It's been some months since I've updated Total Party Kill. My inspiration ran somewhat dry. I needed a kick up the arse.
That kick had been provided by some friends over at The Illuminerdy, who have invited me to come blog with them.
I've accepted, and as a result am kind of retiring this blog.
I hope you'll join me over there.
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| So, you've created a wormhole |
I could just use the time machine to arrange for a water right alibi. It wasn't me, officer, I was shaking the President's hand at that exact moment in front of 300 people, no less.
This post makes three in a row about Gumshoe games, and in rapid succession as well. 
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| TimeWatch main rules |
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| Ezeru - Shapeshifting mutant psychic radioactive cockroaches from a false future |
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| A TimeWatch agent activates an Autochron by Andy Mason |
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| A TimeWatch team - a gunslinger, a neanderthal, a Mongol princess, a psychic Sophosaur and a 22nd Century space pilot |
I continue to enjoy Double Tap, the Night's Black Agents expansion from +Pelgrane Press Ltd
By 'enjoy' I mean 'be continually inspired and engaged by'
It is one hell of a book.
The first half (90 pages) is player facing, and expands on the wide range on cool things that players can do, use or blow up.
The book would be worth the cover price alone for this section.
The second half (30 pages) is director facing, and offers a range of pre-made people, places and perils (OK, monsters) as well as story ideas and tips.
I would probably have paid money just to get 30 pages of quality this high.
If you play Night's Black Agents, I urge you to get this book. There is not a wasted word or filler paragraph in its 120 page count.
Excellent work +Kenneth Hite, +Will Hindmarch, +Kevin Kulp, +Christian Lindke, +Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, +John Adamus, James Palmer, Will Plant and Rob Wieland.
Please keep producing work of this calibre and then take my money.
Let's skip the brain trust explanation and get right into it.
You used to be normal. Now you're not.
You used to have a normal life. Now it's anything but.
One day you had this dream, an I right, about signing your name somewhere and all of a sudden your brain is tied to this other place where the scales are tipped in favour of mad crap and if you pull on the strings, you can make crazy stuff happen as well.
And then sometimes you pull hard and the string breaks and you fall on your ass. Or something falls on you. That smarts, yeah.
Maybe you joined one of them nutty secret societies with handshakes that fry your brain or stop your heart dead, or maybe you didn't. Your business anyhow.
Where we are now is that we could both kill each other with a word, and none of these chumps would even know it. Hell, everyone of these guys could be a corpse already, and the world just ain't cottoned on yet. You coulda done it. You probably didn't. Maybe I did.
Whatever.
But here you are. In my place. And I know who you are.
Your move, kid.
There's a decision that shapes a GM, one that separates the men from the boys, the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad.
You've put in time and effort creating a Non-Player Character for your game. You've not just statted them, you've woven them into the very fabric of your game world. They have a name, a back story, concerns, interests, a personality, goals, hopes and fears.
This is a recurring antagonist. A nemesis. Someone who your players love to lock horns with, who they curse in the day and ally with in darkest need.
Then the players just kill them. Usually in a summary fashion that in no way hints to the greatness of this character.
What do you do? Let the character die? Move on? Start again?
Or snatch them from the jaws of death, resurrect them off screen or retcon their survival?
This is the test.
I recently had to make this decision, twice, in my weekly Night's Black Agents game.
I created the first actual vampire the players were to meet, who was supposed to thrash them within an inch of their lives before dying himself or fleeing or driving them off.
They pretty much cut his head off in the first round of combat with him, dropping him instantly.
OK. That's fine. He has healing powers and is supposed to be hard to kill and fucking scary. Fair enough. Let them have their victory.
Their surveillance cameras picked him up walking around and killing Mafia henchmen with his bare hands some ten, fifteen minutes later. That put the wind up them.
The next time they meet him, some four sessions later, they were sufficiently wary of his recuperative abilities to nuke the site from orbit. They wheeled a bomb disposal robot, packed to the rafters with C4, into the building he was in and remotely detonated it.
I spent the next week agonising over what to do.
He was a vampire with supernatural speed, reflexes, resilience and healing. Of anyone could have survived, it would be him.
But that would be a spit in the face to the players. They'd put everything they had into making sure that they killed this guy dead. It would be unsatisfying to deprive them off that kill.
But what about the narrative function that the NPC was supposed to serve? And what about all the effort I put into building him?
Let me tell you a story.
Back in the late 90s I played in a Vampire: the Dark Ages game. I was playing a 7th Gen Brujah based on the Crusader Tancred de Hautville, who was a lot of a bastard. One of the other players was a 7th Gen Tremere who specialised in the Thaumaturgical Path of Fear. This becomes important shortly.
For some reason we were fighting a horde of flesh eating zombies in a tunnel network beneath London. It turned out that the source of all of these
Undead was a Celestial Chorus mage (don't ask me why, I still don't know to this day). He told us to stop killing the zombies, or he'd have to stop us.
So we attacked.
Our tried and tested tactic was for the Tremere to use the Path of Fear, which reduced the targets dice pools by a sizable amount, often preventing them from acting, and then the rest of us would beat the shit out of them.
So, the Tremere used Path of Fear and rolled well, reducing the Mage's dice pool by 9 dice. This pretty much guaranteed his death. The rest of us surged forward.
At this point the Storyteller starts panicking and tells us that the Mage is teleporting out of the tunnels.
Well, this is patently impossible, not unless the Mage has an Arête score of 10 (Arête is the measure of a Mage's magical might. A score of 3 let's you throw fireballs. A score of 10 literally makes you an actual God), which is highly improbable.
But the Storyteller informs us that, yes, the Mage is a God and can create a fully functioning universe in 6 days or less.
He rolls his one dice, gets a success and has the Mage escape.
Fucking atrocious!
To this day I find this deeply unsatisfying. I'm getting that empty, gnawing, hollow feeling in my stomach just thinking about it.
If only I could roll back time and punch the storyteller in the gut and shout "how d'ya like them apples?!"
Back to Night's Black Agents...
Should the vampire escape?
No.
They found his severed arm in the rubble of the building, and the rest of him stuck in a collapsed bolt hole in the cellar.
Their play paid off. They get the rewards. My NPC gets to be interrogated, and if they're sloppy he may escape (sans arm). He'll probably die. That's fine.
Once again I'm late to the party - I watched Cabin in the Woods for the first time last night.
The thing that makes it an enjoyable film, in my opinion, is the clear love of standard horror movie tropes throughout. My wife and I were both delighted by the gas station in the beginning and it's treasure trove of creepy genre signposts: fish hooks, bear traps, animal skins, pickled creatures, hunting goods etc. I wondered aloud if they'd modeled the cabin on the one from Evil Dead. The scene where the victims choose the transgression for which they'll be punished is wonderful, as is Fran Krantz' line "I'm drawing a line in the sand, no one is reading any fucking Latin!"
The part that tied the film up to Fear Itself, for me, is the statement of specific roles within the genre:
The Whore / slut
The Scholar / egghead
The Warrior / jock
The Fool / burnout
The Virgin / good girl
Fear Itself uses these stereotypes to define character roles within the game with much the same effect as in Cabin...
The overall plot of Cabin is a nice fit with the classic Fear Itself Ocean Game setting: a mysterious and incredibly powerful consciousness horrifically manipulates reality around unsuspecting stereotypes for their own amusement and benefit / a mysterious and technologically advanced organisation manipulates unsuspecting teens into falling into stereotypical roles and controls the environment around them for their own amusement and benefit.
You could run a straight Cabin in the Woods game using Fear Itself with zero effort or adaptation, and you could overlay the Mystery Men and their Ocean Game onto Cabin with only a few tweaks.
I'm running a successful campaign at the moment, which obviously means that I'm thinking about what I want to run next.
I've been toying with a few plot ideas and potential settings for different games for awhile now, and suddenly have hope that I'll be able to run them.
I'm probably getting a bit giddy...
The games are:
Trail of Cthulhu
The first Gumshoe game I bought, and a work of beautiful genius. It successfully evokes multiple interpretations of Lovecraft's work, from the pulp two fisted tales of dark adventure to the doomed and weak minded soul not long for this world with the tenacious and fearful academic somewhere in between.
I have an idea for a game that draws upon The Mountains of Madness and Call of Cthulhu for mood and theme and a real life lost Arctic expedition for setting. I've already started mentally mapping out this idea. It's a strong contender.
Trinity
Originally released as Aeon and soon to be re-released under that name, Trinity is the game from the Aeon Trilogy that I have played the least and have the most books for.
I think I ran a short one shot game for two players back in 2001/2.
It's a game that deserves another crack of the whip - a mix of epic sci-fi, space opera, cyberpunk, post apocalyptic wasteland, Starship Troopers, intrigue and horror. You can set the equalisers to any level you want just by varying the locations and organisations involved.
I'd run a vanilla Aeon Trinity game with a mix of investigation, combat and political manoeuvring.
Hunter: the Vigil
I think of all the World of Darkness games, H:tV has the broadest appeal. Used to playing the monsters in the other games? Have fun playing the other side for once. Never played a WoD game before? Here's a no nonsense gateway to the setting. Not sure about playing a monster? Play a legit human instead.
I was running a nWoD cops game when Hunter: the Vigil announced, and it quickly became apparent that I was running a proto hunter game.
When I finally got it I ran a short introductory story arc for my gaming group, then promptly got my wife pregnant again so had to scale back my gaming for awhile.
I've still got a load of unused ideas that I'd like to try out, and my wife bought me the Compacts & Conspiracies splatbook for my birthday, so it's fresh in my mind.
Ars Magica
My first gaming love. The second game I ever played, the first game I ran. Over the years I've built up and lost a sizable ArM library. I had about 20+ books for 2nd, 3rd and 4th edition, some of which are probably worth a bit of money now, and stupidly gave them all away to charity when the 5th edition came out. To make matters worse, 5th edition wasn't what I wanted it to be, and I gave up on it.
A few years and a bit of perspective later I realised that I wasn't giving it a chance. Different doesn't mean bad. And it couldn't be as much of a disappointment as Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition.
So I'd like to run Ars Magica again.
Changeling: the Lost
Look, this game is fucking brilliant. Really. It's the most well rounded game that White Wolf has ever produced. It's beautiful, horrific, terrifying, paranoid, innocent, brave, redemptive and compelling. It's everything good about folk tales and myths and everything good about modern horror.
It's the best Slender Man pictures meets Pan's Labyrinth meets The Evil Dead.
As I see it, Changeling: the Lost is a game about self discovery and personal agency - freed slaves learning that they can do anything they want, and trying to work out what that actually is, whilst fighting to preserve that freedom.
Mage: the Awakening/Mage Noir
It's hard to get a grip on Mage: the Awakening, to definitively say "this is what the game is about", especially when compared to its predecessor, Mage: the Ascension.
In Ascension it was explicit within the setting that you were caught up in an ideological, metaphysical war with clearly defined sides and an achievable goal. Awakening lacks this direction and forces the players to determine what they want to do and who they have to fight to do it.
The rules are great though. They allow the player characters to bend reality to their will and do a truly impressive range of miracle working.
If running Mage: the Awakening I'd use the Mage Noir setting and play in post war America, late 40s to early 50s, with the players hunting down magical artifacts like an arcane Maltese Falcon.
Pathfinder
Every now and then I have an urge to run a good old fashioned high fantasy dungeon bash.
So far I've primarily used Pathfinder to run Goblin games, because Goblins are ace. The Goblin games I've run so far have been independent of each other but set in the same game world, so the events of the first game (slaughtering a farmer and his family, burning their house down and eating the livestock) informed the second (humans try to drive the Goblins out of the area, Goblins retaliate by setting fire to what they think is a religious monument but is in fact a signal beacon) and the second will inform the third (possible war due to the sudden amassing of an army after an invasion has been signaled).
In every game, though, the players have basically been looking for food and tribal status.
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| Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria |
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| A genuine Bulgarian Mafia boss and ex wrestler |
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| I bought this little webcam because it reminds me of the scrub bot from WALL-E and the tech from Portal 2 |
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| My Dungeoneer character sheet |
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| The final encounter in HeroQuest |
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| A Goblin lair from Dungeoneer |
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| The Elf legs it, leaving the Barbarian to deal with the undead |
That girl that played kiss catch with you after school - she steals children, turns them into mice and chases them through her garden. If she catches them, she eats them and leaves their heads for the other children to find.
That gentleman that watches the dance recitals - he takes the best dancers, sets them on fire and makes them dance in his fireplace to warm his cold hearth. If they burn out to ash, he scatters them on the wind.
The old lady that cleans your house? If you don't pay her, you have to clean her house until every one of the countless rooms are clean. First you have to pick up the bleached bones of the last cleaner.
There is a place, full of terrible beauty and burdensome duty, blinding light and lurking shadow, burning love and freezing fear, where stories are told because that is all the occupants know, where madness is codified and the sane wither and die.
People from our world are dragged into this world, bent to its needs and used until they're spent. A process that can take days or centuries.
In place of these lost souls the occupants leave behind a model made of string, gaffa tape and rags, leaves, twigs and old bones or Lego, glue and tin foil. These mockeries live the lives of the stolen so no one ever notices they're gone.
Every now and then, someone escapes back to our world. Or is released. Or is sent back. They find the world has turned without them, that they've aged faster or slower than everyone else and that there's this thing pretending to be them.
Back in our world these survivors gather in loose communities, attracted to the only other people who could possibly even begin to understand, the only other people they can trust to run or fight or hide if these things come back for them.
It's a bit like: Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy II, The Lady in the Water, Spirited Away, Howls Moving Castle, Coraline, the Sandman
Somewhere in Eastern Europe Matt Damon, Liam Neeson, Daniel Craig and Tom Cruise have just been burnt out by their employers and left to die.
They're suddenly on the radar of a powerful and malevolent international conspiracy who will stop at nothing to silence them. Permanently.
All they have to keep them alive is their years of specialised military and espionage training, a network of informants and a cache of weapons and equipment.
Running isn't an option. They've got to take this fight to the very top of the conspiracy and bring the bastards crashing down.
The only problem, the bastards might be vampires. Or something worse.
Nights Black Agents is a game of hyper capable spies, secret agents and military specialists thrown against a horrific conspiracy. Maybe it's the agents of Satan, or aliens. Maybe a supernatural curse or genetic mutations from unethical experimentation.
Players take on the roles of these super spies, caught in between their old agencies, local law enforcement, organised crime gangs and the shadowy conspiracy. They must uncover a trail of clues and follow it to the top of the conspiracy before the conspiracy gets them.
It's kind of like: Taken, Mission Impossible III, Bourne Trilogy, Casino Royale/Quantum of Solace, Ultraviolet (UK TV series), the Prisoner, Alias, Prison Break
Welcome to Trinity
It's 2120. The Aberrants have been exiled into deep space after they threatened the near total destruction of Earth. North America is under military law, run by mega corporations. Europe has been devastated by an orbital impact. China has risen under a totalitarian regime. Australia is a free world super power. South America is a mysterious hotbed of revolution and anarchy.
Space travel is common place, with settlements on the Moon and our neighbouring planets, and the asteroid field mined for minerals and ores. First contract has been made with other species to varying degrees of success.
Finally, a new branch of human evolution has been discovered - Psions, humans with the ability to manipulate sub- quantum energies, or Psi, and with them the study of a new field of science, Noetics.
You are a Psion, altered and awakened by one of the Psionic orders, tasked with protecting the Earth from the returning Aberrants, furthering your order's interests, representing Psions in a world once bitten by a super powered evolutionary branch of humanity.
You have powers, you have advanced hard tech and the latest bio tech.
Your adversaries include Aberrants - mutants with phenomenal power, organised crime, governments, mega corporations, other Psions, emergent alien threats and possibly the Aeon organisation - a philanthropic think tank with near unlimited resources and a patchy history at best.
It's a bit like: Cyberpunk, Babylon 5, Aliens, Final Fantasy: Spirits Within, Battlestar Galactica
We played Aberrant last night. Once we'd finished, one of the players remarked that "that was the geekiest thing I've ever done". This was primarily because one of our core players is unfortunately over in Germany for three weeks on business, so joined via a G+ Hangout and Viber.
He paid €3 to watch me on a computer screen for two hours. I feel dirty yet oddly thrilled.
The players had opted to forcibly enter a Project Utopia Nova containment facility for questionable reasons - I.e. a wanted criminal had told them that bad things were happening there - and had understandably met with armed resistance.
First they took out a unit of heavily armed security guards, and we ended the session with my version of Captain America, Thor and Iron Man - Agent America, Aesir and Machine Man - arriving on the scene.
At the beginning of this session one of the player characters, a tank called Adonis, parleyed with them. He offered complete surrender if they would guarantee the safety of Solar Flair, another of the player characters, but as he didn't formally represent the team, he got punched through a wall instead.
I did have a plan for this session. The opposing team wanted the players to escape with their target so that the players could lead them to the rebel base (as it were).
Machine Man had an existing Mentor relationship with Adonis, so he was going to take a sucker punch from Adonis, letting the team escape and placing a tracker beacon on Adonis in the process.
It didn't go quite according to plan...
Solar Flair's player was 'a bit PMT' and played her that way.
She unleashed aggravated damage on both Agent America and Machine Man, nearly killing the Agent in the process.
Machine Man did manage to place the tracker on Adonis and say "make it look good, kid" whilst leaving himself wide open.
Adonis didn't take the bait. Instead he concentrated on getting the wounded to medical assistance and pretty much ignored the fight.
Max Control, the player's mind controlling bastard, dematerialised and took complete control of Aesir, landing an unexpected blow on Agent America and effectively turning the tables of the battle.
By this point, the dye was cast. The team had bought a gun to a knife fight. Solar Flair had used lethal force with no thought to the consequences. Max Control had violated one of the mightiest Nova's on earth and still retained control of him. A number of dangerous Novas had been released from containment.
The players retrieved their target, a teleporter called Gates, and left with her.
Adonis stayed behind to clean up the mess and recapture the released Novas.
Adonis' player has already created another character, one a bit less tank like.
I left the remaining player characters in the Antarctic, although they don't know that. They just know it's bitterly cold and everywhere is white.
It strikes me that if Novas were to build their own country, then Antarctica would be a place to do it...
Yes, this is late. I play video games late, normally when I can get them in sales or in special edition packs. This is why I'm only just playing RE5 now.
I played RE4 through on my Wii (after it'd been out a while) and thoroughly enjoyed it - I.e. it scared the willies out of me.
I loved the tension. I loved the claustrophobia, the fear that a mob of infected villagers could be lurking round the corner, or, worse, a chainsaw wielding mutant that feels no pain. Or a dog. Or a ludicrous boss.
I found that whenever I reached a save point I was "right, that's it for the night" even if it was only 15 minutes of play, because I was scared.
The first time I reached the village encounter, where the villagers swarm and you first see a chainsaw gimp, I had to switch the game off and go and have a quiet lie down somewhere safe.
I enjoyed that as the game progressed and I upgraded my weapons and became a better shot that the low level villagers dropped like flies and dreaded the boss encounters and set pieces.
And I hated Ashley...
So I had high hopes for RE5. I'd read the previews and seen some of the gameplay and decided to ignore the controversy.
It apparently was more like RE4 than the other RE games, which was good. I found the first three unplayable due to the fixed camera angles, so something more like 4 was a good sign.
Playing it, though, is a very different feel. RE4 was a slow burn. The plot unfolds slowly, as does the cluster fuck value. You just meet aggressive villagers at first, and chainsaw mutants only appear to signpost significant challenges and to let you know that things are going to get much harder soon.
The story starts off as a simple hostage rescue and evolves over the course of the game into a conspiracy to control mass populace with a mutant parasite.
In contrast Resident Evil 5 pretty much starts off with "look, all these tribesman and townsfolk are definitely infected with the parasite from the last game!"
There is no mystery. No tension. It's a tactical shooter from the first encounter.
Oh, and I keep dying.
In the first encounter.
Which sucks.
So I was ready to give up on the game, but only once I'd tried out the extra material from the Gold Edition DLC I'd bought.
The multiplayer verses mode didn't appeal to me. I'd just die. I have no idea what Mercenaries is either, so I tried Lost in Nightmares, which tells the story of one of the main characters don't something previously (I'm sure that the actual details are not important).
It's ace! It's set in what looks like the mansion from the original Resident Evil, and is dripping with tension.
I've reached two checkpoints so far and not had a single combat encounter, which is brilliant.
I've come across lots of foreshadowing of the immense cluster fuck yet to come - blood on the walls and floor, destroyed scenery, dead security agents, broken cages and cryptic entries in abandoned journals.
It's going to go south very soon.
Which is the key. I'm loving the anticipation. I'm not disappointed when there's nothing around the corner, I'm relieved.
So I'm probably going to play through the DLC before returning to the main game, which is probably a bit perverse.
