe board games. While the more metered an RPG session becomes, without it basically being something akin to BINGO or amateur poker, there is a reason it only occurs in four-hour blocks at larger conventions. Meanwhile, at the smaller game festivals, kitchen tabletops, and computer screens, things get a lot more wordy than worldly.


Thursday, October 12, 2023

Starfinder: Finally Finished Reading It

 

Written in 2017, I picked it up in '18. It has indeed taken me this long to read the whole book. Now I haven't read it religiously, but I have been picking it up about once a week and reading three to five pages. The information is dense and meant for the truly committed D&D 3.65 player getting into science fiction  with its own nuts and bolts. Of course it has like thirty authors and twenty-five supporting people listed on the side scroll of credits, so one might expect that from a book that is 19,000 to 1.6 million pages long depending on the day of the week that one is reading it.

At least some people are playing it. At GenCon, I've seen about a dozen up to twenty plus events for it every year since its release. They might've even moved on to second edition. I attribute this to supply-based RPG "designer" Industrial Complex producing mega-widgets that need to sell only 30% of the stock to make some money, but there are ppl sitting down to play the game. Unlike a lot of new SF RPG works on the bookshelves these days, which garner hundreds of true fans online for maybe six months of online play by some people, including disinterested wouldbe actors, on YouTube. Meanwhile the older SF RPG books have dozens of fans that suck on nostalgia juice and confuse the product with Starfleet Battles or Traveller alternately.

The rules are some very solid and detailed SF stuff. Even when a thousand ppl playing one hundred Starfinder campaigns a year, only a quarter of the provided rules would come out in play. When I started reading the starship section, I was glad to see that the authors were trying to turn vessels into Characters and encounters. I was also wondering how they saw my private notes, but hey I only really got serious about space ships in my own work like five years ago-- still some three years before I waded into this book's section for them. The Character species are things like sexy robots with facial hair if needed; humans; giant lizard people to be used as Tanks; antennae-having psychics, space chipmunks; hidden-faced four-armed things; and interesting, for once, bugs. Dwarves and whatnot from Pathfinder and/or D&D are welcome. The setting is a solar system (and a bit more) striving to be a blank slate for the author-GM. So blank it has only 300 years of history. I like the world listing format, it covers the basics in good sci-fi terms designed for actual play at the table (mostly time and gravity), which I find a very helpful take for my own stuff.

Would I play it? I haven't finished running my first D&D-based combat in thirty plus years over six sessions of play for my TOG OSR fantasy setting yet, so, no. Still the rules here are thought out and helpful to any S-F GM that is only looking for tips. The true Path-finding GM, I am sure can make it work. Overall a Loch Ness Monster game system on the scale of Smurf to Godzilla.


Wednesday, October 11, 2023

Oh the Trip of the Fantastic

I have run my Spacers, Wobble, Crawlspace and various FRPG explorations sessions over the same time periods sticking to very strict guidelines defining each. Meanwhile, I have been slowing down on my gaming. I have been less than interested to keep straying away from soccer and beer on Saturday. Sundays are a great day to watch TV series or movies and do laundry as opposed to squeak in extra game sessions. Late Friday nights being the only time I want to game. This has led to my writing sticking to whatever I am running the next Friday that anybody can get together.

 I have always like mixing up my roleplaying. Not so much mixing the genres that are set in my head. Someone once mentioned to that the longer that they run roleplaying games the more everything runs together after a couple of decades. As a guy that runs around three differing things over various sessions concurrently this has always worried me. I kind of have viewed it as a form of meta-GM dementia for experienced GMs that must be avoided at all costs.

 I am trying really hard not to start mixing the genres up. And then finding out about George Lucas schemes to make his own sagas in Star Wars it's harder than ever.

This is the sexy picture for Lucas's master tale of Star Wars after the three original movies and before his sequels. If it looks like Jim Henson's Dark Crystal to you don't be fooled. It's a series of kid shows that is not meant for kids nor meant to be much more than after-school specials. Its writing is not intended for the kid in the picture, but for the inner child of 50 y/o Star Wars fans. The budget in casting just made its casting meant-for-TV and therefore hopefully palatable to juvenile viewers.

He take his moderate success, these products did better than the infamous Star Wars: Christmas Special, and begin production on this series of works.

Leaving out the Ewoks, but still with really bad juvenile tropes, Lucas forged works of sci-fantasy that would be terrible. Terrible up until Disney got involved to show us how bad things could really get.

Let's hope that my new RPG strategy fails half as much as the Ewok saga.