Just completed – Ratmen

Here are the Ratmen (Skaven, Hosbecites from Slipstream) completed. The technique was extremely simple:

• assemble and glue to base
• spray white
• divide into two groups, painting the fur on one group red-brown and on the other black brown, leaving white gaps where I want the flesh to be
• paint flesh (Formula P3, Midland Flesh) on hands and feet, in ears, along snout, on tail and between legs
• divide again into groups and paint the clothing on each group in straight red, blue, green and yellow, making sure to leave any straps or belts exposed in white
• paint all metal
• paint any leather such as pouches or arm guards
• paint wood
• when dry, paint with Wattle Satin Stain and Varnish, Walnut shade
• paint base burnt umbar (only a simple base here as they are so small)
• splat a bit of PVA on each base, making sure to connect to at least one foot  and to work in angles not parallel with the edges, then dip in a bag of flock
• Paint the base edge green
• spray coat with Tamiya Clear Flat varnish.

The only delay in the process was in waiting 24 hours for the Wattlyl Stain and Varnish to dry. Otherwise these steps could have rolled one after the other and the job could have been done in half a day… for someone who did not have a thousand other jobs to do including being interrupted by demanding children.

Slipstream, Pt4. Shark bites Xaq

Last time, you will recall, agents of the rebellion had fomented revolt on Xaq, a desolate and barbaric planet that served as recruiting grounds for cruel queen Anathraxa’s ruthless armies. Labouring under the belief that he was to become king of kings of all the brutals, a petty chief had united the tribes and was attacking the queen’s troops because he thought them to be her enemies. Anatraxa, aroused by this story of masculine aggression and blind devotion, and uncaring of the lives of her own troops so far lost, decided to visit Xaq and feast on the new tribes’ life forces.

Now read on.

Decision points described in square brackets [like this].

Paranssos and Danton, agents in the service of the rebellion, but ignorant of the ultimate leadership of the cause, were sent to Charadon. [Does the adventure continue on Xaq? Slim-chance: no, but. There are important influences nearby. Where? From locations deck: Charadon.]

The leader of the Sharkmen of Charadon was Ovark Carcaria, a self-styled priest attempting to export his religion. He was also a known critic of Anathraxa, but since Charadon had nothing worth exploiting the planet had been untouched. [Has the religion been successfully spread through the galaxy? 50/50: no, but. Not the religion itself but it has been used as a front to spread the rebellion. Does this involve the fake personality of Dr Baffle? 50/50: no, but. What is the overall relationship of Ovark Carcaria to the rebellion? From the Answer Deck: The Stranger, Patience. Much discussion ensued. We raked over the detail of the three preceding episodes and looked at the clues till we arrived at the following.]

Ovark Carcaria was none other than the single mastermind of the rebellion. Hidden in plain sight as an enemy, but appearing to be a powerless one, he had laid his plans. But Ovark was not all he seemed. He was a sharkman in body, but he had been occupied by a Stygian – the last surviving Stygian after Anathaxa exterminated the race decades, or centuries ago. The six Stygian Elders that were encountered in episode 2 were incorporeal projections. Perhaps they were generated by long forgotten equipment buried deep in Stygia. Perhaps they were vestigial energy of the extinct psychic race. Perhaps they were ghosts. Perhaps they were projections of Ovark himself. What had happened to the personality of the original sharkman? No one knew. However, he had taken control of the body of Ovark, and had orchestrated plans that had their origins far in the past and were only now coming to a head.

The ship carrying Parnassos and Danton dropped through the heavy air of Charadon and plunged into the tropical sea. It sank through the darkness till an enormous domed city came into sight. Giant airlocks cycled in the secret citadel and the pirate agents were escorted into the laboratory palace of the rebellion’s mastermind. There, the entire history of the rebellion was explained, and the agents were instructed on the final act that they must perform in order to finally topple Anathraxa.

The play that had been performed throughout the galaxy [described in episodes 2 and 3] had a psychic brainwashing component. When a certain sequence of numbers was heard, the programmed subject would act out the instructions contained in the play: engaging in sabotage, rioting and general civil disobedience against Anathraxa’s forces. This sequence of numbers would be broadcast as part of a great celebratory lottery being held on Levitos. [How do we deliver the psychic trigger? From Answer Deck: Greed, Good Fortune].

Levitos, you will recall, was the high tech floating city of The Greys that had been starved of fuel by the queen. In secret, a shipment of dark matter had been supplied and now the full range of powers was available to the inhabitants. The technology now available to the rebellion was greater than that possessed by Anathraxa. The queen had failed to take action against Levitos because she had been successfully deceived into attacking Mechanos and now was too busy lustfully engaged on Xaq. [Is Levitos now fully functional? Odds on: Yes, and. Is Anathraxa feeding on Zaq at this moment? Safe bet: Yes.]

The prize of this lottery (broadcast system wide because we have ancible, or at least such time dilation or broadcast ranges are irrelevant to the story) was a lifetime luxury apartment aboard the mighty city with panoramic views of the rainbow flowing slipstream

[At this point we felt we could see the broad sweep of the conspiracy, but had no idea what to do next: how could we play it out? We drew from Brewer’s and received Pyrrhic Victory. At the time it meant nothing so we parked it. It was not until very close to the end that we saw how this described both the entire story arc and the detail of this episode.]

Parnassos and Danton, using false identification papers provided by Sinon of Barter, were posing as Imperial Gaming Auditors. We were in disguise as Psiclopians, with synthetic skin covering our eyes and a semi-functional single eye placed on our foreheads. The real auditors were held up out near Psiclops due to the space battle developing around Mechanos between Anathraxa’s fleet and the now infuriated Robotmen.

We arrived at Levitos on schedule and were escorted to the Commander’s office. Levitos was a gigantic space-going domed city of the Close Encounters kind. The passage through the black hole to Slipstream had wrecked most of its superior technology and it was only able to hold station over the Slipstream flow. This filled the skies with beautiful rainbow displays, much like a continuous Aurora Borealis. The architecture of Levitos was grand, reminiscent of the most opulent old Earth casinos, and in fact that is what Levitos had largely become. The rich and famous liked to be seen there. Now, unknown to most, the great city was coming to life and machines of monstrous power were humming and sparking back into operation.

The lottery was conducted using a gigantic chocolate wheel apparatus with strong echoes of Metropolis in its design. Lights and swinging arms spun around, settling on one of 20 numbers. Every five numbers the spin would halt and the presenter would look into the broadcast cameras and ask the audience to phone in if they were still in the running. The whole event was attended by this glitzy showmanship and direct audience participation.

Behind the semi-transparent lottery wheel face, inside the overheated, valve and clicking relay random number generating machine, we plugged in our ‘audit’ box. Naturally the box had overrides and inserted new code. The result was that when an audience member called in to confirm that they were still eligible to win, a coded tone was played to them, triggering the subliminal programming placed there earlier.

As the numbers ticked over, more and more people called in. In fact, we calculated that a significant portion of the entire population of Slipstream received the signal at least once. [For the record, the winning numbers were: 14, 9, 13, 18, 18, 17, 1, 11, 7, 9, 9, 7, 19, 17, 13, 9, 10, 1, 3, 8.]

A feeling of goodwill swept the oppressed populations of the Slipstream system. Where Anathraxa had set race against race and conditioned feelings of mistrust and antagonism, there arose instead an understanding that the enemies were not neighbours near or far. There was only one enemy: it was Ananthraxa herself, represented by her brutal, cruel, ruthless (and sometimes sexy) forces.

Levitos started its mighty engines and powered towards Xaq. The surviving forces of Mechanos, decimated nine times over yet victorious, descended on Xaq and engaged the fleet protecting the queen. The queen was unaware of this and was powerless to intervene as she gorged herself on the males of the tribe: they all died with smiles on their faces.

Even the crew of Anathraxa’s warships were not immune from the effects of the lottery. They were fatally unprepared as the vengeful killbots carved through them. Soon the skies were clear except for Levitos. Hovering over the desolate planet, while the queen could only impotently shake her fist as the sky, the Levitosians extended a force shield around Xaq, sealing her within.

And so it seemed that the evil reign of Anathraxa had been brought to a close. She was a prisoner, marooned on a planet that she had made barren, with no hope of external aid penetrating the Levitosian shield, and no technology or industry on the planet’s surface with which to engineer a breakout. In the final cruel irony, she was the Supreme Being on the world, master of all, top predator, and ultimate punishers of all males. But increasingly she would be dressed in rags, and no one could offer any solace.

[And now to tie up the loose ends and explain the Pyrrhic Victory finding.]

The military victory of the Robotmen over the Imperial fleet was complete but costly. It was a dark day for robot kind but, as Bendar of Futurama would observe, ‘We can always build more killbots’.

It was a Pyrrhic victory for the winner of the lottery, for there was one, as the view of the slimstream was now forever replaced by the ice filled clouds above Xaq.

Perhaps the greatest Pyrrhic Victory occured for the Levitosians who had worked hard to restore their technology. Witht his technology they could have once again roamed the skies and perhaps even left the galaxy all togetehr. however, they were now eternally locked in orbit around Xaq maintaining the shield around Anathraxa’s prison. They had even lost the view of the slipstream, instead becoming becalmed in a misty sea, dusted and buffeted by ghostly images in a half light.

It was, in a way, even a bittersweet victory for the sexbot turned galactic war criminal. She had everything she could want: devotion, freedom, and an endless food supply. It was only for want of the finer things in life that she would suffer.

But, a disquieting thought: who is this Ovark, the psychic Stygian mastermind that somehow transferred his consciousness into another body in order to fulfil his vendetta against Anathraxa? Who is to say that he could not himself be immortal, transferring his essence endlessly through a series of bodies whose minds had been murdered? Could it be possible that he could turn out to be just as injurious to freedom as his predecessor? And ultimately, how many of the malign tales told of Anathraxa were actually true? After all, who alive today can say they ever actually met in her the flesh…

And so the curtains go down on Slipstream, a story-telling adventure in four parts, told using tools developed by Greg Hallam and Andrew Boswell.

Watch out for new stories coming to a cinema near you.

Slipstream, Pt3 – XAQ

Last time, you will recall, the growing rebellion of the oppressed people of the Slipstream universe gathered pace as the seditious play penned by ruler in exile Basilike was smuggled out of his prison and put on the stage across a dozen planets. Guided by the mysterious Stygians, it appeared that the movement may have a chance of success. In response, Anathraxa’s space navy moved into close orbit around Mechanos due to false information concerning their role in the rebellion.

Now, read on…

For this write up I will try to show some of the decision points that occurred in play in order to demonstrate how the tools assisted in building the story. These comments will appear in square brackets [like this].

The mood in the galaxy was grim. Anathraxa had mobilised her police state system to crack down on all the worlds, disarming and imprisoning anyone suspected of harbouring anti-state feelings [What is the mood of the galaxy? From Mythic: Control Weapons].

We were in orbit around Xaq. Officially we were delivering, via parachute drop, crates of food and simple weapons. However, some of the crates contained high tech weapons. We had been sent by the rebellion commanders to make contact with a certain tribal leader who had indicated that he could be manipulated in to helping us if he could be helped to defeat his rival tribes. [Where are we? From our location deck: The Ice Cloud. Are we waiting in the ice cloud (as opposed to passing through)? From our Sargasso chart: Yes, we were waiting. Why? From Mythic: Important invitation.]

We were mercenaries, Vulture a street punk from Gyptos who fought his way all the top of the murderer and thief path and Buck, a dandy of indeterminate planetary origins who was as cultured as he was venal. [Who were we? From Brewer's, and a draw from the location deck.]

Xaq was one of Anathraxa’s recruiting planets. Kept in a state of stone age barbarity, the inhabitants fought tooth and claw in order to survive and to glorify their goddess. On regular occasions she harvested those suitable for training into her armies. At all times it was heavily patrolled in space by a fleet of battleships and war-rockets. Since the planet was almost completely barren, food and equipment drops were indiscriminately made, forcing the locals (or Primals) to fight each other for the contents. As a matter of practical logistics, external mercenaries were needed to make these drops, but they were never allowed to approach too close or land.

As our ship came over the drop zone and the six crates were pushed on their rollers down the gaping cargo bay ramp, Buck and I followed them out. We pulled our parachutes at the same time as the crates’ auto-opened, and floated down, hoping that the two extra chutes had not been noticed by the patrolling ships. Unfortunately, an observant deck hand was on duty and did note the extra parachutes, starting a chain of events that rippled through the navy’s command structure, but we [the protagonists] did not know that at the time. [Are we noticed? Sargasso table: yes. We discussed what this chain of command might look like, and how long a response might take. We then figured out what the response would be. A team would be sent down to sterilise the drop zone. This could take up to an hour to start happening.]

Since the crates were dumb-dropped they were dispersed over a wide area. We landed close to one of them and scouted around. Luck was with us, and the cave structures close to us were in fact those occupied by our double-dealing Primal chief, Rantipole. [Since this was a planet based adventure, we searched through my maps till we found something suitable. It was an old Battletech tactical map. The centre water was an oasis. The hexes were marked 01 to 15 horizontally, and 01 to 17 vertically. We rolled a d20 twice to find a drop location for each crate and ourselves (discarding anything bigger than 15 and 17). Crates can be seen in white on the attached image.  We used counters to represent the protagonists, red and yellow, and other colours to represent tribes who come to claim the crates.]

We were surrounded by tribesmen. We called out for Rantipole, but he was hiding. Instead his chief wife came out to negotiate. She was very polite and circumspect, but reluctant to agree to anything. We could see that his tribe was poor and weak. They needed help in order to get the upper hand against their enemies, but it was naive to expect that they had any intention of betraying Anathraxa. It was a mystery. [Tell us about the chief. From Brewer's: Rantipole, an idiot. This explained why he was attempting to negotiate with us, a potential enemy to his goddess. Does Rantipole negotiate? From Sargasso: no, but. He sends his wife. What is she like? From our NPC deck: meek.]

Meanwhile, another tribe was closing in on this create, intend on seizing it. On the other side of the oasis a complement of ship’s troops landed and were systematically scorching the area. [Greg described the troops as wearing blue jump suits and simple flak jackets. They were not crack marines or anything like that. They were more like prison guards: not necessarily combat experts, but thorough and merciless.] Other tribes in the area observed this destruction and suffered the consequences as well. They fled from the soldiers towards us. [What do the locals do? From Mythic: Open observe.]

At Rantipole’s area, the closer rival tribe arrived and attacked. This galvanised the locals as we calmly returned fire with our rayguns. As everyone knows rayguns are intuitive and easy to use, even for cavemen, and our newly armed friends were delighted to be so easily able to destroy their enemies. We invited the survivors to join us and, just like that, Rantipole began to consolidate his power as King of kings.

The second tribe appeared and were similarly invited to join the ‘tribal confederation’. Rantipole’s imagination started to work and he imagined himself as the leader of all the tribes. Wouldn’t the goddess be pleased with him? We agreed she would. But there was a fly in the ointment, we told him. See these blue uniformed people? They are not the goddess’ people: they are evil invaders that despoil her work. See how they burn her gifts?

Armed with this evangelising vision, Rantipole led his force against the blue-jackets, but they gave as good as they got and where pinned down but not killed. Things looked grim until the leader of the second tribe that had joined the confederation advised that his people too had a cache of hidden weapons. It had been started by a downed pilot years ago. Extra equipment was brought in, but used ineffectively. The blue-jackets called for help on the radio.

We were informed via our own communications team in orbit that the signal was sent. In terror that they would send something devastating, we pulled everyone back to the caves. [Do they call a Valkyrie (Handmaiden), a particular fear of mine? From Sargasso: no.] Minutes later an extraction gunship collected the survivors of a the landing party, and shortly after that the valley floor was napalmed.

Satisfied that Rantipole was now buoyed up by his messiah complex and could unite the tribes and fight Anathraxa’s troops, while convinced that he was actually doing her will, we (Vulture and Buck) called for extraction.

What did all this mean for the rebellion? Well it meant that Xaq would not remain a recruiting ground for much longer, or at least the recruitment would be disrupted for a significant period of time until this local insurrection could be squashed. And given that the locals thought that they were actually fighting for Anathraxa while they killed her soldiers, this could take a while. What was happening elsewhere to put this into perspective? Rebellion had broken out on several other planets. [From Sargasso.] The psychic, mystical Stygians were our allies. Levitos had received its shipment of dark matter and was well on the way to restarting its engines. Unfortunately, Mechanos copped it. Anathraxa’s fleet acted on the false information provided in Part 2, and devastated the planet of the Robotmen. [All questions to Sargasso, most of which can back with blunt yeses and nos.]

And as the credits roll on part 3, we are transported to the veiled boudoir of the devastatingly beautiful and cruel queen Anathraxa as she read the reports from Xaq. She smiled as she reads of the rebellion. What does it matter that that a few ship loads of soldiers are being killed? For too long the pathetic Primals had worshipped her like dogs. These were real men with some fight in them. She wanted them. She gave the orders: the queen was coming to Xaq to feed. [What is the final mood of the episode? From Answer Deck: Victory, Sexual Attraction.]

Stirring music. Tune it next time.

Slipstream – Mythic style prep for the new session

In Mythic we would call these open threads. I like to call them leading questions, any one of which can act as the Inciting Incident for the coming chapter.

• Is the play successfully transcribed and does it reach the theatrical market? Given that the Stygians put the information straight into Parnassos’ and Danton’s mind, it is safe to assume that the words stuck. It is also probably safe to assume that they could influence the minds of printer/publishers and even producers. So the play gets out there.
• On which planets is the play performed?
• Does this spark the kind of insurrectionist feelings we had hoped for?
• Is the voice of Basilike recognised in the play?
• Is some action taken against Basilike and/or Zeebor if his hand is recognised?
• Was Deyvour invited to assist the Imperial Secret Police with their enquiries?
• Did he survive this treatment?
• Since Dr Baffle does not exist, but it is impossible to prove a negative (that he does not exist), has the Imperial Secret Service drawn any erroneous conclusions? Where has this led?
• Has the Imperial sniffing around Mechanos and Krieg stimulated any response from the locals?
• Has Chilax managed to avoid the stink created by Deyvour’s potential, possible, collusion with the revolutionaries?
• Has Chilax been promotred or demoted in power?
• Has it become personal for Chilax, since she hates to be made a fool of?
• Have Parnassos and Danton outlived their usefulness to the rebellion?
• Does the shipment of dark matter make it to Mechanos unmollested?

With all of this known we can move into the next chapter.

• Given that Anathraxa, her legions, and her secret police are not idiots, what actions do the Imperials undertake to squash what looks like a widespread insurrection?

Slipstream – story prep and house cleaning

Here is a list of the people so far encountered in the Slipstream story-jamming mini campaign.

At left, a typical control room of one of the rocketships of the pirates of Vitin.

• Magdelene – Pirate captain of Vitin. Magdelene has sufficient power to send spies out into Slipstream and enact plots. He/she(?) is clearly in contact with revolutionaries on Levitos. Relationship to other pirate captains unknown.
• Parnassos – ace rocketship pilot and senior officer for Magdelene. Cool headed and reliable, Parnassos has sufficient wisdom for use in under-cover operations and is instrumental in developing a cover story to mask the developments on Levitos.
• Danton – superior car driver and gunfighter, he is Parnassos’ partner in the cloak and dagger operation. He lacks Parnassos’ level-headedness and is prone to whimsical thoughts and has been seen to fall prey to mind probes.
• Anathraxa – tyrannical queen of Slipstream. All people quail under her rule, though open rebellion is just an excuse to be extermined by her forces. Very few have ever seen her in the flesh and lived.
• Dr Baffle – a fabricated personality, invented by Parnassos and Danton (or perhaps by puppet masters somewhere else?) to be a man-who-never-was and a focus for false information. The doctor is supposedly a master of long range mind-control over robots, and is implicated in in a plot to cause massive disruption on Mechanos.
• Deyvour – a spy for Anathraxa from the planet Anarch, where he would surely be a shunned traitor as that planet has suffered greatly under Anathraxa. Deyvour has been framed by Parnassos and Danton into carrying false information concerning the hunted Dr Baffle.
• Chilax – Secret Service agent for Anathraxa. Chilax is beautiful, smart and ruthless. She trusts no one and has everyone, including her own agent Deyvour, followed. Whatever happens, it is certain that Chilax has some knowledge of it, and has counter plans in action.
• Sinon – an information broker on the planet Barter. Sinon knows everything, or knows how to find it out. He buys and sells information without preference. Though he is not an agent of Anathraxa, he supplies anything he finds to Chilax for a handsome price.
• Basilike – deposed ruler-in-exile. He and his race had been thought extermined by Anathraxa. But he lives in secret captivity on the planet Zeebor. It is uncertain whether he has the brains or talent for high government. He spends his time writing stage plays parodying Anathraxa’s rule that are never published or performed. However, Parnassos and Danton have plagiarised one of his works and have had it secretly reproduced.
• Six Stygian Elders – perceived and communicated with but only barely seen, the Elders of Stygia guided Parnassos and Danton to Basilike. Apart from this mind journey their motives remain mysterious.
• Unnamed thugs and cassino operators on Barter.

Impossible allies – pt2, Slipstream story-jamming

This is part 2 of the story jamming exercise in a Slipstream setting.

To start, we asked whether our plan had been successful to convince Anathraxa that the rebellion was going to start on Mechanos, and therefore for her to divert a significant portion of her battle fleet there.

The answer was unequivocal. The Levitos area of space was free of Anathraxa’s ships and the space above Mechanos was alive with them. So far so good.

We then asked ourselves a general question: “What happens next?” We were not even necessarily sure that we would be on the same side as last time, or portraying the same characters. The answer came back: Inquire the Public. What did that mean? It was not till very near the end that we saw how it all tied together.

Using the tools described previously, this is what we discovered about ourselves, our situation and how the rest of the session played out:

We were in space near Stygia. We were portraying the same characters, Parnassos and Danton, lieutenants to captain Magdelene, intent on clearing a path for the coming rebellion against the tyrannical queen of the universe. Our mission was to try to contact the enigmatic (or even mythical) Stygians in the hope that they would help us in our rebellion. Deep in the dust cloud, where the ship’s brain was incapable of calculating the path, Parnassos piloted her with great skill.

With no warning, a ship of unknown design appeared along side. We tried to signal her by radio and then by morse lamp, but no response was given. As we considered what to do, a humming noise penetrated the ship. Behind us, on the flight deck, a half-dozen patches of swirling light appeared. “Leave this place,” a voice in our heads warned. Try as we might to initiate a dialogue, the words were just repeated, and then the lights faded out. The humming became shrill, penetrating both our bodies and the ship’s, until systems started to spark out and fail. Smoke filled the cabin and sparks lanced over the controls. Parnassos wrestled with the controls as the ship fell dead-stick towards the surface of Stygia. At the last moment he levelled her out and we pancaked on the barren planet.

It was inhospitable outside. Dark and shadowy, with an unbreathable atmosphere, Stygia was a nightmare landscape. Tortured rock forms towered over us, sometimes resembling frozen lava flows and at other times, from different angles, the ruins of some demented long-forgotten civilisation. We donned our bubble helmets, buckled on our rayguns, and ventured out.

We wandered at random through the maze of rocks until we became aware of haunting music. Parnassos saw a moving shadow ahead, so we gave chase. It kept just ahead of us until we thought we had it cornered. Then it turned and we saw it properly. It was a monstrous creature of fangs and claws and brute muscle. We let rip with our rayguns but they had no effect. It leapt. We cowered backwards… and noticed in just the nick of time that we were on the edge of a precipice. One more step and we would have plummeted to our deaths. When we looked back for our attacker he was gone.

For some unconscious reason, we decided to descend into the valley that had almost claimed our lives. Picking a path down, we eventually came to the floor and followed this path for what seemed an eternity. Then we saw what could only be described as a typical human village set in an oasis. We advanced and were astounded to see a courtyard full of men and women at leisure – playing cards, drinking, playing musical instruments and canoodling. More surprising still was the realisation that we knew these people. We recognised their faces. They were all the dead pirates that we had known in life. So this was where everyone went when they died, I reasoned. Stygia is paradise! I sat down at a table and motioned to be included in the next hand of cards. One of my old companions offered me a drink and I took off my helmet so I could drink it.

The next thing I remembered was Parnassos leaning over me and fixing down my helmet. He had not been so convinced by the illusion, and so was conscious enough to save my life when I nearly killed myself. The vision was gone, and we were alone on the barren surface again.

Again we set off. Some time later we came to a very ordinary looking office building. This time we were suspicious of all visions and structures on this ghost world and we approached cautiously. Unlike the previous visions, this building appeared real in a different way. This was not an illusion, we concluded. This was a real place, separated in time or space. We were seeing something real from somewhere else.

We entered, and saw a typical office, and a man working at a desk. I recognised him. It was Basilike I, a once prominent member of an aristocratic race that had disappeared when Anathraxa had taken power. It was possible that he could be a rival leader to the resistance, if only we could find out where he was. After some analysis with our tricorders, we concluded that the time scale was consistent with the present, and that he was on the planet Zeebor. How was it possible that we could be seeing this? All the results indicated that somehow the Stygians were using the Slipstream as an information highway.

But somehow just installing another aristocratic dictator did not seem like the kind of rebellion we wanted to be involved in. We remembered the initial motivation for the adventure: Inquire the Public. The people must rise up. What could inspire them to do that? A figurehead, yes. But was there another way?

We looked at what Basilike was writing. It was a stage play describing a fictional people who chafed under a corrupt ruler. It was a humorous work but at heart it criticised the way the people were too lazy to rise up and change things. This was it: this was the tool we could use. Get this published and staged on a dozen worlds and maybe, just maybe, there might be a groundswell of support as people turn the humour around and decide to act.

The words of the play became etched in our memories so we would be able to reproduce them at will. And in a flash, the building disappeared and we found ourselves standing again beside our damaged ship. Our mission was complete. The Stygians had given us all the help they could in advising us how to proceed. After some repairs we lifted off, back to civilisation, back to add the next piece to the plot to overthrow queen Anathraxa.

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.

Fragment profile – Koldos

Koldos (Low tech) is a fragment gripped in a perpetual ice age. The original world was a lush forest, but since the calamity it has frozen into a perpetual Arctic. The native Koldosites build their cities over geothermal springs. Without this source of heat, the fragment would quickly become uninhabitable. Blizzards and crevasses make surface travel dangerous.

The Koldosites are a blue-skinned humanoid race who survive by hunting the local seals which fish the freezing oceans. When not out hunting, the Koldosites retire to their cities, warmed by deep geothermal activity. Cities have been established over volcanic geysers, using the hydroelectric power and thermal energy to maintain the environment. In this environment the Koldosites are a social and gregarious race, unlike their default behaviour when traversing the surface in the almost perpetual blizzards.

Visitors to the cities report a welcoming, socialist economy, but also remark upon the cloying humid atmosphere, ripe with the perfume of so many human and animal bodies admixed with the numerous cooking fires. Diversions and entertainments such as games of skill and chance, races and contests of man and beast, along with public and impromptu recitations and musical performances are common. Vices such as prostitution are unknown as the Koldosites, both male and female, whilst fastidious in tracing lineage and united in their admiration for the family, are quite promiscuous. Theft is unknown as most property is communally held and any private property is typically imbued with personal significance. For example, a person may have a noteworthy item of clothing or a knife, but that item would have been gifted by a relative, or be a family heirloom, or be something that was made specifically for that person. Therefore any thief could never use it anyway.

Industry is largely reduced to craftsmanship, the original planet of Koldos was significantly more advanced and the elders relate the tale of the passage through the black hole and how this has rendered their world the place it is today. Many large machines, such as lathes and arc furnaces have survived and are still in use. Their limited number and the need to keep them running has been one of the main drivers in the development of their communal economy.

Koldosites have not fallen so far into ignorance that they have forgotten technology. Their education system reinforces the loss, and reminds them to be alert for the opportunities for trade with fragments that have retained more. Remnants of the Koldosites’ technology still lie locked beneath the glaciers, trapped there when Koldos was dragged through the Ice Field after ejection from the Black Hole.

The harsh environment has also fostered a cultural feeling of self-reliance, and so self-confidence. Anathraxa demands food from the Koldosites, a commodity grown with incredible ingenuity in hydroponic gardens, and one which the natives are hardly spare. She also demands sulfurous minerals, which are in extreme short supply on the fragment. When these tributes cannot be met, and even if they can, Anathraxa’s Handmaidens take men. It is quite probable that the sacrificed men are happy enough to ‘go out with a bang’, but the ecological and economic pressure this puts on the remainder of the Koldosite race has fostered a deep and growing sense of resentment. There are rumours that secretly imported technology is being used to drill tunnels through the ice to the old cities in the hope of finding weapons and manufacturing technology.

*************

The Koldosite figures are from Eureka, from their Inuit range.

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.