The Ruins are Endless

I felt inspired to build a very simple scenario and encounter generator for miniature wargaming in ruins. Not LOTR style ruins of an impressive structure sitting pristine on a hilltop, but instead vast untamed ruins that occupy the entire board.

The thing about such exploration adventure war-games is that the entire terrain could not be known by the figures. Just as in an exploration of the darkest Africa, the heroes have no idea what could be around the next pile of collapsed building.

Starting with the excellent work, The Forest is Vast, I stripped out all reference to rules and scale as this can change from game to game, and rewrote the encounters to fit the urban ruin setting.

This resulting random generator can be used for fantasy urban decay (Mordheim), deep in the heart of the jungle (pulp adventures), any of the brands of zombiepocalypse, and any post apocalyptic settings.

So here it is: The Ruin is Endless. Comments and feedback welcome.

Lizards!

These fellows have been in my painting box for at least ten years, probably more.

I distinctly remember lodging a request with my mate, Pete, when he went to work in the UK to bring me back a box of GW Skinks. As a non-gamer, I’m sure he found the experience confronting. Still, if the most confronting thing you ever have to do is walk into a hobby shop and ask for toys then you have lived a very sheltered life, my friend. Pete has since redeemed himself by living such a harrowing life that I feel positively confronted reading his dispatches from the front.

Anyway, so I bought these skinks because I have a soft spot for the lizardmen (and rats). But how to paint them? The default seemed to be green? Why? Hard to say, really. Any skink I have seen is brown, and when you look at other lizards in the wild they have an amazing and beautiful range. This was in part why it took me so long to get around to painting them. I could never decide on a scheme, and I felt inadequate to the task.

Recently I have decided to paint things because they are no good unpainted when I am dead. Better to be painted shithouse than not at all.

A little research came up with the poison frog of South America. This test paint is an attempt to capture that scheme. White undercoat, black eyes, space marine blue hands and feet, blood red dorsal surfaces (that’s back, to you), yellow ventral surfaces (front), orange crest gills, brown for the bow and quiver, silver for jewellery. Wattyl Stain & Varnish. Tamiya Matt Clear varnish.

I’m pretty happy with this guy and now I just have to discipline myself to do the rest.

Tools for a Slipstream story-telling game

Slipstream, the pulp science fiction setting designed for Savage Worlds role-playing and miniatures wargaming, was the topic of our most recent story-telling effort.

Greg and I approached this as we have done for all of our efforts in the last few years, treating it as a shared GMless story-telling  game, rather than a traditional role-playing game. This meant that much was randomly generated on the fly and we talked through the possibilities, creating the events and resolutions as we progressed.

Slipstream is squarely my baby. I know Greg tolerates it, but his particular passion is mythic Greece. To ease us over the hurdle of me living and breathing this stuff and therefore having a deeper affinity with the setting, I created a few tools.

The first was a deck of cards listing everything in the Slipstream Gazeteer on pages 49 to 52, along with the explanatory text. This served as the primary location randomiser answering such questions as, ‘Where are we?”, “Where does he come from?”, “Where is our home planet/fragment?”, “Where does the evidence point?” By flicking out these to Greg, he had an instant thumbnail on a place. This relieved me from the role of deciding on a place and then describing it in detail – effectively making me the GM. Once locations where found, the book was available to both of us to open it for more info in the Fragments section, pages 57 to 74.

To give us a feel of the sweep of the place I took the free download PDF of the Slipstream universe and printed it in A1 and had it laminated (quote $120 at the printer under our office, or $28 down at Office Works – guess who got the job). This sat in the middle of the table and we poured over it, tapping and stroking the map making grand plans and generating the feel of navigating the slipstream and estimating travel times. I think this device worked well.

To generate an Inciting Incident, I created a deck based on the ideas in Instant Game. Each card had six possibilities, such as: Secret Door, Brainwashing, A Visit From the Law, and so on. There were 32 cards. So with a roll of a dice and a flip of a card we had a very large set of things to push us into an adventure, and find new twists when we got stuck.

Then I created a more specific location deck, designed in a similar way to the Inciting Incident deck, showing such specific places as: Beach, Roadside Motel, Abandoned Building, and so on. This deck helped us move from scene to scene. Where is the next contact going to be waiting? Roll a dice and flip a card. These last two decks could be used with any setting.

Finally, we used our old standby tools, the Mythic Game Master Emulator to answer yes/no questions and generate any on-the-fly motivations or twists, and also Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable to generate character names and any deep motivations.

Together, these tools appeared to provide enough support to keep the action moving while informing enough detail. We appeared to be slowed down on only a couple of occasions, and I do not recall being totally stumped, as we have been on previous efforts.

The full story-telling game lasted for around three hours. We found our characters, developed two memorable foes that are sure to reappear as nemeses, linked several fragments in a complex plot of rebellion against queen Anathraxa, and painted pictures of a particular place – Bartertown – that I found to be vivid and ‘live’.

I think it worked, and with any luck we will continue in this setting.

The full write up of the story will come when I get around to it.

Anubis Studios – Alive?!

A Yahoo group has been set up to talk about the games that will be coming out of Anubis Studios. This will give the players and testers the chance to voice their concerns in a single forum and get corrections and additions address.

Great days.

http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/anubis_studios/

HÂN – campaign update

It is one of those campaigns that I come back to every now and then with a wistful attitude. There is every chance that it will never be played, but the material is there. Call it a pet project.

Here is a Mind Map I made of some of the material.

Flash Gordon, the original is still the best

Flash Gordon. King of the Cliffhanger

Alex Raymond, in 1934, with his creation Flash Gordon, conceived and rendered a spacefaring future so intriguing and exciting that it has persisted in the visual imagery of Science Fiction ever since.

In 1936, Universal Studios would produce the most expensive serial production to date bringing Flash Gordon to the big screen starring Buster Crabbe and Jean Arden. A reported $350,000 budget was set, about double the normal serial budget.

So successful, Flash Gordon has become synonymous with Cliffhanger Serial. After three serials and film adaptations of those serials, Flash Gordon would find a home on television during its early years in the 1950s.

Flash Gordon reappeared on the big screen in 1980 with Sam Jones playing Flash and Max von Sydow playing Ming the Merciless. Timothy Dalton of James Bond fame plays Prince Barin.

Flash Gordon Serials

“Flash Gordon: Spaceship to the Unknown” The planet Mongo is on a collision course with Earth! Flash Gordon and Dale Arden join Dr. Zarkov and blast off in his rocket ship to Mongo, trying to avert worldwide destruction.

“Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars” (1938, 299 min., 15 episodes) – A mysterious beam of light emanating from Mars is sucking the nitrogen from the Earth’s atmosphere, and only Flash Gordon can stop it, battling Queen Azura, the Clay People of Mars, and his mortal enemy Ming the Merciless!

“Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe” (1940, 234 min., 12 episodes) – A rocket is dropping purple dust into the Earth’s atmosphere, causing instant death! Can Flash Gordon stop the madman from Mongo while retrieving the antidote to the death dust from the frozen planet of Frigia?

Mythic – The Sleeping Dragon’s Tower

Time has passed since we last played a story-telling game. Most of my efforts for the better part of this year have been in skirmish miniature games. Flashing Steel is with Ganesha for review. Raygun Gothic is progressing slowly but surely behind the scenes – we have a new dice mechanic, and have narrowed the focus so that it is no longer a ‘generic’ science fiction set. But you get tired of one style of game after a while. It seemed time, therefore, that we tried our hand at something different.

Mythic remains our preferred game approach; Greg and I have worked out a comfortable method of play, neither of us leading, discovering the setting, era and mission as we talk. Where Mythic shines is in the internals of keeping the action going. The random elements are rich enough to spark the imagination. What it lacks – for our purposes – is a randomisation mechanism to find the setting. Greg and I choose not to play in defined settings. Just making things up tends to become stale as we can only imagine to our prejudices. We have used Brewer’s a lot in the past with success. But even then it can lead one to well known paths.

Greg found a new free for download product called The Instant Game. This has a set of rules for character development and action, but this is not its strength. What it does have is a number of great tables to help you find a setting. More than a simple list (which is a reflection of cultural prejudice, as I mentioned earlier – some people may be interested in Boston 1770 as a setting, but it has bugger all interest to Australians, for example), it adds a layer called Tone. The tone modifies the setting. Take the example of an Orwellian setting (again, many people would shrug their shoulders at the thought of a dystopian corporate/fascist future, but it speaks to me). This implies all kinds of dark adventures: terrorist freedom fighters, torture (re-education) chambers, and so on. But what if we laid the tone of B-Grade over it? Or Comedy, or Romance? See how it changes? Great addition. I recommend it to Mythic players as an addition to your toolket.

Anyway. So we rolled to find out setting and tone, plus some ‘things’, and ‘opposition’. Our first attempt came up with Tiny People, Heroic, Atomic Monster, Secret Society. After chewing this for a while we came up with either a Star Wars Ewok world, or a 1950′s Gozilla world with pygmy natives. Neither of those things really grabbed us as a place we wanted to tell a story in and, more importantly, we did not feel that we had really created anything new.

On the next attempt we got: Skyscraper, Mythic (an omen if ever I saw one), Fury Dragons, Government Agent. Now we were talking. This was a hard set of ideas to reconcile.

We spent a long time (up to an hour) discussing how these elements made a setting. We proposed ideas and discussed them, discarding the ones that did not develop the setting, refining until we came to an understanding of what this place was. The following is what we came up with.

This was a First Age setting. The immortals still live. The land is a defined area, and that is the whole Universe. In the centre of this land is the Tower, the place where the Dragons sleep. The Dragons were the creators of the universe, but were, by their nature, destructive and fickle and uninterested in the affairs of humans, exactly analogous to the Grecian Titans. It is an article of faith that the dragons became tired and fell asleep, and it is their dreaming that keeps everything ticking along. The worst thing that could happen would be that they should awake, shattering the dream, and everything would fall back into primal chaos. Or so the believers in the old religion tell us.

Greg’s character was a priest of this old religion. Mine was a cynical guttersnipe who had attached himself to the church as the one place that gave him care and employment.

The government of the land was a Revolutionary one that had managed to achieve power some years ago. One of their central platforms was that the Dragons were a myth (because they were unseen in the Tower, of course), that man was a free agent, and that believers in the old religion were dangerous reactionaries.

The action started at the Federation Day carnival, where Mythic informed us that a murder had occured. We concluded that we had been followed and my punk character had ambushed him and bumped him off. Agents were on our trail. But why? We asked Mythic three questions (no more than three – a house rule we have), and found that we were on our way to meet a Restless Fixer. He had passes for us to enter the Tower. Through random rolls in both Mythic and Brewer’s we found that the government were after an artefact that could wake the dragons (so their offical claim of disbelief in them was propaganda). They wanted to wake the dragons because they believed the story of them holding the universe together was a fairy story, and that they were merely powerful creatures that could be used – presumably to solidify their rule. We knew that the government were after the secret (an artefact) that could wake the dragons. Our job was to get it first and make it safe so they could do no such thing.

To get the passes, which we wanted in order to find out the truth about the dragons (we had three conflicting theories on their origins now), the Fixer wanted someone sprung from gaol. This person was a Shewd Devils Advocate: a firebrand Barrister who was notorious for exposing government mistakes and inflaming public passions.

Did we have the power to release him? Yes we did, or at least the priest did. So we went to the prison and Greg’s character simply signed the papers. Then we got out of there fast before the Revolutionary Guards descended on us. We told everything we knew to the lawyer, who promised us he would spread the word of the intention to wake the dragons. Any way you looked at it, such as act would be a disaster.

The tower was a country within a country. Priests carried out the ancient rites. People lived their whole lives within the vast structure, much like the Forbidden City. Our passes were quite senior, and we were shown to a chamber where one of the most important rituals took place. It was a gauzy, 70′s chamber, with tinkling glass sculptures and organic, bubling light shows. There we were giving a dreaming drug in order to commune directly with the dreaming dragons who slumbered hundreds of floors above. In this dream we discovered yet another version of the dragon myth, and this one was probably the true one as we had dropped into a different plane of reality.

The dragons were in fact put to sleep by the people. It is not the dragon’s dreaming the enriches the land. It is the collective dreaming of the people that prevents that dragons from waking and destroying the universe. The relationship was symbiotic. This power is enhanced by naturally occuring blight that affects grapes. It was therefore in the wine the clergy use in their ceremonies. So the connection between religion, the people, dreams, and the maintenance of the universal balance was revealed. This was the secret that the government agents were after. So it was distributed and could not be simply grabbed and used. But the wine industry could be squeezed by taxing it out of business, for example.

Armed with this knowledge we returned to talk to the Barrister. We gave him everything we knew and between us concocted a plan. Since the government clearly suspected something like this, hence their pogrom against the old religion, they would need to be fed something that sounded close to the truth. The connection between dreaming and the dragons was well known. Even the direction of the control (people to dragons, and not the other way) had probably been deduced by them – they just did not know what was the mechanism.

Brewer’s came to the rescue and returned Corn Laws. We would spread the word that it was another kind of plant rust, say one that affected the grain that beer was made from. This agreed, the Barrister set about building a smear campaign that would subtly introduce this idea into the public conscious, and so allow the government to ‘uncover’ the wrong answer and start supressing the production of beer.

This would make things tough for the beer makers (but not the crucial wine makers) for many years, but it gave us – the defenders of the old faith – more time to figure out how to topple the government.

The end. Drunk, we quit to dream.

Flaming Plasma – Planetary Romance

One of the major problems with this set of rules is dealing with vehicles. In the science fiction (or, more accurately, space fantasy) setting, vehicles can be expected to be present and they are potentially very powerful. The trick is to keep the spirit of Songs with its extreme simplicity, but you don’t want to make it so simple that it becomes possible for a man armed with a pistol to take on a tank because the combat results are all off one continuous table.

Flying Lead has a separate two-stage vehicle combat section, and this is a way of dealing with the problem. From game experience, however, Greg and I found that want we really wanted to do was shoot at the driver of the car rather than shoot the car. These are heroic, skirmish games, and not tactically intense anti-tank games. That’s just the way I like to play.

As I played with a number of different approaches – getting some good feedback from Alan – I came closer to thinking that the real feel I want from these rules is a pulp, space opera. I am less interested in having a gritty war-game than I am a dramatic war-game. I don’t mind impossible leaps and heroic actions. In fact if this could not happen in Flaming Plasma I’d call the development a failure. I still want the rules to be generic so that games can be played anywhere along a notional time, tech, or setting continuum. But the feeling I am realising I want is in that heroic, dramatic, pulp end of the pool.

This simplifies vehicle combat enormously. A strider may waltz into the playing arena, as may a megahyperdeathbot, but the action remains with the individual man. Weapons +/- are therefore constrained into a very narrow band reflecting ease of aiming, not power of attack. And so the results must be carried by Special rules characteristics. And this allows a lot more less-mechanistic colour. So I would like people to be able to play Aliens with this, but I’d also like to allow a Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon sword ‘n blaster game as well. This pleases me: it fits the vision of the game I want to play.

Mythic Hân – map update

I felt the need to cartographise. Here is an update to the geography of the Empire, continuing the policy of making the representation abstract. This time I have included the idea of Judicial Circuits: those regions that are under Imperial Administration and can expect a high ranked Judge and other administrative staff to be active in running the areas.

In a nutshell: each province has its own Governor. This may be an appointee from the capitol, or it may be some local king or warlord. Groups of provinces are joined together in a Judicial Circuit and a Judge is appointed to this next higher level of command. His job is to tour his provinces and act as a ‘High Court’ for any matters of law or policy that cannot be handled at Provincial Government level.

However, not every ‘province’ is a Province of the Empire. Some remain outside of Imperial law for various reasons – which we will find out during play.

So far we have only explored province 01, Parangaricutiro.

From Mythic: is this a province contained within an active Judicial Circuit? Somewhat Likely; 78, No.

This is consistent with our finding in play that no Governor was in place, which was why the demon prince was attempting to achieve some legitimacy. However, after I had rolled I realised the question was ambiguous. What did I mean by ‘active’. I decided that province is a Province – since this is consistent with what we found in play – but that there is something not only wrong with the Provincial Government, but with the Judicial Circuit as well.

Has a Judge been assigned to the Circuit that Parangaricutiro belongs to? Very Likely; 39, Yes.

So there’s a new thread: what is the reason for the Judge of that Circuit being so lax? Why had the region not been visited for so long? Why had he not appointed a Governor?

Mythic Ravenloft – time to get back to work

There has been a long pause in this story while I have been bringing other writing and gaming elements forward. I am now starting to think about this story again and I wonder what has brought it back to the surface.

The odd conclusion I am coming to is that it has to do with the weather. Ravenloft is a winter story – the way I am telling it. As the days became longer here I could think of nothing to say. Summer in Australia is about long long days and hot hot temperatures, interspersed with the odd thunderstorm and imperilled with bushfire. Hardly the kind of inspiration I need for a story about snow and ice, and Vampires,  zombies, and loves lost…

But now the threat of fire is receeding, and the mornings are darker. It’s still pleasantly warm, humid even. All the indications are that it will not be a particularly severe winter. Still, I am anticipating that the reduced light and the morning fog will get me thinking black thoughts again.

Now to get the juices flowing. First: I need to reacquaint myself with the characters, and I need to appreciate what important thing has just happened (in the last scene) .

In true Mythic style, I rolled against my tailor made Mythic Focus chart and found ‘Remote Event’.

Next entry: what Remote Event pushes the characters into action?