The Elusive Dr Baffle: story-jamming with Mythic/Slipstream. Pt. 1

Mythic style games seem to work backwards from a typical role playing game. The overall plot or scenario is not actually known until the end, though to write it down you have to put it first – as if it was known all along and you were working towards it. The reality of this type of collaborative story telling game is that you muddle along making stuff up and then weaving it into a coherent plot after it has happened. It is a conscious piece of legerdemain that you play on yourself, pretending that there is something to be uncovered: it is just a matter of putting the pieces together in the right way. All of the background only fell into the place part way through the session – for the early scenes we were in a process of discovery, both about the setting and location, and also our reason for being there.

Background. (Savage Worlds setting) Slipstream

We were Parnassos and Danton, lieutenants of the pirate captain, Magdelene, on a mission to the planet, Barter, from our home base of Vitin. The pirate captains of Vitin had been prevented from joining forces by queen Anathraxa. What they needed was a powerful ally who could challenge her, or at least take the heat off their sector of space long enough to enable a gathering.

Levitos was a high tech city-ship whose engines were in a state of disrepair and short on fuel. Anathraxa taxed the Levitosians in dark-matter to deliberately prevent them from restarting their engines and recovering their potentially vast power. In secret, the pirates of Vitin had been creating a stock pile of dark-matter. This was to be used to sweeten an alliance with the Levitosians, who would in turn furnish the pirates with advanced equipment and join the fight against Anathraxa.

To achieve this, the shipment must not be detected, and the Levitosians must be freed from surveillance long enough to allow repairs to occur. So, Parnassos (Greg) and Danton (me) were on Barter to sow false information in the hope of directing Anathraxa’s attention to a sector far away from our theatre of operation. Barter was a desert trading world where the scum of the universe gather to make deals, double cross and murder each other, and sell each other out to Anathraxa’s spies. The local police were corrupt, and spies were everywhere.

Scene 1. An airship ferrying people to the city from the space port located out in the desert

Conscious that Barter was rotten with Anathraxa’s spies (exactly what we wanted as we had false information that we wanted to plant), we scanned the crowd till we found a likely candidate. We found him nursing a drink and looking mournful. He was a Peter Lorre type of character, probably an Anarch from Scar. We settled into a booth near him and allowed him to overhear our conversation which concerned our meeting at a particular tourist spot with a Dr Baffle (The Conundrum Scientist – an entirely fictional character who we intended to make real to the security service: a sort of ‘Man who never was’). We had information for him concerning an operation called The Paradox Projector.

Scene 2. Next day, in a skimmer car heading out to a well known ruin where tours were often taken

As we approached the site, we saw that our bait had already been taken. The area was surrounded by squad cars and paddy wagons. Local police, directed by Anathraxa’s agents, were rounding up everyone at the site in the hope that one of them was the terrorist: Dr Baffle.

We pulled to a halt and scanned the scene with binoculars, but were observed in turn. A squad car speed after us in hot pursuit. Since I was an expert driver I headed to another ruin outcropping and then in a spectacularly believable stunt, crashed the car. Parnassos ripped a jacket and dropped the first of our data crystals with carefully crafted false data. Then we hid in the ruins.

The agent from the airship (by now we knew his name was Deyvour) climbed from the car, along with a statuesque woman of extreme beauty. This agent (we later found out) was called Chilax, and she was as ruthless and efficient as she was striking to look at. She quickly found the dropped crystal and viewed its contents on a portable holo-projector.

Once we were certain that she had seen the info (an unmistakeable 3D map of the city of Mechanos) we started shooting in order to dissuade them from trying to capture us. Instead, looming clouds on the horizon told a story of a coming sand storm. Abandoning the chase, they sped off.

Later, in the midst of the storm, the convoy of paddy wagons passed. We jumped onto the running boards of the last car and hurled out the driver to make good our return to the city.

Scene 3. A gambling house

We played Babes, a traditional card game with four suits: Vagitatus, Fabulinus, Cuba, and Domiduca. Since we were both expert card players we managed to convincingly lose badly and were dragged into a back room for a tune up. After being roughed up a little, we offered the second data crystal, claiming that it was valuable information. Sinon, a well known information broker, was called in to verify the data. When he saw that it was the biography of a certain Dr Baffle, who he had been detailed to look out for earlier by Chilax (we calculated) he paid the price and took it.

Scene 4. A cafe

We found Deyvour at a cafe drinking coffee and pretending to read a paper. I slipped the waiter a fiver and pretended to serve Deyvour his coffee, while at the same time slipping him a message printed on Imperial stationery. It instructed him to go to planet Krieg and meet with contacts concerning the Paradox Projector being smuggled into Mechanos. Such a message could only have come from Chilax, we hoped he would reason.

As Deyvour prepared to leave, Parnassos slipped into a chair behind him and advised him to tell no one, “No, don’t turn around.” This mission was critical, Parassos told him, and at the same time he dropped the last data crystal into Deyvour’s pocket.

Scene 5. The space port

We allowed ourselves to be followed to the space port. We knew that Deyvour was aware of us, and we detected that both he and we had tails. Inside the ship we eluded the agents and made our escape out of the cargo loading hatch.

Alone on the tarmac once the liner had taken off, we imagined the surprise on Deyvour’s face when Chilax had him searched, only to find the data crystal. A data crystal that gave dates and times for hiring a hanger on Mechanos where a device was to be built. The device was an obedience override that would scramble the minds of the robotmen of Mechanos. Chances are they would fly into rebellion against Anathraxa. The mysterious Dr Baffle was to activate the device from a secure location on Krieg.

Deyvour would know nothing, and he the note he thought was from Chilax was clearly not. Was Deyvour the mysterious Dr Baffle himself? That was what we hoped Chilax would ask herself.

We also hoped that she would send out an alert for Anathraxan warships to make for Mechanos, far from where we planned our rebellion on Levitos.

And so ended Episode 1 of The Elusive Dr Baffle.

Potential recurring characters:

1. Chilax, senior agent of Anathraxa who is now on our trail
2. Deyvour, junior agent and traitor to his Anarch people. He has a score to settle with us because we set him up to come under suspicion from his boss, Chilax
3. Sinon, information broker on Barter

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.

Savage Dwellers of the Forbidden City

Few things are more boring than reading a blow by blow account of some one else’s role playing experience. Wargame reports can be marginally more interesting because you have photos of the little toy men on the table. But RPGs. Unless the writer really has the talent for writing, are just dull. You had to ‘be’ there.

So it that vein I will not give a blow-by-blow description of the session that Greg and I played recently: Savage Worlds game where we actively attempted to meld RPG and skirmish miniatures gaming.

This probably comes as no great innovation to the vast majority of players who have been brought up on, particularly the modern version of, D&D. It’s all just skirmish gaming, right? Well, no. We have come from a world where the two forms of game have been poles apart. So this use of Savage Worlds to swap between the two modes of play is new – to me, anyway.

The attached image shows the tools we had. The action was set in the 1930′s – an Indianna Jones antiquities hunting adventure – the treasure being found in the classic AD&D module ‘Dwellers of the Forbidden City’. The Call of Cthulhu and Realms of Cthulhu were there to give us more info on the period. I also have Thrilling Tales (not pictured as Greg has made off with it to study), but for all the wealth of period detail it gives very little equipment information. RoC, similarly, has a nice list of guns. But what we really needed for the first session was info on other pieces of equipment that would be available to an adventuring party in 1930. Such as torches. For this we referred to the master of all source books, CoC (4th ed, in this case).

Slipstream sat ready as well just in case any super-science artefacts should turn up. But in the end none were, so it will stay on the shelf next time.

So to cut a long story short, the initial role-playing session went as expected. A little banter with a local chief, some scene setting. Some hints of the coming story. Characters were explored to find out who they are. Greg and I are of the school that start off with minimal stats for characters and allow them to find their abilities in play. For example, Bud, a college undergraduate and assistant to the professor, had only a d6 for shoot and was armed with a conventional .38 revolver. But where he fired he Aced and then Raised, knocking the pygmy beastman on his arse. We knew immediately that Bud had the Marksman Edge, and we developed a background around him being on the school pistol shooting team.

But when we came to the scene that was a skirmish war-game with miniatures, the action just fell to… fighting. Penny the journalist could do nothing but find a .32 in her garter and blaze away, and this was not how we had imagined her at the start. A war-game implies fighting, and diminishes – or at least taxes the imagination – to find a role-playing activity.

Or so it seemed last night. With a little more practice we may be able to see more.

This was the first session in what I hope will be a mini-campaign to move through this classic module.

Building a miniatures campaign

It has been a long time since I managed to play in any campaign, either role playing for miniatures. The tyranny of distance and time has conspired to make my circle of friends tiny, with divergent interests and time schedules making linking games together in any meaningful period of time difficult.

But, as Lord Percy said when asked how he was going to master the art of alchemy, transmuting lead  into gold in a single afternoon, “I like a challenge”.

Thrilling Tales has a magnificent scenario builder. Not quite as clear as one might want in some cases, and a little repetitious in others, but overall it is a great piece of work. I heartily recommend it. Using this core idea, even with the table entries as they stand, you can build a pretty interesting story arc. Thrilling Tales is built for inter-war ‘pulp’ adventure and if that is your bag, as it is mine, then every dice roll speaks magic.

However, the specific scenarios are designed for a role-playing game. However (2), it is designed for the Savage Worlds system which is intended to be a skirmish war-game system at the same time. However (3), Savage Worlds talks about Plot Point campaigns: set ups that lead the players through a semi-structured ‘plot’ which allows a peripheral ‘sand box’ play. This is arguably a perfect world, unless you have a magical group that all want to just live and explore and just soak up the majesty of the fantasy world created (man – how I remember those heady high-school days). However (4), the Plot Point campaign is not really described particularly well in anything I have read. I do appreciate the idea, but the actual implementation remains obscure to me.

Being an organisational person, I drew a picture. You can see it here: plot point campaign.  In this, I propose 6 (miniatures) games in a sequence make up a campaign. This campaign is tied to a setting, with a beginning, middle and end, with each game leading to the next.

For Flashing Steel (still in the pipe works at Ganesha) I built the three game campaign, but this is significantly different. Ganesha games are particularly man on man skirmish, and are designed to be friendly ‘pick up and play’ style. They are excellent short games – we get through a scenario in 40 minutes – so you can play a mini-campaign in a night. Not so a Savage Worlds game which is longer, though admittedly not the length of a dreary big-battle taking a full night for four moves.

The campaign skeleton I threw together today wants testing. No doubt. The real test is to build a story arc into it and have it play tested. Now all I need to do is get my friends to have interest in a single topic for more than a few days or, alternatively, pick a topic for which I have enough figures…

Rescue June Mayweather – Act 2

Last time, you will recall, the Rocket Brigade had tracked baron Aristodemos to his palace on a remote planet. He had kidnapped plucky reporter, June Mayweather, and certainly had no-good in mind. During the battle with the baron’s mechanical servants, dashing captain Stagg Wallop was killed, and the team were unable to prevent the baron from having his wicked way with June and then escaping in his personal rocket.

Now, read on.

A reformed Rocket Brigade with a new leader in captain Cody ‘Uppercut’ Kirby had traced the baron to an inhospitable jungle planet. He was now reinforced by a squad of picked goons, armed to the teeth and protected from the environment. With June in tow, the baron needed to recover a necklace that (we discovered by using Mythic) would chain June in mind and body, and kill her within 40 days unless a hefty ransom was paid.

For this game we had a first test of the Raygun Gothic rules, using the d6 countback dice resolution system. In addition, we incorporated our favourite elements from other games, including randomly occurring monsters, and natives with changing allegiances. Figures were a mix of Eureka, Renegade, Pulp Figures, and some D&D pre-painted as well. The main terrain piece was a Paizo flip map of a swamp, supplemented with some walls to lift some of the ruins into relief. GW trees were dotted around as well, and I ringed the uncompleted tree armatures at the edges to give the impression of dead and rotten swamp vegetation. And just to further help tie the map into the underlying board, I dotted some Miniature World Maker rubber swamps to break up the hard edges of the card.

The baron and crew trekked along the path, pretty much ignored by the natives who lurked in the thick greenery. Every turn, we randomly discovered who’s side the natives were on, and for every group in the jungle we rolled to see if a crocodilic monster or giant snake appeared and attacked. Once engaged with a monster, we rolled to see if a feeding frenzy started and another appeared. The natives spent most of the game fighting off these beasts, though a couple managed to shoot their poisoned arrows at one unfortunate goon, who went down.

The rocketeers bounced over the undergrowth, and found themselves in the middle of the path, directly in front of the baron’s picked squad, who gunned a couple down. Bypassing the main group in one direction, and bouncing over them in another (while firing his Colt .45 as he zoomed over their heads), the rocketeers cornered the baron in the ruined building. A goon had been trying to retrieve the necklace (requiring 3 successes in difficult checks), but he dropped his shovel as Cody lived up to his nickname and sent him reeling.

But it was to no avail, the baron’s man defended admirably, recovered and then knocked out Cody, and the baron calmly pulled his raygun and vaporised another rocketeer entering by the other doorway. Then, June still in tow and presumably still enamoured of the villain, the baron fled.

Again he slipped the net, but he failed to retrieve the necklace. The rocketeers were almost wiped out, and the final act will need to be prosecuted by a different unit of the galactic law enforcement agencies.

StarGate 1900 SG2 team defined

New game coming up, with Greg playing the defenders and me taking the role of the exploring humans. Here is my SG team. It is SG2 by virtue of the fact that it is the second to be defined. This week I hope to have the figures painted as well.

Colonel Sabow – Personality
Points 95 Quality 4+ Combat 3
Special Rules -Pistol, Crackshot/Marksman, Elite, Hero, Leader, Steady Under Fire

Sgt. Lewis – Personality
Points 111 Quality 4+ Combat 3
Special Rules -Submachine Gun, Climber, Elite, Hero, NCO/Second In Command, Steady Under Fire, Strong

Cpl. Hopkins – Personality
Points 99 Quality 4+ Combat 3
Special Rules -Drum Fed Light Machine Gun, Crackshot/Marksman, Hero, Steady Under Fire

Dr. Alexander – Personality
Points 80 Quality 4+ Combat 3
Special Rules -Pistol, Elite, Hero, Medic (professional), Specialist, Steady Under Fire

Pvt. Lagodan – Personality
Points 75 Quality 4+ Combat 3
Special Rules -Bolt Action Rifle, Chucker, Crackshot/Marksman, Elite, Light/Bushwacker, Stealth

Pvt. Sialkot – Personality
Points 75 Quality 4+ Combat 3
Special Rules -Bolt Action Rifle, Chucker, Crackshot/Marksman, Elite, Light/Bushwacker, Stealth

Pvt. Treptow – Personality
Points 75 Quality 4+ Combat 3
Special Rules -Bolt Action Rifle, Chucker, Crackshot/Marksman, Elite, Light/Bushwacker, Stealth