Category: Rules

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.

Homebrew Heart Landmarks 3

May the fourth

The shows mostly deserve to be dropped into the Sarlacc’s maw, the fandom is more toxic than the bite of an Ewok (you just know those little guys are spreading rabies,) and the heyday of Star Wars was a Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away. But I do love a non-standard holiday as an excuse to play an RPG. Today, abiding by the Tables and Tales May the Fourth rule, Isaac is going to run us through a Star Wars themed adventure using Vaults of Vaarn (the rule is that we have to have a Star Wars themed game but we can’t use any official Star Wars games to do it.)

But not before I come up with a Star Wars themed Heart Landmark! You lucky readers!

Oddya’s Bog

Name: Oddya’s Bog
Domains: Religion, Cursed
Tier: 1
Default Stress: d4
Haunts: The Proving Cave (Echo/Mind d6)

Description:
All the inhabitants of Oddya’s Bog are one with it. Most of them have become one with it over the course of years and decades, adding their own energy to that of all living things in this place. I mean, they add their flesh too, but you can’t make an omelette etc. The Bog needs the bodies and life-force of the people and other animals who find themselves drawn here.

The bog, a treeless, stinking expanse of fetid, untrustworthy marshland, writhes and undulates, as some such places do due to the waters concealed beneath the turf surface. Oddya’s Bog moves in this way because it is made mostly of people and animals, living beings that are absorbed bodily by the landscape to add their essences to the entity known as the Compulsion. They live still, in a terrible mockery of life, slowly learning what it means to be both one and many under the sway of the Compulsion.

Master Oddya is the Compulsion’s greatest champion that has not been fully absorbed. He has existed in the forgotten bog for longer than he can remember. It is possible that he is nothing more than a creation of the Compulsion’s microscopic constituent parts, the chlorimediants. Either way, he is a sour old prune that many have mistaken for a Gutterkin. Perhaps he was once a drow; he shares their pallor and long ears; but he can reach no more than knee-height to most elves and he walks the discomforting bog, unclothed and usually sucking on a recently plucked eyeball or knucklebone.

Many come to the Bog in search of Oddya, believing him to be some sort of wiseman or priest of a forgotten god. The downtrodden and addled residents of the lower levels of Spire have a great need for a saint or a leader to believe in. Rumours have been circulated by a certain, rather smelly sect of blank-eyed, robed and hooded drow on the streets of Pilgrim’s Walk. They have been telling tales, in the voice of the earth itself, of a prophet and holy man named Oddya who holds the secret to oneness. They appear every few years before inevitably disintegrating into the bog-stuff that they are and slowly making their way through the waters back to Oddya’s Bog, where he will re-constitute them and send them back to the City Above again the recruit once more. The pilgrims who come are brought under the sway of the Compulsion as Oddya speaks his strange backwards sermons to them, urging them to surrender to the Compulsion, to trust it and to use it. Most are captured and merge with the bog. Some escape but Bog Folk will follow them to prevent them from spreading the truth of the Bog beyond its borders.

Only one cave at the edge of the Bog is free of the Compulsion, the Proving Cave. If you enter it, you will be forced to contend with the thing you are most desirous of. If you manage to resist it, you will be healed by the cave at the price of a D6 Resource. If you do not, you will gain the Fallout, Unproven. See the Special Rules section.
Special Rules:
Master Oddya – If he is allowed to speak his strange mystic mumbo-jumbo, he may ensnare the listener and bring them under the influence of the Compulsion. Endure/Religion or Cursed roll to resist or suffer d4 Echo Stress. If a PC suffers fallout from this, use the following:
Fallout There is No Try (Minor Echo.) Next time you might need to roll to do anything in Oddya’s Bog, you succeed automatically, but you lose a part of yourself to the Bog and the Complusion. All actions not directly in the service of the Compulsion are Risky.

Fallout I Have a Bad Feeling About This (Major Echo.) You are becoming one with the Bog and the Compulsion. All actions not taken directly in the service of the Compulsion are Dangerous.

Fallout Become Greater than You Can Possibly Imagine (Critical Echo.) Your body has become one with Oddya’s Bog and your essence serves only the Compulsion.

The Proving Cave – Ask the player what their character most desires if you need to. This thing will appear in the Cave as though it were the Heart itself. But it is fleeting and dangerous. If they attempt to take the thing or make it there own in any way, they will gain d6 Echo stress. If they get fallout from this, use the following:
Fallout Unproven (Minor, Echo) If they see the object of their desires again, they will be compelled to pursue it. If they resist, any other actions will be Risky. (Ongoing)

Resources:
Everything here is tainted but Oddya’s Bog Turf is a d4 Cursed Resource.

Ultraviolet Grasslands Caravan Creation

Session 0 done!

Characters created! Caravan stocked! My players are ready to head off from the outlying barrio of the Violet City into the trackless expanse of the Ultraviolet Grasslands. Honestly, between characters and caravan, our session went over time quite significantly. I did not expect to get any actual travelling done during the session, having gone through the character creation process myself already and having listened to the first couple of sessions of this Open Hearth Actual Play refereed by Marc Majcer. It took them the full three hours or so of the first session to do the same. In fact, they were still settling caravan details for the first part of the second session too.

I actually do regret not creating my own caravan before we had session 0 too. I think it would have helped the process go smoother. But not to worry! It went well enough and, indeed, the players enjoyed both processes. They particularly liked the sheer off-the-wall nature of everything about their characters, the anti-canon nature of the game and the setting and the randomness of almost every step. As for the caravan creation section, specifically; I have noted in a post from last year that I like to give the PCs a home that I can fuck with and I have done it repeatedly in various campaigns. But, in previous games, the creation of that home was never as involved or player -focused as it was in UVG. They immediately got into it. They understood the importance of the caravan, the supplies, the capacity of the vehicles, the types of animals they chose and the cost of everything of course. It took very little urging from me for them to get attached. They now have three carts and 9 mounts, all of which have names, some of which have favourite plushies and foods, a few hired cart drivers, also named and probably with tragic backstories. They have made it exceedingly easy for me to manipulate their little emotions when I fuck with the caravan almost immediately.

My approach

Anyway, today, I’m going to take a slightly different approach to caravan creation than they did. They opted for the “first caravan” package that is presented in the UVG core book. This is honestly a great option that does a lot of the work for you. It takes several key decisions out of the players’ hands and does all the cash calculations for them. Each of them took this package and added a few more animals. That’s how they ended up with so many carts and such a menagerie of pony-analogues.

I’m going to start from scratch, deciding on the method of transportation, the types of animals or animal alternatives, the trade goods and travelling gear. The caravan is going to be run by the character I created a few days ago, my D.W.A.R.F. Tumult Fisher Wizard, Del ‘Machinist. But I’m adding a couple more characters to their company of traders so that I’ve got more money to play around with. The caravan rules state that each character begins with a €1000 loan from a financier (with 100% annual interest!) so, I thought it would be more fun to start with €3000 than just the €1000 that Del would have had access to on their own. I’m not creating these characters in their entirety, I’m just going to roll on the background, strange item, motivation, path and name tables for them.

Hero Number 2: Oï Yu, the Timelost undercover Rainbow Inquisitor. He’s taken the Traveler path. He’s tracking a missing ledger. Oï Yu has brought with him his special carmine cactus that secretes drops of blood.

Hero Number 3: Maria bra Salsur, the bluelander pueblo heretic rancher. She has taken the path of the Fighter. She is following visions of glory and rebirth into the grasslands. She brings with her a self-playing zither with seventy tunes.

My caravan

Financier

You have to start somewhere. When you are trying to kickstart your dream of outfitting and running your very own grasslands-going caravan like Del and their friends are doing, you have to start with money.

Outfitting a caravan is expensive. The PCs should start with a loan of €1,000 per character. The financier is dubious and there’s 100% annual interest, but it beats scrabbling for pennies.

I’m going to go with the book’s advice here and get a loan of €1000 for each hero, so that makes €3000. That will, of course lead to a final debt of €6000, a nice round number, I think you’ll agree. Also, it’s future-Del’s problem, right?

The first step is to decide a few things about our financier. There are a couple of handy d20 tables in the back of the book for this very purpose:

  • Who are they? – Cat witch faction leader
  • What do they want? – Acquire forbidden magic
  • Their Organisation – Cat-first society
  • Their opponents – Savage capitalist scions
  • Weaknesses and oddities – appears only as a hologram

But Who’s really behind the patron?

  • Who’s coughing up? – Under-funded second-tier military complex
  • How do they hope to benefit? – Practical evidence to justify continued funding
  • What extra help can they send along? – Annoying but capable administrator

The beginning part of the Caravan section of the book goes into a lot of detail on trade goods, trade routes, the measurement of time, consumption of supplies etc. I’m going to maybe come back to some of this stuff later. For now, I’m going to establish the constituent parts of my caravan.

Vehicles and animals

Bearing in mind that I’ve only got six grand to play with, options are limited here. But this is what I would like to go with. We can’t really afford anything actually mechanical or biomechanical (which I would like as I feel like that would be Del’s jam,) despite their being some beautifully weird and desirable options such as the Road Yacht, the Porcelain Walker, the Autogolem and the Meat Crawler (yes, meat crawler.) But I can’t afford any of those! Instead, for vehicles, I’m going to go with a pair of Solid Coaches. They can each carry 12 sacks, with is pretty good, and they are less likely to suffer catastrophic damage on the road as they are level 7.

As an aside, most things are measured in sacks when it comes to hauling things across country. A sack is the basic unit for trade goods. A sack is equal to 10 stones. A stone is equal to 10 soaps. A sack is also about the same amount of space that a human takes up. Usefully, a sack of supplies is also just enough to keep one human fed, watered and otherwise relatively comfortable on the road for a week.

A week, as it happens, is the basic unit of travel in UVG. Journeys from one destination on the Grand Long Map of the Ultraviolet Grasslands to the next are said to take one week or two or more. This is adjusted for things like the relative speed of your vehicles, the types of misfortune you meet along the way, and whether or not you need to stop to forage when you inevitably run out of supplies half way to your destination.

  • Solid Coach x2 – €600 each – €1200 total bringing my cash down to 1800.

Each of these coaches needs a couple of draft animals to pull it. So, I guess we’ll need to roll on a table to determine exactly the type of pony-analogues we’ll be purchasing.

  • I rolled a 5 on this d6 table. It’s Goatelopes… I think we can all imagine what those look like, graceful antelope legs with a shaggy furred body, the ability to eat almost anything and the terrifying devils’ eyes of a billy-goat. Del is not going to fall into he trap of naming these poor beasts but the Timelost Oï Yu can’t resist. We have
    • Hopper whose favourite fruit is mango
    • Famante who has the genetic heirloom of utter baldness – requires liberal lashings of sunscreen.
    • Fiodor who has a wise move. He always lets you know when rain is coming by stopping and refusing to move until you cover his head.
    • Korven has a cute trick. She can stand on just her forelegs as though she’s doing a handstand.

Anyway, each draft animal costs €70, so that’s another €280. Down to €1520 now.

More humans

Next, we need to consider who will drive these coaches while the PCs galavant about pretending to know anything about running a caravan. As I am on a budget, I am going to hire a couple of people for this, or, as they are described on the Vehicles & Mounts table, Human, Common-ass. It is Wirth noting that the table also provides options for simply buying slaves but does take pains to point out that this sort of thing would be perfect for evil caravans and that they might be resentful, which its probably putting it mildly.

  • Human, common-ass x2 – €7 per week. I’ll reserve two weeks wages for them so that’ll take me down to €1492
    • Del, not wanting to get attached would not wish to name these lads either, but, being humans, they come furnished with their own names:
      • Torron Valpin is a Redlander
      • Ulfis i’Bosc is from the Greenlands

Supplies and other stuff

Right, now, let’s consider the supplies we need to keep us alive out there without having to stop all the time to hunt and forage. You need a sack of supplies per person per week. So, including our drivers, Torron and Ulfis, that makes five people. So that’s five sacks of supplies per week. Let’s make sure we are covered for a little while and get two weeks worth of supplies.

  • 5×2 = 10. Each sack of supplies costs €10, so that makes €100 on supplies. This brings me down to €1392. It also brings the total number of sacks we have to 18.
  • How did I come to this number you might ask, dear reader?
    • 5 humans +
    • the 3 useful kitbags that the heroes come with (each one takes up a sack of space) +
    • 10 supplies

So, this leaves only 6 sacks of space for trade goods! Except it doesn’t. I’m going to refer back to the standard first caravan package and pick up a “bog-standard Pro-Hiker (TM) kit” for each hero as well. This will include a bunch of generally useful traveling gear like tents, sunscreen, schnapps and wine skins and a hat. Each pack of gear takes up one sack of space and costs €50. Most importantly, though, I get to roll on the hat table for each hero.

  • Del – bush hat & corks
  • Oï Yu – Ultramarine tagelmust
  • Maria – Sombrero

This hat-table-excuse brings the cash reserves down to €1370 and available sack space down to just 3!

More capacity, please!

Well, that seems like a shame to me. We could afford a few more mounts for the PCs to ride alongside the coaches and free up, not just the space the PCs take up, but also the space their kit occupies, since riding animals can bear 2 sacks. That opens up another 6 sacks on the coaches, meaning we can transport 6 more sacks of trade goods. Of course these mounts do cost €70 each too:

  • 3 riding mounts – €70 x 3 = €210. This takes my total cash down to €1160
    • Oï Yu’s mount – Blinki the pony (dances with Oï Yu when the zither is played)
    • Maria bra Salsur’s mount – Pander the llama (a rare pedigree whose hair is soft as merino wool)
    • Del ‘Machinist’s mount – unnamed donkey (favourite fruit is dragon fruit)
  • But leaves enough space to transport 9 sacks of trade goods.

Trade goods

I rolled on the table on the first caravan package and got

  • “Vampire Wines,” which is just blood, right? I mean, right? (Actually wrong. The Trade Goods table says they are just made from grapes that are grown in soil rich in the flesh of creation)
    • These cost €100 each so that’s another €900 down, leaving us with €260

I’ll spend €68 to get bows and spears for each of the heroes and another €30 to get nomad robes for them. That brings my cash down to €162. I think it’s probably wise to keep that for the journey. Never know when you’re going to need to stop for burgers and milkshakes on the Steppes of the Lime Nomads.

Legalities and marketing

This caravan is established as a company in a legal sense and so it will need a logo/symbol, a name and a company motto.

  • The symbol is a stylised coach based on the first two owned by the company, speeding across the grasslands in silhouette
  • The name of the company is Ultraviolet Lopers
  • Their motto is “From the Circle to the Sea”

Conclusion

In conclusion, I think I may have enjoyed making this caravan that is probably going nowhere, at least as much as my players enjoyed making their actual caravan that they’ll be bravely shepherding into the Ultraviolet Grasslands in a week or two. There are so many great options to choose from or to roll up randomly. There’s usually a laugh to be had during the process and you get to name mounts and humans and stuff. Honestly, great craic; would do again.

Ultraviolet Grasslands Character Creation

Ultraviolet Grasslands

I have been reading Luka Rejec’s polychromatic point crawl, Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City 2E for a while now. It’s a remarkably attractive and inspirational piece of work. Luka is responsible for the artwork, writing and design. He really brought his vision to life in this book and he has continued to support it for the last six or seven years since the first edition came out. Most recently, in the form of a massive crowd funder for no fewer than two books to expand the world, Our Golden Age and the Vastlands Guidebook, which I wrote about last year, here. But, there have also been a number of other supplements in the meantime. I picked up a bunch of them on a recent Bundle of Holding deal. The files included the invaluable UVG Guidebook. This details the Synthetic Dream Machine rules devised by Luka. Most useful for my purposes here, is the guide to character creation for UVG 2E. So, I’m going to use it to create my own character, and my own caravan too!

Here’s a little bit about the setting, taken from the UVG Guidebook:

The UVG is a point-crawl setting inspired by psychedelic heavy metal, the Dying Earth genre, and Oregon Trail games. It is a world colored by new wave science fiction and inspired by artists from Moebius to Miyazaki.

The characters, referred to as “heroes,” begin, generally, in the Violet City. This place is ruled by Cat Lords with little human hands and big human servants/pets. It is also the last outpost of human dominion on the shores of the Circle Sea. Beyond the city, to the East, stretch the irradiated, largely uninhabited, weird, vome-infested Ultraviolet Grasslands. The PCs are headed out there, probably at the head of their own caravan, hopefully with some goods to trade at the next stop, which might be the Porcelain Citadel or the Last Serai or some other magical-sounding destination along the Low Road and the High, which, if you follow it long enough, will take you all the way to the eternal sunset and the Black City.

New Campaign, New Character Creation Post

This is all in preparation for starting a new campaign of UVG on Sunday. It’ll be a small caravan of just three PCs and it’ll be a tight, friendly group, but I always find the experience of creating a character myself helps me to guide them through the process so, here we go!

My Hero

So, in the finest tradition of, well, my other character creation posts, I’m going to roll this one up as randomly as possible. Anticipating my requirements in this respect, Mr Rejec has helpfully furnished me with many a table in this book. So, without further ado:

Ability Scores – SEACAT

That stands for Strength, Endurance, Agility, Charisma, Aura and Thought. I have a few options for this process but I am going to take the most random, the d100 roll.

  • Strength – I rolled an 18 on the d100. This translates to an entirely unremarkable 0. I guess I should be grateful there are no negative attributes in this system
  • Endurance – 96! This translates to an excellent and amazing 4!
  • Agility – 62. This gives me a talented 2
  • Charisma – interestingly, this is not like D&D Charisma, more like the Ancient Greek meaning, which encompasses fortune. Anyway, I rolled a 49, giving my character a promising 1 in this ability
  • Aura – This can help your character “to use powers beyond mortal ken longer than usual.” I got a 19, giving my second 0.
  • Thought – “the mental dynamic ability. It captures how a character absorbs, processes, and manipulates information.” I rolled a 47. This makes my score another 1.

So, at this point my ability scores are:

  • Strength – 0
  • Endurance – 4
  • Agility – 2
  • Charisma – 1
  • Aura – 0
  • Thought – 1

Background Trait

I like the method of determining your capacity for learning traits. You get an inventory for this, just like for physical objects. You can’t overload your trait inventory without suffering from encumbrance, anymore than you can physically carry too much without the same issue arising.
I get 7 + Thought inventory slots for traits. So that’s 8 slots then. It won’t come into it at this stage, of course. As a level 1 character, my hero will only have three traits.

A starting trait gives you a +3 bonus to actions that can utilise it. Although you can upgrade it from Skilled, which is the starting point for all traits, to Expert, which provides a +6 and Master, which bumps you up to a +9.

Now to the fun part. Rolling a d50 to determine my Background. (So, in the UVG Guidebook, this table is actually a d40 one. But there is another version of it in the core UVG 2E book, so I’m using that for this bit, as well as to answer the following two questions below.) For this unusual die roll, I’m going to roll another d100 and divide by 2.

I rolled a 65, so half that and round down, I get a 32:

  • “Tumult Fisher Wizard” (?) This acts as my first trait and, I guess determines my Path (see below)

Why are they on the Road?

What is my Tumult Fishing WIzard’s motivation for heading off into the dangers of the Ultraviolet Grasslands? Well, the same table is going to tell me that. I rolled a 29, making it 14 this time:

  • “Pursued by Loving Enemies.” This sparks a lot of potential background stories for my wizard.

What Do They Bear?

You always start off with one strange item. It might be valuable or it might be important or it might be sentimental. I guess we’ll find out. I rolled a 6, so that’s 3 on the table:

  • “Green brick with the light and warmth of a candle.” Some sort of Oldtech item maybe?

Path Trait

So, in the UVG Guidebook, you do things a bit differently than you do if you’re just using the core book to make your character. If you use the Guidebook you will be led, carefully and systematically through the process, starting with ability scores, moving onto background traits and then to path traits. In these rules, your characters path can one of three broad categories, Wizard, Traveller and Fighter. They are not classes; they’re only used to determine one of your starting traits. After that, you are free to choose traits from any path you like as you level up.

The whole character creation section of the core book is quite compact, and, in fact, the entirety of the rules are squeezed onto a single page. The core book is, first and foremost, a setting book. It can easily be adapted for use with almost any OSR or D20 system and, indeed, with just a little work, could work very well with a PBTA or other ruleset too. So, I think the decision to pare down the rules, particularly for character creation, makes sense, especially when the Synthetic Dream Machine rules were already available in other publications.

Anyway, what I’m getting at here is that the core book does not refer to Paths at all. Instead, it seems to fold them into many of the backgrounds on its d50 “Who is this Hero?” table. A good example is my “Tumult Fisher Wizard” result from the d50 table earlier. It includes something that could be a background trait, i.e. Tumult Fisher as well as one of the paths, wizard.

So, by default, my first Path trait will be from the Wizard path list in the UVG Guidebook. There is a list of six options so I’ll roll a d6 for it.

  • That’s a 3. “Exuberant. Each of your life points is worth double when paying for powers.” It’s worth noting at this point, that Life is analogous to hit points and you spend Life to cast spells, so this is quite handy.

Generate a Third Trait

So, you then get to choose one more trait. There is a random trait table. Depending on the result of the roll, you could get another background trait, a wizard trait, a traveller trait or a fighter trait. So, here we go, it’s 5! Which means a Traveller Path trait. Another d6 roll on that table, and that’s a 6!

  • “Swift, Spend one life or one hero die to get one more action this round.” That is an amazing trait for any hero!

Equip your Character

Similar to trait inventory slots, I get 7 + Strength inventory slots for items. With my 0 strength, that’s going to make it a 7…

You start at level one having two items and some cash (denoted with a €, pronounced cash, not euro.) One of your two items is a kit useful to one of your background traits. In this case, I guess it might contain fishing rod, net, lures, wizarding items, that sort of thing. But, as the guidebook states, “You don’t need to choose in advance exactly what is in your character’s kit — the items are in a quantum superposition until you define them as you play.” This should include a civilian weapon that deals no more than 1d6 damage.

The other thing you get is the Strange item I rolled up earlier, “Green brick with the light and warmth of a candle.”

I also automatically start off with €100 in cash. This sounds like a lot but a week of carousing will cost the average character 1d6 x €100!

It’s also worth mentioning Burdens at this stage. It is possible to take items or traits as burdens rather than have them in your regular inventory, perhaps because those inventories or full or for some other narrative reason. Each Burden you carry (you can have up to 20) gives you a -1 to all checks though.

Last Few Attributes

Level: 1
Life: 8 (all level 1 characters start with 8 Life.)
Hero Dice: 1d6 (these come and go quite often in play. You can use them to adjust a die roll or recover Life. You also get one per session and every couple of hours of play!)
Save: 13 (all level 1 characters get a Save of 13. You have to roll over your Save score in dire situations. You can add an ability bonus from Endurance or Aura to help you out. Interestingly, you can’t use Agility to save. Instead, it is considered an action roll.)
Melee Attack: d20 + ability (strength) + skill (if applicable.) I’ve got a 0 here.
Ranged Attack: d20 + ability (agility) + skill (if applicable.) My agility gives me a +2 to ranged attacks
Oldtech Attack: d20 + ability (thought) + skill (if applicable.) My Thought score gives me a +1 for Oldtech attacks
Fantascience Attack: d20 + ability (charisma) + skill (if applicable.) Another +1 here.
Damage: I imagine my fishing wizard has a little fishing knife. That’s 1d4 damage.
Defense: Here’s the formula, 7 + ability (agility) + bonus (if skill applies) + armour. No armour yet, so it’s going to be a 9 for now.

Name Your Character

The Guidebook has a table of names. The table lists them under particular cultures of the Vastlands, so, in all likelihood, the name you choose will also decide the culture you’re from. It’s a 12 point list so I’m going to roll a d12 on it. That’s a 10.

  • D.W.A.R.F. Names: There are 8 listed. Let’s roll a d8. That’s a 2 – Del ‘Machinist. Very practical, I’m sure. Lets also give them the pronouns they/them.
    Here’s the Dwarf glossary entry from the UVG 2E core book:

Dwarf: Backronym from ‘De Werker Aristocratiscee Revolutie Fraternitie,’ Dwarfs are a distinct culture-class of selectively biomanced people. They have effectively fought the traditional aristoi of the Red and Orange lands to a standstill and now form a major industrialist society of the Rainbowlands. A famously bureaucratic and collectivist faction, they are the only one staunchly opposing the bureaucratic and individualist Emerald City Cogflower Corporation (actually a coin church).

Looks like my fisher wizard is a communist. Love it.

Conclusion

So, that’s my D.W.A.R.F. Tumult Fisher Wizard, Del ‘Machinist. They have great endurance and very average strength. Despite having rather low Aura, they have a wizard trait which allows them to double the effectiveness of the Life points they spend on their spells and another trait from the Traveller path that allows them to spend a Hero die or Life point to get a second action in a round. And he comes with a green brick that has the light and heat of a candle. I have a pretty good idea of them in my head.

I will say that, if I were to do it all over again, I would have just stuck to the UVG Guidebook to shepherd me through the character creation process. Switching to the UVG core book for that one table roll complicated things unnecessarily. My advice would be to do the same, if you are determined to use the Synthetic Dream Machine rules for your game of UVG. Otherwise, use a different system and utilise the tables in the core book for flavour.

I think the next post will be Caravan creation so tune back in then, dear reader!