Category: Rules

Slugblaster Character Creation

But what is the aim of this game? Well, its to be the most teen teen you can been.

This is the second in a series of character creation posts I’m using to figure out which game I want to schedule of our next campaign. You can find the last one here.

Kick-flip Over a Quantum Centipede

That’s it. That’s the game. This is the kind of weird shit your character should be doing, or, at least, trying to be doing. “What is a Quantum Centipede?” I hear you ask. If you have to ask, you’re just proving you’re a dork. Not like me and my crew. We’re Slugblasters and we go Slugblasting across the frikkin’ multiverse on our boards. Or, like, it will be me, after I get finished making this character.

Slugblaster

Slugblaster GOTY boxed set cover
Slugblaster GOTY boxed set cover

Slugblaster is a game by Mikey Hamm. It was released by Mythworks in 2024. It uses a Forged in the Dark system which means it’s based on Blades in the Dark. I will be making a Blades character as part of this series too, but for some perverse reason, I decided to do this one first.

Essentially, in a Forged in the Dark system you build a dice pool of D6s through various means. When you roll your dice pool to try and achieve something, the highest roll is generally the only one that counts. A 6 is a full success (and, actually, if you get more than one 6, in Slugblaster, it gives you 1 Style point.) A 4 or a 5 means you succeed but introduce a problem of some kind. Anything else is a failure.

There are other rules, of course, but that is the essence of it.

But what is the aim of this game? Well, its to be the most teen teen you can been. You have to do kick-ass tricks on your board, hack gear, get into drama with your teammates and rivals, and have “touching narrative downtime arcs.”

And the “classes” available to us reflect all of that so well.

Pick Your Personality

In this game, Personality is the closest thing to a character class or playbook. Here are the available Personalities:

  1. The Grit
  2. The Guts
  3. The Smarts
  4. The Heart
  5. The Chill

As the book tells us, “Your personality isn’t about what you can do, it’s about how.” Which seems appropriate in a game about teenagers. It also means that any PC can do anything, as long as they describe it in terms of the way their Personality would handle it. I like this a lot. It’s a strong foundation for a heavily narrative game. Anyway, I’m going to roll a d5 to see which Personality I go with. I got a 5, which makes my character the Chill. This is, by far the most important decision/roll you make regarding your character. The Personality itself defines most of the things that make you you.

The Chill

The Chill description, extra gear, attitude and traits
The Chill Beats and illustration

“Play as the Chill if you want to crack jokes, eat some snacks, let problems solve themselves, and not think too much.”

Maybe the Chill is just lucky or maybe they notice things the others never do. Things work out for the Chill, that’s all.

Here are some of the things the Chill gets:

Extra Gear

1-2 Something You Found on Your Way Here
or
3-4 A Pet

I rolled a 2 on a d4 so I’m going to take Something I Found on My Way Here. That is incredibly wide open. Could be anything at all. I’m going to say it’s something that all adventurers should have, a long length of cabling. It was just lying there on the pavement in front of Old Swenson’s ‘shop, wrapped in plastic and taped up. It took a while to get it open with my Swiss Army knife to see what it was. It adorns my shoulder, cross-body.

I think, technically, this item is whatever you need at the time during the Run. I don’t think you need to actually decide what the item is until its needed.

Style Bonus

I get 1 Style after a run in which I express “ease or flow.”
Style is a currency that you gain by doing cool stuff and playing to character. You can spend it during downtime to gain Beats, propelling the story in the way you want it to go.

Attitude

I get to add an extra d6 to all actions! Ad infinitum! This is massive. If I could otherwise only manage 1d6 for an action, this immediately doubles my chances of a favourable outcome. Don’t forget, it’s only the top result on your dice that matters.

Traits

You only get to pick one of these to start with. As you hit your Trait Beats, you get to choose more. For now, let’s take a look at what’s available. There are five to choose from:

  1. Steezey – Gets me an extra style if I roll doubles
  2. Umm… Guys – I happen across the stuff nobody else does
  3. Button Masher – I can utilise a “locked mod” but only for one action. You can normally only mod your devices when you have the correct set of components for them. You can also normally only use mods that you have on your own Signature gear. This would let me momentarily yoink a crewmate’s mod and use it for my own nefarious purposes
  4. Lucky – I can use this to have one thing go my way that otherwise would have gone south. But I could only use it once per Run
  5. Quirk – I would get to choose one thing that I’m inexplicably proficient in doing. If I can relate it to the action I am taking, I can upgrade any 1-3 roll to a 4/5 instead. What am I good at? Could be practically anything.

It would obviously be better to choose the perfect starting trait for the character you want to build, but I’m going to roll for it again. I rolled a 4 on my d5! That makes me Lucky! I’m quite happy with that. It is very thematic for this Personality and can be used in almost any situation.

Beats

So, you don’t start with any of these, since they are all about the advancement of your Slugblaster. But, I thought it would be fun to introduce the concept and some of the Arcs they can lead to. This system of Beats is heavily inspired by its namesake in Heart the City Beneath, which I discussed in this post last year. In Slugblaster, the Beats are a little more focused and you have to spend currencies like Style and Trouble to buy them. That allows you to play out a scene and send the story off in a way that you and your character want it to. This might be something to do with your Traits, like introducing your Origin Story, it might be something to do with your Family, showing your Trouble at Home or the Final Straw for your parents. It might be more to do with your Personality. Here is the Chill Arc:

  • Caught in a Plot – this costs 1 Style. Wrong place at the wrong time? Right place at the right time? Somehow your luck makes sure you discover some sort of plot.
  • Serendipity – this costs 2 Style. The plot thickens. Your crew might have something to say about it. This one gives you +1 Legacy. Legacy goes towards your ultimate Epilogue, deciding the type of life your teen will have in the future.
  • In Too Deep – This one costs 4 Trouble, which is quite a lot. The corner you painted yourself into with this case of mistaken identity has gotten very narrow and claustrophobic. You get found out. Things are going bad and one of your teammates notices how bad. This one gives you +1 Doom, which has a similar, if more negative effect on your Epilogue.
  • Somehow Works Out – The last Beat in the Chill Arc costs 3 Style. As the Chill, everything always works out in the end. Why were you ever worried? -1 Doom, +1 Legacy and +1 Trait.

Like I said, I can’t pick any of these at this stage, I just wanted you to get a feel for the types of Beats available to a Slugblaster character, dear reader.

Vibes

This one is an actual d6 table. Nice.
Here are the options:
“

  1. Space cadet
  2. Just woke up
  3. Laundry day
  4. deadpan
  5. Always eating a bag of chips
  6. Kisses their mom on the lips and isn’t weird about it” (!)

Here we go! That’s a 3 on a d6. That gives my Laundry Day. Just out there wearing the punishment underwear and the ripped jeans.

Look

There is another table, this time a d6xd6 table that will help me define this Slugblaster’s looks. The first roll is a 1 and the second roll is a 5. That gives me the result, “ballcap.” I think this a baseball cap given to me by my brother, who has left for college.

I’m going to roll again on this table, because just “ballcap” isn’t much of a look. This time I get a 4 and a 4. That’s “chains.” I’m imaging a lot of different sized chains hanging off a thick leather belt connected to a bunch of different things like keys, that Swiss Army knife, a little flashlight, an oversized Garbage Pail Kid keyring.

Family

Another d6xd6 roll here: I get a 5 and a 4, which gives me “sheltered.” Maybe that means they are a family who distrusts the rest of society, and they just want to be left alone to do things their own way. I imagine this could lead to an interesting Family arc! You are supposed to roll on this table twice, so I rolled again and got a 6 and a 2, “relaxed.” This seems to be at odds with the first one, but maybe it just refines the story a bit. Maybe the family has been sheltered for so long that they have become complacent about the outside world. Maybe, when to comes back to bite them, things will change.

Bond

This one is not really possible for right now. It requires there to be other actual players. The book suggests that everyone should choose the PC of the player sitting to their right to have a bond with. This is a nice random way to conduct this sort of thing. Sometimes, you find that a player is most likely to choose the other player that they already know best for this sort of bond. In my car, I am going to just roll a d4 to decide the other Personality type that I am Bonded with. I rolled a 2, which gives me the Guts. That’s the Personality with lots of confidence and “sass.” There is a d6 table here that you can roll on to better define the type of relationship you both have. I rolled a 1, which means we were childhood friends.

Gear

Rayguns
Rayguns

Everyone starts with a phone, a raygun and a hoverboard as well as the extra gear provided in your Personality description.

Since the Phone section suggests that it doesn’t need to be phone shaped, I think I will go for a wrist-console

I get a Raygun… There are two steps to making it. Step A and Step B, each of which involves a d6xd6 table. I got a 1 and a 3 for Step A and a 3 and a 5 for Step B. This gives me a Particle Blaster.

And then there’s the Board. Obviously the average Slugblaster’s most price piece of kit. The “Your Board” section of the book has a nice intro to the origin of the Nth Gear Hoverboard and how it revolutionised the world. The section also has several tables to help you design your board. So here we go!:

Grip Colour – 2 and 3 gives me “red.” I’m thinking gaudy, tie-dyed red
Grip Cut – 4 and 3 gives me “logo.” The stylised face of a little gremlin
Deck Graphic – 2 and 5 give me “name of a sponsor.” The sponsor is called “Gremling”
Type of board – I got a 5 and a 1, “oldschool”

You also get two pieces of gear from the list on page 66 of the book. I’m going to check that out right now.

Here are the two items I have selected from page 66:

  • Grappling Hook – it has 100 feet of cable, can stick to almost anything and has a handy winch
  • Pro Camera Gear – This could be anything from a decent DSLR camera and tripod to “shoulder-mounted 3D rigs”

Pick Your Signature

Signatures
Signatures

This is the item you are probably going to use to solve most of your problems given half a chance. People know you by this item and it’s your most prized possession. I’m going to use the table to help me describe it! 3 and 3 means its dirty/worn.

But, what exactly is the item? There are twelve listed so I’m going to roll a d12 for it obviously. That’s a 10, which gives me a Kinetic Deck, which allows my oldschool board to go faster over solid ground and make it super-heavy at will.

I get one mod to start with, although there are five listed. I’m going to go for the Stasis Anchor which can make the board totally immovable until its deactivated.

You get some more tables to add flavour to your Signature.

  • Origin – 4 – made it myself
  • Form – 3 – There’s an enamel pin made by my best friend, the Guts, stuck to the front of the board
  • Slogan – 26 – “ALT” and its got a holographic face that keeps changing as the angle changes

Name Yourself

My parents know me as Benji McWhirter. My friends call me Bench and I call myself Alter.

Conclusion

And that’s it, that’s the whole character creation process. I imagine, if you’re not writing about every step, it is probably quite quick to roll up a new character. There are a lot of fun ways to customise the base character but the fun seems to be in advancing, gaining Beats and Traits, Doom and Legacy and Fracture (another type of currency which is used to break up the crew!) But it starts you off with the tools to make things really awesome and dramatic as the game goes on, and that’s what it’s all about. I have a couple of gripes and they involve the gear. What you get to start with is stated in a couple of different places, but in each one, the list of things you start with is different. Also, there is an element of confusion around the Signature still. I am not sure if my Signature is my oldschool board that has this Kinetic Deck upgrade, or is that another piece of equipment on top of my board? It’s not super clear.

Otherwise, I have one more mechanics-related complaint and that is about the jargon used in place of more (for me) understandable terms. Boost, kick, turbo, slam… is it because I’m not a skater? The meaning of these slides off my brain, unlike the terms used in Blades in the Dark: goal, action rating, position, effect, harm.

Maybe I would get used it in play.

It is a gorgeous book, I have to say. The artwork is colourful and creative and inspiring and the writing is witty and just right, theme-wise.

Have you any experience with Slugblasting, dear reader? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Triangle Agency: Character Creation

“Triangle Agency is a tabletop role-playing game and exciting new job opportunity for humans like you.”

Be the change you want to play

I haven’t made any real progress in deciding what to run next. I asked the question here but have not enough feedback to be helpful. So I thought I would take a more practical approach to the problem. Several times over the last year or so, I’ve written up complete character creation posts for various games and systems to give me more of an insight into them, to see how I like them and to get me motivated to run them. You can read some of them here. I have always found these to be useful exercises and usually pretty entertaining for me too. So this will be the first in a series of character creation posts. I will do one for each of the games in the list in my aforementioned Time for a Change post. The first of those is one I am very interested in getting to grips with. I have been reading the rule book for a while and it’s one of the more unique and exciting on the list.

Triangle Agency

The back cover of Triangle Agency
The back cover of Triangle Agency

Triangle Agency is a game by Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland published by Haunted Table in 2024. Here is what the back cover has to say about it:

Triangle Agency is a tabletop role-playing game and exciting new job opportunity for humans like you.

Investigate supernatural Anomalies, wield tremendous power, and take advantage of our comprehensive life insurance benefits all from the comfort of your favourite table!

This book includes everything necessary for you to experience the chilling horror, wacky comedy, and emotional truth that can only come from working for Reality’s Most Trustworthy Corporation, 333 years running.

Welcome to the first job of the rest of your life!

I think that’s enough to go on for now.

Getting started

The book has more than fifty pages of material introducing the core concepts and rules of the game before it even dips its toes into the cool waters of character creation.

The first step into that stream would barely be considered part of character creation in most games (and I’m not entirely certain it is in this one, but that’s where I’m starting):

Identifying your Region

The book gives you a few options here, including your own hometown, a place you would like to be, a fictional place and Ternion City, the setting presented in the book as though it were a real place and so does not simply get included in the “fictional place” category.

I normally randomise everything in character creation posts but I’m not sure that will be helpful here. I’m going to go for Ternion City, which is, after all the location for the Agency’s primary HQ, a massive skyscraper that is “hard to miss and not included on maps.” In a real campaign, I’m sure this would have been decided upon through conversation with all the players or just by executive decision by the GM (General Manager.)

The same section wants you to determine the level of mundanity/reality of your setting, asking you to determine if a long list of phenomena are real or if they could be considered Anomalies. The list includes Ghosts, Artificial Intelligence and Debt. This is also probably something to be decided as a table or by GM decree.

Your agent’s ARC

The start of this section takes pains to remind you that you shouldn’t have skipped forward to this page. If you did, your agent will begin play with one demerit.

Essentially, your ARC is the set of components that makes up the essence of your agent. Each component is call an ARC piece. The A stands for your Anomaly, the R represents your Reality and the C is for your Competency.

Anomaly

As an agent of the Triangle Agency, you are bonded with one of the very Anomalies you are tasked with hunting down and dealing with. Such people are called Resonants.

There are nine Anomalies to choose from and I would expect the choice to be a hard one. Every one of them is split into three different abilities, each of which sounds like great fun to use in play.

They include:

  • Whisper: if you have Whisper abilities you can manipulate what people say, express the thoughts of others or silence your own noises
  • Catalogue: a Catalogue Resonant can create objects, change the properties of objects or even produce a duplicate of themselves
  • Timepiece: Timepieces can adjust time to suit their needs, help allies to overclock their own abilities and effect a target’s memory
Timepiece Anomaly page
Timepiece Anomaly page

There are several others that are just as compelling but I love the idea of time manipulation powers so that’s the one for me.

This gives my Agent three abilities. Each of these abilities comes with a survey question to help you build your character’s personality. This is a really nice touch and great way to link personality and ability traits.

  • We’ve Got Time, Q: I know A1: The deep magic
  • Overclock, Q: I’ll sleep when… A1: I’m tired
  • Remember When, Q: I’m more likely to ask… A: Where are they going?

Reality

Reality is as it says, really. It’s the regular, everyday shit we all have in our lives, family, relationships, background, etc.

I need to select one of nine Realities. They include:

  • Caretaker – devoted to a Dependent who they bring everywhere with them
  • Overbooked – Maintains a job (Vocation) in the mundane world as well as their Agency duties. Finds it hard to maintain Relationships.
  • Romantic – constantly distracted by the building of complex relationship webs. They fall in love easily and always want to please that person.

With the Timepiece Anomaly, Overbooked seems like a suitable Reality for my Agent.

Overbooked Reality page
Overbooked Reality page

Overbooked provides you with a Vocation. There is a d4 table for this so I am going to roll on it. I got a 1! That’s “Journalist.” Very Clark Kent.

Every Reality gets a “Reality Trigger.” You get a work phone for one of your Relationships to call you at any time. This is for the GM to fuck with you at the worst possible time. You get a 4 box track called “Something Gives.” Every time you fail to fulfil the requirements of your Vocation or lose the phone you mark a box on the track. If you mark them all, that’s it, you’re done. You have to choose a new Reality.

Every Reality gets a Burnout Release. This is something you can do that allows you to ignore all Burnout, which is great because Burnout reduces the number of successes you score when you roll your dice pool to do stuff. In the case of the Overbooked, the Burnout Release is Threading the Needle. It means you can do anything relating to your Vocation and ignore Burnout.

Burnout is something you accrue as you attempt actions using Qualities that you have no Quality Assurances in. Sometimes you lose QAs and sometimes you just don’t have any to start with. Your Competency determines the level of QA you have in any given Quality so we’ll consider them more in the next section.

We have some Onboarding Questions here in the description of the Overbooked too. Let’s look at them:

  • What is the most difficult decision you’ve ever made?
    • A: When I decided to take the position as an Agent, I knew it would severely impact the time and commitment I could give to my Vocation as a journalist. Even though I now know I was choosing between becoming an Agent and death, I sometimes regret my decision.
  • What terrible thing will happen if you give up your responsibilities?
    • A: No-one can report the news with the same degree of integrity as I can. The world will lose a ruthless truth-teller.
  • How do you celebrate victories?
    • A: I don’t. There’s no time for celebration. It’s just on to the next story or the next Anomaly.

I feel like I really learned a lot about this character in answering those questions. Very cool.

Finally, as part of my Reality, there’s the Relationship Matrix. You get three Relationships which you must identify by answering the questions provided.

  1. Who is your other boss?
    • My editor, Sybill McPartland
  2. Who cares the most about your health?
    • Mum
  3. Who are you in charge of?
    • My rich kid intern, Hunter

I need to identify one of them as my closest Relationship. That will be my editor, Sybill. She gets 6 Connection. Mum and Hunter get 3 each.

If there were a full table of players for this, I would get three of them to portray each of my Relationships whenever a scene with them came up. These players would be chosen here. As it is, I will have to skip that step.

Competency

The final ARC piece is Competency. The book describes it as the most important aspect of your ARC (although, I have never before met a more unreliable narrator in an RPG book as the one in this section of Triangle Agency, so, you know, take it all with a pinch of salt.) Essentially, this is your role in the agency. It describes your responsibilities, code of conduct and equipment.

The available Competencies include:

  • R&D – The creatives who see what people really want and make it for them while also figuring out the universe’s enigmas
  • Gravedigger – These are the agents who are taking care of things no-one else wants to face in places they don’t want to be
  • Hotline – An ear to listen, a guide and a customer service professional

With this character, I think I’m going to go for Hotline.

Hotline Competency page
Hotline Competency page

Here’s what the Hotline gets me:

Prime Directive – Never say, “unfortunately.” If I deliver bad news to someone, I get a demerit (demerits are used to negatively affect your standing in the Agency, while commendations have the opposite effect.)

Sanctioned Behaviours – I’ll get one commendation if I

  • Help someone unburden themselves
  • Take the blame for something I didn’t do
  • Connect someone to an unexpected fate

If I do all of these on a single mission, I’ll get three extra commendations!

Initial Requisition – Hold Music, Vol. 1
A fantastical tape player the bland music of which has the power to transport the agents to a safe waiting room for up to an hour!

Self-Assessment – I have to answer the three questions presented to determine the increases I will get to particular Quality Assurances.

  1. A customer has a problem I have been unable to fix in my own life. I…
    • Share the approaches that have failed, to save them time (+3 Empathy)
  2. A customer has a broken product and a convincing story. I…
    • Pull every string necessary to get their refund (+3 Persistence)
  3. A customer’s call disconnected. I…
    • Call them back and submit an error report to IT (+3 to Professionalism)

Signature quote – “Your call is important to us. Your time is important to us. Everything you do, think, and are is important to us.” I think my Agent really takes this to heart.

Onboarding Questionnaire

The final part of character creation that I will be dealing with today. There are several more pages dealing with Competencies in detail, Requisitions, Work/Life Balance, etc. but the book insists that you leave this section until after your first mission.

The Questionnaire is a set of nine questions, the answers to which you should expect to be shared with the rest of your Field Team.

  1. How did you come in contact with your Anomaly?
  • I was TAPped for fieldwork though the Triangle Academy Program. I was approached by another field agent who must have seen some potential in me. Once I had completed the program, I was left in a glass cell with an Anomaly that looked like an old egg-timer that kept spinning in the air until it fused with my body.
  1. How did the Agency find you?
  • I found the Agency through a case I was reporting on. It was about the disappearance of a circle of trees in Trinity Park. When I went there to investigate, I discovered several field agents who were impressed with my professionalism and brought me on board.
  1. What is your Annual Salary?
  • $80,000
  1. What do you look like?
  • I’m a skinny, white guy who wears a lot of brown and beige coloured corduroy and polyester. I have thick rimmed glasses, brown hair and brown eyes. I look like I’m from the seventies.
  1. Do your powers have a unique visual manifestation?
  • I sometimes leave little piles of sand behind after using my powers.
  1. How do you take your coffee?
  • Black
  1. Who among your Relationships is your primary contact, and why?
  • My editor, Sybill, because she would be the first one to miss me.
  1. What do you bring to the table in a collaborative work environment?
  • I am a dogged investigator. When I am given a task, I will see it through to the end.
  1. Finally, please list all prior work experience and level of familiarity with Adobe, Excel and the Google suite.
  • As a journalist, I have ten years experience working with all aspects of adobe software and most of the Google suite although I rarely use Excel for anything other than lists of things. Don’t ask me about formulas.

Two last things, I gave him the pronouns, he/him and the name Mark Dent for some reason.

Here’s the first page of the form fillable character sheet for Mark Dent:

The character sheet of Mark Dent
The character sheet of Mark Dent

Conclusion

This was a fairly involved process but one that got me thinking quite deeply about the type of person this Agent is and not just the type of character he is, if you see the distinction. I really liked doing it actually. I loved reading about the various Anomalies, in particular. If I was actually about to be a player in a game of Triangle Agency, I’d be eager to get to use them too!
I feel like I learned a lot about how the game would be played as well. So, mission accomplished in that respect.

First Anniversary Blog Post: The Packing Game

A well-packed bag can mean my day is more comfortable and enjoyable. And, let’s be honest, cuter.

This is the second in a short series of blog posts by other authors to celebrate the dice pool dot com’s first anniversary. You can find the first one here: Crying at the Table.

Turning habits into games

My wife, H, has always taken a lot of time and care about packing her bag for a trip. She will start planning days or weeks in advance. As someone who habitually just chucks a few more-or-less random pieces of clothing into a bag five minutes before leaving, it fascinates me how she takes the time to draw out each of the items of clothing in her sketch book and uses that as the basis of her eventual pack. It shows a level of care and attention to detail that I think most of us would genuinely like to possess.

But it doesn’t end there, because at the end of every trip, she will mull over the decisions she made regarding each item. Was it necessary? Did it get worn or used? Was it redundant? Does it deserve to travel next time? You can see the foundation of a game right there. In this special guest post, she introduces the actual solo journaling game she’s making of this habit, the Packing Game.

Introducing the Packing Game

By H.

Is it all just a game?

Somehow packing has always seemed like a game or puzzle to me. It’s nice when things just “click” into place. Having just the right items for your trip, and getting to wear every item you pack really feels like a win. And, if you have access to laundry and clothes that dry quick you get to carry less on your back. Coming home with mostly clean laundry? Ronan knows I will say “it’s a coup!”

Why The Packing Game?

I don’t feel ready for a trip of any length until I’ve done my packing list. I usually draw them. To manage travel anxiety, drawing my packing list gives me time to consider what I would bring, and how I would meet any eventuality.

After my trip, I would mark off what I didn’t wear, and consider it for my next trip. I’d reflect on that item that went unworn, and get an idea of what was an aspirational item, and what was really useful. Slowly, I began to have some faves that made it onto every trip. True “MVPs” in my wardrobe. Like a soft kimono-cut top that works for lounging or dinner over a dress. That is a truly ‘magic item’ because I found out how versatile it was in many situations.

I used to lug around a spinner (rolling bag), and packing too much for trips. Sometimes I used a small Samsonite C-LITE Spinner (4 wheels) 75 cm, 94 L (!). I’d also have a backpack with one outfit and extra pair of unders and socks, in case my bag went missing. So there was a lot going on.

That spinner was heavy. One day, lugging the bag down 3 flights of stairs in Cologne, I injured myself. It took months (Ronan said years) to recover from costochondritis. So that has motivated me to want to carry less. Even if the bag is on rollers, sometimes you have to lift and carry it.

But I did it again, for a trip to Taiwan last year, I brought a large variety of clothes. We had hot weather on the coast, and cool mountain weather in Ali Shan, and we were hopping all over the place. With more stuff, it was more to pack and look after. We did get to do laundry, both machine wash and hand wash. So we were reusing. Still, I feel I overpacked.

I wanted to carry less, but I didn’t want to give up the options and flexibility for what to wear.

I came across the One Bag world and found out that the duration of your stay doesn’t need to impact your bag size. The famous Indefinite Backpack Travel guy uses one “classic” bag all year round. He does just fine with 6 t-shirts, 1 pair of shorts, 1 pair of trousers, swimming togs, and one pair of shoes… A true minimalist.

Having said that, if you think you can walk into any place in a t-shirt and technical trousers and feel comfortable, this entire game might actually sound ridiculous. (It is!)

For me, I need colour and pattern. I need layer-able clothing to deal with temperature changes. The right clothes make it so I adapt to any weather or surprise that comes up. Leaving room in my bag also means I can pick up things along the way.

A well-packed bag can mean my day is more comfortable and enjoyable. And, let’s be honest, cuter.

So that is where I had the idea to hone my skills by creating this packing game.

Making a game is hard

I’ve had ideas for games before. A Cthulhu Dark game with nefarious plant-based cosmic entities where I’d serve dinners to the players, based on the session. I did one session and I genuinely didn’t know what I was doing. It was mood board at best.

Creating this game helped me understand the complexity of setting up rules and scenarios. And I definitely appreciate the work my friends do to create entire worlds with some rules and random tables.

A GAME ABOUT ONE-BAGGING IT

People are drawn to the idea of one bagging because it means:

  • Easier to manoeuvre
  • Easier to stow
  • Less stuff to worry about
  • Lower fees
  • No checked in luggage

At the start, they think they are going to haul a 45L+ backpack for a 1 week city break. They are completely new to playing “The Packing Game.” They bring things “just in case” and little bags of “what ifs.”

As people get more experienced, they tend to size down. You can spot the Master Packers, who use sub 30L bags, closer to 20L.

They favour light weight clothing that washes easily and dries quickly. They favour items that are versatile and resilient. So they pack smaller. With a lighter, smaller bag, they are more mobile, and have few items to look after.

HOW IT WORKS

Here’s how this cosy game about one-bagging it works.

Caveat: this hasn’t been play-tested yet. I’m still writing and testing the game. The idea is to make it a zine, or a PDF, with templates to follow in a blank A5 book. The Travel Journal is where you will keep track of what you pack and wear. And the inevitable fates of the items; to level them up to mythic status or be crossed off the list. Remember that one main object of the game is get as many wears for as many items of clothing as you can to level them up.

What you need to play

  • A pencil and eraser
  • An A5 notebook for your packing lists
  • Dice: All the dice
  • A perverse love of packing
  • A real or imaginary closet

The Travel Journal

As you play, you’ll keep notes in the travel journal.

Two page spread -Essentials and extras and the slots they take up. 4 step guide to packing your bag. On the second page - illustrating your bag slots and the items in them.
Two page spread -Essentials and extras and the slots they take up. 4 step guide to packing your bag. On the second page – illustrating your bag slots and the items in them.

You’ll work in a box for each day, to note the weather, with AM and PM outfit, and anything packed in a day bag (as needed.)

You should include a sketch of the combo or a short description, making sure to note styling. ⭐ Mark any day bag items (since these are at risk of being lost.) You can list the items. Write in pencil or erasable pen so you can update effects on them.

If you’re not used to drawing your list, the game includes tips on drawing your clothes.

A step by step guide showing how to draw your clothing items.
A step by step guide showing how to draw your clothing items.

Playing modes

The game unfolds in daily turns, with two play styles:

  • Planning Mode – plan your trip in advance, maximise rewears, and level up “magic items”
  • Spontaneous Mode – each morning, roll to discover the day’s weather and events

Starting out

On your character sheet, you will note the settings for your game.

  • The duration of the trip
  • Where you will go and when
  • The size of bag you need to carry

This sets the scene for your adventure and helps you decide what to pack. For example you can check the local season and note the typical temperature ranges and weather. Daily weather you roll for will be relative to the usual seasonal climate for that time of year.

If you’re in Planning Mode, you can just pick the location, time of year, duration and daily activities.

If you’re playing Spontaneous Mode, you write down six places you’d love to go.

  • Roll a d6 to let fate choose your Destination
  • Roll for climate and time of year, by rolling a d12 for the month
Two-page spread showing a destination table, climate/season tables and bag size tables
Two-page spread showing a destination table, climate/season tables and bag size tables

The classic “one bag” in this game is 25-30 L. Here are some variations. You can choose your difficulty level.

  • Micro – 0.5 (half bag) sub 20 L.
  • Classic – 1.0 (classic one bag travel) sub 30 L.
  • Max – 1.5 bag (this might be a carry on plus personal item) sub 45 L in two bags. Max bag size 30 L.

The bag size you choose is more to do with your own convenience, comfort and style.

Packing your bag

The journal includes a page where you can mark down your item list. This includes traits like “quick wash” and “spill hiding pattern” which will help when you meet the Travellers’ Fates each day. You also mark clothing statuses, like (D) for dirty.

You mark each time you wear an item, and 5 wears equals one level. This will help you discover magic items with excellent versatility.

Two page spread covering Magic Items and their rarities with versatility and combos covered on the next page.
Two page spread covering Mageic Items and their rarities with versatility and combos covered on the next page.

The packed bag is visualised as a grid of “bag slots” where one litre equals one bag slot. You can see and image of this under the Travel Journal section above. Caveat: Real life bags will indicate the volume in litres, but also include mesh exterior pockets. So your real life bag volume may not match the label.

To make it simpler, the game includes rules for estimating the size of items, for example jeans may take up 2 slots, whereas a tank top may take up 1/2 a slot. You can use your judgment, but when in doubt, you can fold up an item and see how big it is compared to a 1 litre carton.

In your bag slots starting out you can pack:

  • Your toiletries and under garments
  • A row with your “travel day” combo, including a top, mid-layer, bottom, shoes, outwear, and accessories.
  • And one “base” combo with a top, mid-layer, and a bottom.

Each day, you will have to make up a new combo to wear, based on the activities you roll for the day (AM) and evening (PM).

If you don’t have the right clothes, you can add or swap items from your “Magic Closet.” This might be something you own, or something you find online for the sake of the game. Alternatively, you can shop for new items on the trip, but then you’ll give up activity time.

Embarking on the journey

The play starts on Travel Day, with the option to roll for a PM activity. This gets you additional wears if you change clothes from your bag before getting to the hotel. Be wary, everything you have on you is subject to traveller’s fates.

If you do an activity, you will meet your first Travellers Fate on Travel Day.

Alternatively you can just wake up on Day 2, having arrived at your destination late at night. It’s up to you!

Good morning!

  • Roll for the weather
  • AM Day activity and meal
  • PM Dinner activity and meal

This means you’re doing 2 big things a day. When we travel, we tend to do one big thing a day, so adapt as you need to.

Managing inventory

Wearing what you already have will increase the number of wears, and level up items faster. But remember, there’s a risk you won’t have a unique combo if you repeat exactly the same items.

Tip: you can get a unique look by restyling. Using the same button down, you can get several unique looks by leaving it opened, or buttoned up, or tucked in/out/french.

If you have enough items and accessories, you can jump to meet your Traveler’s Fate.

If you didn’t have the right clothes packed or cleaned you need to acquire new items.

  • you can “draw from your closet”
    • draw one item from your MAGIC closet. So even if it’s not in your closet at home, you can grab something from your Pinterest or screenshots.
  • alternatively you can swap up to 2 items
    • The swap mechanic encourages you to find items that have more versatility.
  • or you can “shop” but it eats up an activity

Every day you can bring a small tote or backpack with accessories or even a shirt. Be warned: the bag could get lost due to Traveler’s Fates.

THE TRAVELLER’S FATE

After you’ve set your outfits and packed your day-pack, the day is set in motion. You mark down your wears in your inventory. Then its time to go about your imaginary day.

Unless one of your activities or meal is at your accommodation, you have to assume you only have the items you brought with you on the day.

Now you must roll on the Traveller’s Fate table to find out what happened that day. The table is packed with typical traveller trials, diversions, and mishaps.

Mark effects on clothes by putting a cross through the item, or maybe a “D” for dirty.

Use items and traits to offset Traveler’s Fates

If you have an item to mitigate a particular situation, then you can avoid the negative effects from a Traveller’s Fate.
Examples:

  • If you have a handkerchief, you can say you tucked it into your collar before you ate, avoiding any spills. Get the achievement: Bib Gourmand
  • Alternatively maybe you wore a stain-masking pattern to disguise your spaghetti mishap
  • If you packed a UV jacket you could avoid the effects of forgetting sun protection! If you left your skin exposed, you could get the “Blister in the Sun” effect and have to stay in the next morning and nurse that burn

Finishing your day

At the end of each day, run through this Checklist:

  • Mark any wears on the item list
  • If an item has 5 wears, it levels up
  • Strike off any swapped out items, and “inherit” the wear points (e.g. if you cross off a level 3 item, add 3 levels to the new item)
  • Add any new items to your inventory. Mark the traits (quick dry, versatile, etc) and the number of slots it takes up. Mark as level 1 unless it was swapped and inherits levels
  • Add effects, such as dirty as (D) or stained (S). Cross items off as needed
  • Before you finish your day, you can do a load of laundry. Mark laundry day (3) as a circled number on each item
  • Unless it has the “quick dry” feature, any washed item is not available the next day. E.g. wash on day (3) cannot be used on Day 4

So make sure you have something to wear the next day!

When you wake up, you start a new day.

Heading home

On your last day you can rewear your travel outfit, or set a new travel outfit.

And then you roll your final Traveller’s Fate. Re-roll if you got a duplicate fate.

SCORING

Add up the total levels of all items on the trip. This is your base score.

5 wears is 1 level. 1 level is 1 point.

An item with 43 wears would be Level 8 and three fifths.
Round up or down on levels. Level 8 and three fifths would be Level 9 (or 9 points.) 8 and two fifths would remain level 8.

Count how many clothing items remain on your list that have not been crossed off. If you have less than 12 items, regardless of length of trip, excluding extras and accessories, you win bonus points equal to the length of your trip.

Count any ZERO level items, meaning unworn. Subtract that from your score. Each Zero item removes 1 level.

Dirty clothes. Subtract a point for every item marked with a D.

How many empty slots have you got left? Add bonus points for each empty slot.

If two or more slots remain empty, pick from the Souvenir table.

Check the Achievements table and make sure you pick up badges for your profile. For example “Accidental Tourist” if your clothing takes damage two days in a row.

Congratulations you have completed the Packing Game!

References

Survey

This game is still in development, dear reader, so H would love to get some feedback. Could you answer these questions?

  • Would you be interested in playing this game?
  • What format would you like to see it produced in? (PDF, zine etc.)
  • Would you be interested in extras like themed journals and sketchbooks?

Troika! Whalgravaak’s Warehouse Review

Here’s the story: hundreds of years ago, the city’s premier logistics wizard, Whalgravaak, abandoned his warehouse, having shredded the Manual of Operations for his Sphere Pool (a mechanism used to import and export goods across the cosmos) so that his rivals could never figure it out.

One-shot fun-shot to campaign of terror

You know what it’s like, dear reader: you want to introduce some noobs to RPGs or just to your group of players, you want to make a good impression but you don’t want to scare them off by plunging them into a multi-session campaign with a complicated, crunchy system. So you pick up a location-based adventure, thinking you can just use a small portion of it, just what you need, just enough for one session, one single shot. But, after that session, the curiosity gets the better of you all. That was a weird, but enjoyable experience, you tell each-other. I bet we could have fun exploring the rest of that odd locale, you tell the players, why not have some more sessions and see how it goes? So you do that. And then the bloodbath begins.

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse

SPOLIERS BELOW! If you are interested in being a player in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse, turn back now!

The covers of three Troika! 1:5 adventure modules, Whalgravaak's Warehouse, The Hand of God and Eye of the Aeons.
The 1:5 adventures that I own, Whalgravaak’s Warehouse, The Hand of God and Eye of the Aeons. All from Melsonian Arts Council

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is a Location based adventure by Andrew Walter for Troika! The design is by Shuyi Zhang. It came out in 2023 and was the first of the Melsonian Arts Council’s 1:5, an ongoing series of location-based adventures for Troika! There are a couple more available now and another out very soon. You can find them all here. My somewhat rotating group of Tables and Tales members just had our last session in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse on Monday night, after spending a total of eight sessions there.

Here’s the story: hundreds of years ago, the city’s premier logistics wizard, Whalgravaak, abandoned his warehouse, having shredded the Manual of Operations for his Sphere Pool (a mechanism used to import and export goods across the cosmos) so that his rivals could never figure it out.

Since then, the strange nature of the warehouse, staffed by giants and stocked with oddities, has only grown stranger, and more dangerous. It houses a handful of physics defying, Tardis-like chambers, not least of which is the terrifying Deep Storage, a swirling mass containing several pocket dimensions and a wraith-like being who wants nothing more than to consume intruders. At least one cult has taken up residence, and they are often mutated into horrific Chaotic Spawnlets by the effects of the radiation still spilling from the Sphere Pool. The warehouse is sandwiched by a vast desert of dust occupying the roof, which is peopled by the descendants of Whalgravaak’s former employees and, underneath, the tunnels of a pack of unpredictable Worm-headed Hounds.

But entrance has been forbidden by the Autarch for centuries and, even if you were foolhardy enough to ignore a diktat like that, you would still need to be brave enough to face the unknown dangers within.

The Hook and the Party

The book suggests a few potential hooks for your PCs. Since my game started off as a one-shot, with brand new characters and no existing campaign to work it into, I went for one that seemed like the object might be achieved in one session. They, along with many other groups of mercenaries were contracted to return with the head of a Cacogen, known only as the Opportunist, to their patron, an Exultant of the Autarch’s court. But we dealt with that in flashback as they all sat in the weed-choked yard of the warehouse, dotted now with small encampments of adventurers and brigands all gathering their courage to gain entry. The PCs’ band consisted of a Monkey Monger (and monkeys), a Gremlin Catcher (and dog), a Wizard Hunter and a Landsknecht. They were, to put it bluntly, a motley crew.

That first session was all fun and games. Every encounter, except for the last one with the Cacogen, was resolved peacefully. This happened mainly due to the rolls I made on the Mien table for each encounter. The worm-headed Hounds they encountered wanted to play with the Monkey Mongers monkeys, they did not want to eat them. The Flat Serviceman was happy to follow the party around and clean up after them. The Segmented Crippler in the Pigeonholery, didn’t want to wake up, so they skipped that one entirely. This is a pretty standard mechanic in Troika but I think it gave the players a false sense of security. The session ended with this motley crew finding and defeating the Opportunist quite handily. And, at that point, we thought that would be it.

But a few months later we decided to continue with their explorations of the warehouse. Obviously, their original motivation to explore was gone. They had achieved their objective, but the players were all good sports. They decided between them that the motivation was purely one of curiosity and greed. They had spotted, through a bubble like window in one of the rooms they had traversed, a vast and terrifying pool of chaos and wonder in a room far too big to exist within the confines of the building. This was enough for them. Essentially, they went in search of adventure. Although, through the sessions that followed, I did introduce the idea that they might want to find that cult I mentioned earlier and that they should seek out the incredibly valuable Tome of the Sable Fields that was reported to be stored in the warehouse, somewhere. This gave them a little direction when I thought they might need it, but, honestly, I think my players just wanted to see what new wonder/horror the dungeon had in store in the next room.

The Dungeoncrawl

It was only from this point that I started to really treat this adventure like the dungeoncrawl it is very much meant to be. The book does a good job of introducing the concepts of tracking resources like lantern oil and provisions as the party explores. It also explains the concept of exploration turns and their effect on the game, i.e. the distance you can travel in that time, the amount of lantern oil you use per turn, and the likelihood of running into an encounter. I followed all these rules to the letter and they made for some interesting moments in the game. But, to be frank, the weirdness of the setting is the real draw here, not fiddling with rations and light levels. Also, few of the characters lived long enough for starvation or oil-skins to become a problem.

It also has rules for dealing with the spatially distorted, impossibly large areas within the warehouse. It suggests that the players should make Luck or Skill checks to avoid getting lost in these areas, but, in all honesty, I didn’t really require that sort of thing.

Mapping is also a part of the dungeon crawl format and this adventure does want the party to attempt to map the space for themselves. The thing is, when some rooms appear to be a kilometre wide and the next one is spatially normal, that map becomes effectively impossible for them to draw accurately after a relatively short period of time. Eventually, I gave up and just shared the one from the book with the players, trusting their ability to separate player knowledge and character knowledge. My advice, if you are doing this, try get your hands on the PDF version, since the one in the physical book stretches across two pages and the crease obscures part of it.

In fact, the adventure has four maps:

  • the warehouse floorpan, using 10ft squares to denote distance
  • a hex crawl for the desert on the roof, replete with points of interest
  • a map of the Worm-headed Hound tunnels beneath the warehouse, superimposed over the warehouse plan
  • a largely vibes-based map of Deep Storage

These are all great but usefulness will vary. In our game, the party spent several sessions trapped in Deep Storage but took one look at the desert and noped right out of there. This seems like a good point to note how good all the artwork is in this. There are plenty of colour and black and white illustrations but they leave me wanting even more!

Warehouse Workers and other Beasties

A warehouse is a dangerous place to work, especially when the correct safety protocols are not observed. It doesn’t help at all when you are trespassers and several of the residents are large enough to crush you with a single blow.

The crimson giant, Paude, the pipe-smoking, bearded giant, Arbuthnot and the blue, jelly giant, Gamtomerian.
The giants are not what you might expect.

The giants are the main NPCs of the adventure and Whalgravaak’s only remaining employees. Each one is fabulously interesting, diverse and well-drawn. They have their own motivations and desires. I was gratified that the party managed to encounter all of them during the eight sessions we played. In fact, one player had two different characters killed by two different giants. I will point out that it is entirely possible to avoid violence when dealing with the giants, it’s just that, sometimes, the Monkey Monger on the team has monkeys who decide to fuck with them and one thing leads to another.

The wraith-like Gulf Man Roamer from the swirling vortex of Deep Storage is a potentially lethal foe who has a chance to show up each time the party moves through that already dangerous room. If it captures you in its bag, it’s going to spirit you away to eat you in its extra-dimensional lair.

No warehouse is complete without forklifts. Whalgravaak’s forklifts are humanoid constructs with the face of the wizard himself. They treat intruders like stock, and will attempt to whack them and pack them. They hit very very hard.

Its a black and white dog, with a neck like an earthworm
When you read the words, Worm-headed Hound, is this what you imagined?

There are also a bunch of random encounters, including the Worm-headed Hounds I mentioned before, desert nomads from the roof, and Bandits/Burglars/Bastards. These only turn up on the roll of a 1 on a 1d6 for each turn the party travels. It didn’t occur very often in my game. The Roof and the tunnels have their own random encounter tables as well, but I never used them as the party never spent any appreciable time there.

This is just a selection of the possible encounters you can have in this setting. I haven’t even mentioned the tiny army guys, the sentient crane parts, the Onion God or the Mulled Dead.

The Rooms

I have hinted at rooms that defy physics and rooms with pocket dimensions, and those are usually the big-ticket locations that contain some of the greatest set-pieces in the adventure. Deep Storage alone evoked some of the most inventive use of skills and spells and a great degree of fear and tension from the PCs. It killed one of them (two if you count the Rhinoman eaten by the Gulf Man Roamer.) The Roof could act as an entire short hex-crawl campaign and the Sphere Pool has some truly memorable and dangerous elements to it.

However, many of the other rooms have weird and wonderful contents as well. Some of them, the party will glance at and move on, while others will capture their imaginations and encourage them to interact. I never really knew which reaction I was going to get from them, actually. The room full of melting rope? They had to spend an hour trying to figure out how to set it on fire, the eternal battle between tiny armies playing out across a battlefield seemingly larger than the whole warehouse? Just popped their heads in and left with some captured little men.

Some of the rooms were relatively mundane warehouse style rooms with shelves and containers. The book has tables in the back to help you identify the state those rooms are in and the contents of the containers, which is useful.

One of my over-riding impressions by the end of our game, was that in some ways, the great variety of bonkers content in the rooms served to detract from any unifying theme. There were some elements that went together, such as the warehouse’s disdain for traditional dimensions. If my PCs had explored the Roof or even encountered any of the nomads who dwelt there, they might have found a distinction between those descendants of the ancient striking workers and the giants who continued to obsessively do their jobs even long after their employer had passed on. But, none of that is to say that the rooms weren’t endlessly fun and inventive.

A Note on Lethality

I recently wrote a post sharing some of the obituaries of the characters who met their ends in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. You can check it out here. There are only three of them in that post. A few months previous to that, I wrote this post, which contained the obituaries of two more. The mathematicians amongst you will have summed those already. That’s five. In the final session, we lost another one. That makes six. That was three character deaths each for two particularly unfortunate/reckless players. Warehouse work is dangerous. Only one of the original party survived to the end. You have been warned.

Conclusions

The covers of the two different versions of Troika! that I own.
Numinous or otherwise, its the same game.

There is so much to recommend in this adventure. It is endlessly entertaining, challenging and bonkers. It has such a variety of locations and such a diversity of encounters that you would need to work hard to get bored in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. I think it works so well to show off Troika! as a system, too. The problems it asks the PCs to solve and the encounters they have to deal with utilise things like the Luck check really well and encourage players to invent their own unique Advanced Skills. But if they get into fights, especially with the incredibly random nature of Troika! initiative, there is a very high chance they are going to come out of it dead. There are a few opportunities for insta-kills throughout the warehouse too. I can’t overstate exactly how lethal this adventure is. Luckily, my players leaned into that, even when they were creating new characters to join in the same fight the original one died in (they got very quick at creating characters.)

I think it’s also flexible enough for many GMs to easily take it or part of it and fit it easily into their own ongoing Troika! campaign. As I said at the start, our game started as a one-shot and it could have ended there. But we were able to easily adapt it into a short campaign of its own.

Dear reader, let me know if you have played Whalgravaak’s Warehouse or if you would like to! I’d love to know your views on it.

Homebrew Heart Landmarks 5

It was the kind of party that took its toll on a number of different organs, the brain being not the least of them.

Two-day Wedding

Dear reader, I returned yesterday from a trip to Cork where I attended the wedding of a dear friend of mine. It involved a great deal of time spent with very old friends in the most convivial of circumstances, accompanied often by a pint of Murphy’s and a lot of reminiscing. I’m still recovering. It was the kind of party that took its toll on a number of different organs, the brain being not the least of them.

But, you know, inspiration is a fickle mistress.

Pub Crawler

Name: Pub Crawler
Domains: Wild, Haven
Tier: 3
Default Stress: d6
Haunts: The Pub Crawler (d12 Mind)

Description:
Vansant Depwy, former Knight of the Lower Docks and Minister of Our Hidden Mistress fled the City Above many years before. Burned by the Ministry and broken by his former companions in the knighthood, he found himself wandering the arteries of the Heart, lamenting his lost companionship and honestly, just gagging for a pint. As always, the Heart provided.

The millipede of enormous proportions that is Pub Crawler came to Vansant when he was most desperate and dribbled ever so delicately into his open mouth as he lay directly in its path. It roused him immediately. The finest ice wines of the High Elves the flowing ichor seemed to him. The next moment a fine brandy from the Home Nations. He could not get enough, despite the dubious origins of the divine liquid. His head swam and he rejoiced. Immediately he hopped aboard the cyclopean insect and continued to ride it forevermore. Along the way he collected what salvage he could to hook the creatures glands up to rubber pipes to facilitate easier imbibing. He built a small structure and started filling casks while welcoming visitors to his little ramshackle hostelry. As time went on, he and the beast attracted the attention of more less-than-discerning travellers desperate for a decent drink so deep as they were in the Heart. Some of the visitors became residents and then publicans in their own right. The pubs stretch now from the great insectile head to its earwiggy tail. Vansant’s, of course, has pride of place between the two many-faceted, ale-gold eyes. Its name is synonymous with the creature itself these days, the Pub Crawler.

Special Rules
They say it’s a mile from one end of the Pub Crawler to the other. A visitor who wants to partake of the healing effects of the Haunt must work their way up from the tail, taking a drink in every pub on the way. In other words, it’s a pub crawl. The booze is not particularly strong at the tail end as the further they get from the mouth, the more they are forced to water it down. So each visitor is forced to make and Endure/Wild roll or take a d6 Mind stress as they begin to commune directly with the Pub Crawler itself. The first roll is Normal difficulty, the second at Risky and the third at Dangerous.

Fallout Tipsy (Minor, Mind) One more? One more. Doing anything but getting another drink is now Risky.

Fallout Well on it (Major, Mind) There is a constant clicking and clacking in your mind. You must now either try to kill the source of it (the Pub Crawler) or try to understand it.

Fallout Pallatic (Critical, Mind) You understand the Pub Crawler and its reason for being. You know why it secretes such delicious and delirious juices. And now that you know, you have no choice but to stay and set up shop yourself. Spread the booze and spread the word.

If you do manage to make it all the way to the magelight illuminated superpub known as the Pub Crawler, Vansant himself will come and serve you the most potent brew of all, purging you of all Mind stress and Fallout and bestowing on the lucky patron an honorary knighthood.

Corkers

I’m off to Cork for the weekend so I won’t have time to come up with anything new today. Instead I thought I would share a couple of posts from last year. I wrote these at a time when I was first experimenting with some homespun rules and borrowed mechanics for our D&D 5E campaign.

This first post is preparatory to introducing a Blades in the Dark style engagement roll to our Spelljammer game.

Forged in the Dungeon

And this one is an update about how it went!

Forged in the Dungeon, Part 2

I’ll be back next week with some new posts. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these re-posts!

Prep Part 2

I am an unapologetic shill for Huffa’s Between the Skies. It’s one of my most used and most valuable RPG books. I use it constantly in lots of contexts. But I love using it to prepare for sessions.

Still Prepping

This post is part of a blog bandwagon started on the Roll to Doubt blog.

Click on the link above to take in the blogpost that’s piloting this bandwagon. Wagon-jumpers abound. You can find a very nice read on the same topic and a handy list of related blogposts on the Among Cats and Books blog.

And here’s a link to the first post on this topic on the dice pool dot com.

Between the Sessions

I am an unapologetic shill for Huffa’s Between the Skies. It’s one of my most used and most valuable RPG books. I use it constantly in lots of contexts. But I love using it to prepare for sessions. Its approach to random encounters in particular is one I highly recommend. The encounters are built, not just to make your session interesting, but to introduce potential allies and enemies, recurring characters, locations, objects. In short, they help you to truly build your campaign without relying on GM-written plots that the players may or may not want to interact with.

The methods and tables introduced in the book make for interesting, impactful characters and occurrences. And they have depth, too, enough to hook your players and keep them hooked. You know that old story that your players would die for the unnamed goblin you just made up on the spot but won’t give a shit about the NPC you spent two weeks crafting an elaborate back story for? I feel like the techniques in Between the Skies are almost designed to prevent that. Why? Well, firstly because, if used as your main way to drive the game forward, you are not going to be spending so long lovingly hand-crafting those NPCs, you are just going to roll them up on the tables provided and not worry about whether or not the PCs run into them, because whatever they run into will be interesting and fun enough to capture their imaginations. So, all the NPCs are more like the loveable nameless goblin and you don’t feel the need to make sure the PCs interact with any of them in particular. This has the effect of allowing the players to dictate the direction of the game to a large extent. This is a good thing!

Let’s Interact with the Mechanics

So, Huffa’s advice when it comes to travel is that, unless it is going to be interesting or important, skip it. I can get behind this approach. Recently, I have tended towards the idea of the journey being the game, but sometimes, when you know the next scene you need to play is across the city and its a relatively safe place, just skip to it, or montage it if there is something interesting to see along the way or if its a good opportunity for conversation between characters.

If and when you want to play the travel, though, Between the Skies presents you with two options, progress-based travel and route-based travel.

Route-based travel

Using this method, you use a map, just a basic one that includes routes and locations along them. You roll once on the Encounter die between locations and resolve that before arriving at the next place. Simple. The book includes several ways to generate route maps and destinations but I won’t concern myself with that here.

Your route map should have options, different ways of getting from A to B with more locations in between your starting point and the final destination depending on how long you want the journey to last.

This has the feeling of the caravan travel methods used in Ultraviolet Grasslands.

Progress-based travel

This gives me the impression of beating the resistance of a delve in Heart. Before the journey starts, determine the journey length. There is a helpful table that indicates the amount of Progress points required to reach the destination depending on how long the journey is. You record progress through the resolution of Encounter Die rolls.

The Encounter die works as follows:

  1. Encounter
  2. Something Approaches
  3. Environmental hazard
  4. Complication
  5. Hint as to what is nearby
  6. Progress/breakthrough/boon

So you only get progress points on a 6.

What I did

As with everything in Between the Skies, you can take it or leave it. I have used a combination of the two methods, where I decided that a spelljammer ship journey from the Rock of Bral to the First Home asteroid would take three days and I would have them roll on an encounter table once per day. So this is the table I used:

Wildspace encounter table d6

1-2 No encounter
3 Environmental/Ship Hazard
4 Ship Problem
5-6 Encounter

When you only have three days and so, three possible rolls on the table, I felt it was better to increase the chances of actual encounters/problems/hazards occurring. If it was a more exploratory journey, I would use the progress-based method as described in the book.

Now, using the tables in this book, of which there are many, you should be able to create a fascinating encounter on the fly, but, if you can, I think its nice to prepare a few beforehand, at least one of each kind. So let’s do that here.

I thought it would be a good idea to roll up some options on the spark tables in the book and add them to a d4 table for each encounter type (environmental/ship hazard, ship problem and ship travel encounter.)

Environmental/Ship Hazard

We’ll start with the hazards. For each hazard you want to prepare, you roll 1d6 to determine the hazard type and then d66 to generate a hazard keyword on the Environmental Hazards during ship travel table in Between the Skies.

I shared this table in the last post so lets use the results I rolled up on that.

3 Ship Hazards

Roll 1d4

  1. Hazard 1 – Storm, Flood
  2. Hazard 2 – Disorientation, Sphere
  3. Hazard 3 – Obstruction, Cold
  4. Hazard 4 – Trap, Haunting

I then go ahead and prepare a few details of the hazards. Here’s the first one as an example.

Hazard 1

A solar storm rolls in from the direction of the sun.

  • The gusts of solar winds batter the ship
  • The deck is flooded in light and other solar radiation
  • All those on deck risk blindness
  • There is also a chance of taking radiant damage
    • All on deck must make a Dexterity save, DC 15 to avoid blindness
    • If they are afflicted with blindness it lasts 1d4-1 days. If you roll a 1, Roll 2d12-1 for the number of hours it lasts
    • Even if they saved against blindness they must make a Constitution save, DC 15, against radiant damage. If they fail they take 4d6 radiant damage. If they succeed they take none.
    • This goes for the ship too, if the damage roll beats the damage threshold

You can see that I took the hazard type fairly literally but moved it into a wildspace context. A solar storm seemed obvious but also pretty cool. The keyword, “flood,” took me a little while to work out but I thought flooding the deck with light seemed both like a cool, spacey event and something that could present a real problem for the PCs.

Obviously, you can prepare the details for each entry in the table. They don’t have to involve a lot of work but putting a little extra preparation in at this stage can remove the need for it at the table.

Ship Problem

Similar to the hazards, you simply roll up a problem type and a problem keyword on the Ship Problems tables in Between the Skies. I did this four times and created the d4 table below.

4 Ship Problems

Roll 1d4

  1. Problem 1 – Armament, Separation
  2. Problem 2 – Quarters, Shrinkage
  3. Problem 3 – Cargo, Disappearance
  4. Problem 4 – Bridge (spelljammer helm), Error

Here’s the detail on one of these entries:

Problem 2

One of the crew has stowed something large and awkward in the crew quarters. It is limiting the amount of space available to sling hammocks and the rest of the NPC crew is unhappy about it.
This crew member refuses to be parted from their huge steamer chest as it contains something of extreme personal significance.
The PCs will need to resolve the interpersonal issue.

You can see that the details here are left deliberately vague. You Ould ask the players to decide which member of the crew is the problem, what’s in the chest that’s so important and, most importantly, how the resolve the issue.

Encounters

And finally we have encounters.
There are a lot of different encounter tables in the book. You can choose the one that best describes the surroundings of the PCs at the time. There are two space encounter tables, one for known space and one for wildspace. They are d66 tables. Once you have done rolled on them, you can get some more inspiration by rolling on the encounter keyword, detail and related entities tables.
Once you have rolled on the Encounter distance and awareness tables in Between the Skies to determine how far away the encounter is and how much attention they are paying to the PCs you can roll on the d4 table below.

You’ll note that the results on the table below are not all similar. For instance, encounter 2 doesn’t have a related entity. In general, such entities, as generated by the tables in Between the Skies, are sentient NPCs so I didn’t think it necessary for the parasite I rolled up. But mostly each of them includes an encounter keyword, a related entity, and two encounter details.

5-6 Encounters
  1. Isolationists – Confusion, Related Entity – Unknown NPC, Glittering, Prayers
  2. Ship Parasite – Loss, Scales, Experiments
  3. Ruins, Ancient – Mourning, Related Entity – Petty God, Knots, Miscommunications
  4. Stowaway – Battle, Related Entity – Creature, Eggs, Blindspots
Stowaway

Size, substance and form table: Very small biota, piecemeal.
Weakness: True name
Needs: Brains
Characteristics and details: Pacifist, stalks
Behaviour: Social: Family: 5 appearing
Demeanor and current behaviour: Protective, healing
Attacks: Blast – teleporting

For the final example, I’m using the creature generation tables in the Entities chapter of Between the Skies. You can see all the details and keywords that I rolled up above.

Along with the keywords, battle, eggs and blindspots, that came from the original encounter detail rolls, these will make for a fascinating encounter with some sort of very small fungal entity that has escaped a battle to find refuge aboard the PCs’ ship. The mushroom creature has a desperate need for brains to help heal its young but will not take them by force. Perhaps they only consume the brains of dead beings. Perhaps they have a blindspot that means they cannot sense constructs. And maybe, also, they have crawled into the ship’s stores to try to feed on the eggs, mistaking them for heads containing brains. I like the idea of them lashing out with a teleporting blast to deposit attackers some way off the deck of the ship, leaving them to perish in wildspace. If the PCs can figure out the creatures’ true names, they’ll be able to get them off the ship, but how?

Conclusion

I think you can see the fun you can have preparing encounters and encounter tables using Between the Skies. Once again, dear reader, I can only urge you to go and purchase it. It’s so useful and you won’t regret it!

Alien RPG’s Hope’s Last Day: A Review

If you’re interested, go check out my post previewing this game here.

A Bad Call?

Burke, Carter J “confessed” to Ripley that he had made a bad call in sending them to a colony on the moon, LV-426. But did he mean it? No. He was a scumbag of the highest order. He was just fucking someone else over for a percentage. I sent my players to LV-426 too. I wasn’t looking to fuck them over for a percentage, but, at the very least, I expected most of their characters to get impregnated by facehuggers, ripped to shreds by drones or melted by acid blood. Did any of that happen? Did I make a bad call in choosing the Cinematic Alien RPG scenario, Hope’s Last Day, from the core book, rather than the one from the Starter Set? Well, dear reader, why not come with me on a trip through our one-shot and my thoughts on it, and you’ll find out.

Shake and Bake

These two scenarios couldn’t really be much more different. The one from the Starter Set, Chariot of the Gods, is set on a ship out in space, you know, where no-one can hear you scream? It’s also very much a full scenario with an entire three act structure. They say it would take three sessions to play but I have my doubts about that estimate, having played Hope’s Last Day.

Speaking of which, Hope’s Last Day is a scenario that’s set totally on the moon where Ripley and the Nostromo’s crew found the Alien eggs in the first movie and the setting for the action of the second. This scenario was not even a full Cinematic experience. It is billed as a taster, since it really only encompasses what would be the third act in a normal Cinematic scenario. The book confidently asserts that it could easily be played in under two hours.

Frankly, duration was the deciding factor for me. I only had one night to get through a whole scenario. I don’t have a lot of wiggle-room in my schedule due to the fact that I have at least seven other ongoing games at any given time, so it really had to get wrapped up in one shot. So, I shook it and baked it.

Shaking

Shaking, essentially, meant reading through the scenario a couple of times. It’s very short, so this was not a problem. I also took notes on the various major beats and summarised the contents of the various blocks and rooms into bullet points. Most of the scenario consists of these location descriptions so this was key for me. Also, they are all presented in what I consider to be unwieldy blocks of text in the book, and I prefer referring to bullet points at the table. This work helped me to keep things flowing a little more smoothly on the night. I also screenshot handed the pregenerated characters out to the players I thought they would suit best a couple of days before. This part was fun, and the players were left to wonder how I decided who should play which character. Each character had an agenda that was generally meant to be kept secret from the others. Now these were fun. Stuff like, being willing to sacrifice themselves for the others, wanting to acquire an alien and escape with it or just to keep the company’s actions a secret at all costs. You know, normal stuff. Anyway, I examined these agendas and assigned the characters purely out of a desire to see each player pursue that secret agenda. Other than this fairly sparse preparation, I got a couple of copies of the map of Hadley’s Hope printed and a few character sheets. I familiarised myself with the relevant rules as much as I could and that was it for the shaking.

Baking

At the table, we baked. And, I will say most of the time this one-shot spent in the oven, there were no issues at all. Was I ready to nuke the site from orbit by the end? Not quite, thankfully. I’m mixing my metaphors quite egregiously at this point so I’ll abandon them both and just tell you what happened.

I started exactly as the scenario suggests you start, with the four PCs inside the West airlock of Hadley’s Hope. They had just returned from a day or more outside the settlement and were not aware the Aliens had already decimated the population. I let them investigate a bit, try and get an intercom working, and generally futz around. The scenario calls for an Alien attack whenever the PCs dawdle but I didn’t want to lose anybody so early on. I think this was a mistake on my part. Their first encounter with an Alien occurred a little later after they had made their way to another block of the station and messed around looking at eggs and facehuggers and whatnot. This gave one character the opportunity to collect an egg and another to sacrifice himself to keep the others safe and made them all start running to find the way out. This was more like it. Things really started moving then. The one who sacrificed himself turned out to be an artificial person as Bishop would have us call them. So, the alien just left him, innards outed, on the floor and unable to move, but not dead. Luckily there was an extra pregen for that player to take over so we continued on.

Later they encountered a couple of facehuggers after finding a few weapons. They made short work of them and moved on again. They spent much of the last part of the session effectively split into two parties running from two different drones towards the only way off the planet, a shuttle. And you know what? They all made it! Except the android, who, I can only assume was caught in the conflagration when the nuclear reactor in the processing plant went up as Ripley and the others escaped. Also, they didn’t all make it, because the pilot turned out to be the company plant and she spaced everyone else as soon as they left the atmosphere. I guess that made her the winner?

Game Over, Man

So, what was the verdict? It’s a mixed bag, to be honest.

I think our main complaint was that this was mislabeled as an under-two-hour scenario. I mean, ok, it was our first time playing the Alien RPG so we did have to spend a little extra time referring to the rules and figuring out what all the stats meant, but that does not account for the fact that this thing took us almost four hours. Even then, I had to abandon some integral rules to allow us to make it to the end in that time. I don’t honestly know how anyone gets five people around a table, people who want to role-play, who want to fuck around and find out, people for whom the joy is in the playing, not in the finishing, and have them get through this scenario in anything less than four and a half hours if you stick to all the rules of the game.

As for the rules. The main negative was the initiative system. Alien, like other Free League games, uses an initiative card system. We generally found it a little difficult to keep track of things using this and found it slowed the action down significantly. One of the main issues was that the PCs kept getting into initiative, running away from fights, getting out of initiative, getting caught again and getting into initiative again! So we were shuffling and picking those cards a lot. In fact, as time ran out on our session, I just left the cards to one side and did it narrative style. I got each player in turn to tell me what they were doing and told them how the Aliens or the environment reacted or acted against them. This really sped things up and drew the evening to a very exciting close, in fact. Would I use the initiative system as-is if I played again? I think I would give it a go as long as I had more time to play with but I would be ready to give up on it in a second if it started to get in the way again.

One more issue for me was the system used to figure out how the Aliens attack. Every time it’s their turn, the Game Mother has to roll on a table to determine which of their special attacks they use. This started off as a fun activity, but quickly got frustrating. It felt like each time the Alien had one of the PCs in their grasp, I would roll up an attack that allowed them the chance to escape. Now, if this happens a couple of times, it adds a nice dramatic element to the chase. But this is literally how they all managed to get away in the end. If I had been just choosing the attacks for the Aliens, there would not have been so many occupied seats on the shuttle when it took off. I feel like there is a better way to adjudicate the moves they make. Admittedly, you would not want every attack to be lethal, either, but it felt as though far too many of them were underpowered.

One element that worked well but felt like it was under-utilised or tacked on was the Stunt mechanic. Each skill had a stunt table that told you how you could spend your excess successes (each 6 you get when you roll your dice pool is a success and you gnerally only need one to succeed at your task,) but the players almost exclusively went for one of two options, at least in combat situations: they added extra damage or they pinned the enemy down to prevent them from taking as many actions on their next turn. This was fine but it feels like this needs more work. Perhaps the new edition will deal with this.

You know, there were plenty of mechanics we liked in the game too. The main mechanic in the Alien RPG, the thing you would lean on to sell the system, is Panic. Like other Year Zero Engine games, you roll a dice pool consisting of a number of dice equal to your score in a given skill plus the number of dice equal to your score in the related ability. So, if you have a 1 in Mobility and a 2 in Agility, you roll 3 dice. But, as you play, your character gains Stress for all sorts of awful reasons. For every point of Stress you gain, you get to add another die to every dice pool. This gives you a greater chance of success but also gives you a chance that you’ll have to roll on the Panic Table. This happens if you roll a facehugger (a 1) on the official Alien RPG Stress Dice. There are other ways of panicking. Usually, if one of your companions does something unhinged or crazy or if you see an Alien for the first time. That kind of thing. By the end of the session, everyone had so much Stress that they were rolling obscene numbers of dice and there were Panic rolls happening almost constantly. One Panic roll would often lead to another from someone else because of the result they would get. Also, because, each time you roll on the Panic table, you have to add your Stress Score to the roll and the shit at the bottom of the table is way worse than the shit at the top, the results got very bad as time went on. For example, this is what you get for rolling a 7 gets you:

NERVOUS TWITCH. Your STRESS LEVEL, and the STRESS LEVEL of all friendly PCs in SHORT range of you, increases by one.

This is what you get if you roll a 15+:

CATATONIC. You collapse to the floor and can’t talk or move, staring blankly into oblivion.

This did happen to one character but they were already at the shuttle at that stage and someone was able to drag them inside.

The feedback I got in stars and wishes from the session indicated that the players also loved the agendas they were given with their PCs. This was a worry for me before we started. I mean, not only did they not get to create their own characters, I didn’t even give them the choice of which one to pick. Obviously, this was because I didn’t want to reveal the secret agendas to everyone before play started. And I’m so glad I did it this way! Everyone had pretty much figured out who was the android in under an hour, but no-one, and I mean even me, because I forgot what the pilot’s agenda was, expected to be spaced by one of their own when they were on the verge of escape. Incredible scenes. This element of the game is specific to the short Cinematic Play scenarios. And, indeed, normally, in a full scenario, your PC’s agenda changes as you move through the three acts. I can’t account for how well this works, obviously, but it sounds great.

As for the scenario itself, there is not a lot to it. This is definitely a good thing. If you play it, you’re not going to get to most of the compound. A lot of those areas I summarised into bullet points remained completely unexplored. Once the drones were after them, the PCs soon discovered a sense of urgency and a definite goal, i.e. escaping on the shuttle. There was a bit more to it than that, but not much. Like I said, this was fine, especially as the PCs’ agendas took the place of a set plot most of the time anyway.

It was also cool that the scenario was so closely related to Aliens, the movie. I watched it the night before running the session, and that definitely helped me to picture the place and to describe it at the table. I’d recommend doing that if you do intend to run Hope’s Last Day. I’d also recommend leaving yourself at least four hours to do it justice.

So, was it a bad call? No, but if I went into it again, knowing what I know now, I would have made a few alterations to my expectations.

What about you, dear reader? Have you played this scenario or this RPG? Are you looking forward to the Alien Evolved Edition? Get in the comments?

Dungeon Crawls are Classic

DCC Adventures

If you’re anything like me, dear reader you buy a lot of RPG books that you are unlikely to ever pick up and play. Sometimes, that’s the intention or at least, you don’t have a plan to plan to use it, you know? I have some in both categories. Some books I backed in their crowdfunding phases because I want their creators to continue to create cool stuff, even though I know it will be impossible to fit the actual final product into my ongoing campaigns or their new game into my frankly ridiculous gaming schedule. Some I picked up in PDF format through Bundle of Holding or Humble Bundle because the deal was so good I would have been stupid not to buy them. Some I purchased with the knowledge that they might enrich an ongoing campaign but then just never fit in anywhere.

But DCC adventures are in a slightly different category. I have bought a truly obscene number of them, mostly as PDFs. I think this started after listening to a few of the reviews of DCC adventures by Fear of the a Black Dragon. Then I started to collect physical copies. My local independent game shop had copies of their Dying Earth setting box and the Umerica setting book, both of which I purchased. You know, a lot of the time, this was purely due to aesthetics. They are beautiful works of art, frankly. I love their style and their content, even if I hate their layout. But the real reason is because these have always been aspirational adventures for me to play. Genuinely, I feel at this point that, if I could, I would abandon D&D for DCC. Why? The adventures I have read are just effortlessly lacking in D&D’s corporatised humourlessness. They are not written in comedic fashion but in the last two sessions of DCC playing Sailors on the Starless Sea, I have had more genuine laughs and gasps of outrage and tears of sorrow and joy than I have had playing D&D since 2014. And that is not to demean the efforts of many of the wonderful creators of 5E products, it is simply to praise the work of the designers who created a game that I expected to bounce off due to crunchiness but which I, instead, embraced due to its flexibility. The philosophy of the adventure design also has a lot to do with this new attitude. To discuss that, let’s talk specifically about the module I just finished with my players tonight, Sailors on the Starless Sea.

Sailors on the Starless Sea: Endings and Beginnings

The surviving sailors sailed off to parts unknown at the end of our session tonight, each player with one remaining character. This is the ideal ending to a DCC 0 Level Funnel adventure. I am guessing that sometimes players end up with more than one 1st level character to begin their true career as a proper DCC adventurer, but it seems like the best possible outcome if you’re only looking after the one.

It was the getting there that was so much fun though. I wrote recently about character creation in Cosmic Dark being so much fun because the players play it, they role play the most developmentally significant moments of their PC’s lives up to that point in snippets and flashbacks with other players. The DCC funnel is surprisingly like that except its also involves a dungeon crawl, horrific death on a brutal scale and a boat load of shared trauma. Every one of the characters left at the end of the funnel knows precisely what the rest of the survivors are capable of and what they are not capable of. They know some terrible secrets about them and they know that they are keeping some terrible secrets about their own character too.

The survivors were not necessarily the ones you might have predicted at the start as 20 peasants ranged about before the Chaos Keep’s rusted portcullis, but they were the ones Luck favoured in the end. They survived traps, vine horrors, a shit-tonne of beastmen, a cursed well, a fire trap, a Chaos Leviathan, the return of a Chaos Lord to the plane of mortals and a literal tsunami… Someone powerful was smiling on them. And their players knew that by the end, that’s for sure. This made every death so much more terrible and every survival so much more precious. If it hadn’t been for that one critical hit that time, they might not have destroyed the Chaos Lord; if it hadn’t been for that fumble, maybe Gwydion would have made it past the chapel; if it hadn’t been for that successful Luck check, maybe Thomas would have been left with no surviving characters instead of the four he started the session with. There are so many of these death or glory moments woven into the text of this adventure that it is hard to overstate how much every roll and action seems loaded with meaning and significance, especially when the PCs generally have no more than 2 or 3 HP.

It’s easy to say that there were just so many PCs that their existence was cheapened. I even allowed them to restock a few peasants at one point. The adventure allows for this about half way through because they know exactly how lethal it is about to become on the second level of the dungeon. 23 PCs went into the dungeon in total. Six emerged alive, one succumbed to the effects of a potion once they had escaped, a poignant and fitting end point to the whole story. Every one of those deaths had an effect on the player who played the character.

They wondered from the start who might survive. Maybe they would be different. Maybe all their little darlings would make it through. Perhaps only the weakest would be culled. Repeatedly, tonight, the characters that the players expected to survive went down. It was still shocking to them, it was still sad to say goodbye to them, even though time was of the essence. It made for some of the most effective drama I have had the pleasure of being part of at a gaming table in years. And it was a DCC funnel adventure. An adventure designed as a way to whittle down your choices of character to play in a campaign in the most Darwinian fashion.

Harley Stroh wrote a great adventure filled with mystery and danger and conflict and true significance and then they play-tested the shit out of this thing. This is how I know: There was a moment at the very end when the last PC, who had stayed behind to loot some corpses, had to make a Luck check to secure his place on the Dragon Ship to escape the dungeon. This was the second last element of high drama in this game and it was all down to a single roll, DC 17 to leap to safety from the shore to the boat. Thomas thought he’d whiffed it. Thought he rolled a 9. But it was just one of those dice, white text on light background… turned out it was a 19. His character grabbed the gunwale of the longship and Hilda dragged him aboard just time for them to be ejected from the cavern by a tidal wave. The highs and lows! The regret and the relief!

Sailors was genuinely one of the highlights of my recent gaming experiences and the feedback I’ve had from the players so far has also been glowingly positive. If you haven’t played it, dear reader, do yourself a favour, go and find yourself 15 to 20 drunk peasants and get them to invade the ruined keep of the Chaos Lords, you won’t regret it.

Alien RPG(s)

World’s first Alien RPG

Imagine you’re twelve years old and you have an obsession with something. I would imagine this is a relatively trivial task for most of the nerds reading this blog post. Anyway, You have an obsession and you generally want to express your love for your obsessions through the medium of role playing games. Once again, I’m sure you’re all still on board. I had several of these, Lord of the Rings x MERP, check, Star Wars x West End Games Star Wars the RPG, check, Robotech x Palladium’s Robotech RPG, check. You get the idea. But there was one missing. It was an important one. It related to a sci-fi movie series that I was far too young to watch legally (sorry Mum!) It was Alien(s.) The first I even heard about this franchise was from a friend on the playground. He and his brother had managed to stay up way past their bedtime and watch it with the sound turned way down so as not to wake up their parents, on a satellite TV channel (which I did not have.) Anyway, he told me literally the entire plot of Aliens from start to finish during break time one morning, leaving pretty much nothing out. And I knew I had to see it. It was some time later that I managed to get someone to rent me a VHS copy to watch myself. And thus was the obsession kindled. The hardware, the badasses, the gunfire, the nuclear explosion, the Xenomorph itself. It was all perfectly concocted to appeal to the mind of a twelve year old boy. It was frankly cruel to prevent me from seeing it! It wasn’t until quite some time later that I even got to watch Alien. And seeing it, that first John Hurt chestburster scene, the slow whittling of the crew, the hiss and the creep of the monster, the silence and the horror of it. Still gives me goosebumps to watch that film.

By that point, I was well into RPGs, had been playing D&D for a couple of years, had played Gamma World, Twilight 2000, Shadowrun, all the games I mentioned above and more. But there was one missing, an Alien(s) game. Why? Because it did not exist at that point. It was still a couple of years before the Aliens Adventure Game would be published by Leading Edge Games. Even with how badly that game was received, I would have taken it. But it didn’t exist, so I made my own…

I actually remember writing a full rule-book for it. I did some drawings and cut and pasted some movie stills from magazines for the more complicated stuff. I remember being quite proud of my work, which was contained in a three ring binder and held together otherwise by sellotape and glue. I can’t find that binder now. It’s been more than thirty-five years, so I was particularly pleased to be able to discover even a small piece of evidence of this first Alien RPG. I found a hardback science notebook that contained the first (and, I think, only) adventure for my Alien RPG. Here are some pages from it.

Unsurprisingly, it was a sort of dungeon crawl set in a “titanium steel” mine (the irony that I wrote this in a science notebook, of all things, is not lost on me), with a point crawl in a town called Lewisville attached to it. I used a sort of cursed chimera of D&D and Palladium rulesets to run it. As I remember, this worked well for my friends and me. We had played so much of both, they were second nature to us. The PCs were all colonial marines on a bug hunt. It didn’t lean into the themes of the movies or evoke much of an atmosphere BUT, the marines got to shoot a LOT of Xenomorphs. And that, for us, at that age, was all that mattered.

World’s latest Alien RPG

Alien Evolved Edition is Free League’s latest incarnation of their 2019 Alien RPG. It had a really successful kickstarter, which I backed at the last minute. I wasn’t going to. I mean, I still had the first edition on my shelf, it’s only a few years old, and I hadn’t even played it yet. Not only that, they were at pains to point out that this is not a big overhaul of the game, more like some rules-clarification, the addition of solo rules, and a glow-up. But then, they showed me the special edition of the core book… and I caved.

I don’t regret it though. Free League is almost guaranteed to produce a true piece of art every time. And this book has art and design by Johann Nohr of Mörk Borg and Into the Odd fame. I received the Beta versions of the PDFs today and I am not disappointed.

Anyway, I thought it was probably about time I pulled the first edition off my bookcase and dusted it off. I have been reading it for a few days, prompted, I think by the fact that it was Alien Day on April 26th.

Much of this RPG will be very familiar to anyone who has played any of Free League’s Year Zero Engine games over the last few years. When you try to do something, you make a dice pool from your ability score and your skill score with additions from items or circumstances. Alien uses exclusively D6s so all you’re looking for is a single 6 for a success. But there are a couple of differences with Blade Runner and Tales from the Loop, with which I’m more familiar.

Firstly, you also add to your pool, Stress Dice equal to your current Stress score (which you can gain mainly from pushing rolls.) This gives you a better chance at success but also introduces the potential for your character to Panic, if you roll a 1 on one of those dice. This is usually not good for you. The effects can range from a mere tremble in the extremities, to a berserker rage or full catatonia. Sounds fun, right?

Secondly, you get to add stunt effects when you score more than one 6 on your roll. This feels like it was yoinked directly from Green Ronin’s Fantasy AGE game system, which Dragon Age uses. However, it utilises specific stunts for each skill. I imagine this necessitates a lot of book-checking when stunts come up, but its still a nice feature, which I appreciate.

There is another attractive element to the game as well. I like the very clear delineation between Campaign and “Cinematic” play. Campaign play is exactly what it sounds like. You create your character as you would in any other RPG and you and your friends hope they survive through a multi-session story as things probably spiral slowly out of control. The book includes some useful resources for creating planets and start systems, as well as thematic NPCs to help with this style of game. Cinematic play is designed for one-shots, or, at least a short series of sessions. The events of it are probably a little less flexible and fit into an appropriate three-act structure. The PCs are chosen from a few pregenerated characters. And let’s face it, if you’re talking about Cinematic and Alien, you are not expecting them to survive, or, at least, not very many of them.

Alien Day delayed

I was so annoyed that I had missed an opportunity to play an RPG on a non-standard holiday that relates to it, that I felt like I had to play it anyway, in penance. So, I announced a one-shot of the first edition of the Alien RPG today on our Tables and Tales Discord, and I have a couple of sign-ups already. I have a few published Cinematic options and a few days to decide which one to play. I am leaning towards the one from the core book, which relates directly to the events of the movies, as an introduction for the players. But there are also the scenarios in the Starter Set and the Destroyer of Worlds boxed set that could be contenders.

I’ll be back probably next week with a report on how it went! I might just do a round up of that and our Star Wars themed Vaults of Vaarn one-shot from May the fourth. See you then, dear reader.