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RPGaDAY2015 Day 18: Favourite SF RPG

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 18.

Favourite SF RPG: Is almost impossible for me. I have very rarely played SF RPGs. I guess the most recent one was an SG-1 game when I was living in Halifax back in 2004. Supers is its own category, so I am really and truly stuck.

Can I say Fate Accelerated because we had a great Firefly game using those rules?

Can I say Old School Hack because Kirin Robinson – its creator – ran a kind of Star Frontiers hack using that at Gen Con in 2013?

Can I say the unnamed game I cooked up in university for our long running space opera campaign?

You’re going to have to accept one of those. I don’t have that much experience.

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RPGaDAY2015 Day 17: Favourite Fantasy RPG

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 17.

Favourite Fantasy RPG: This should be an easy answer, but it’s kind of not. One of the reasons I design games is because I am unsatisfied with the games available. Further, what kind of fantasy? Swords & Sorcery? High fantasy? Science fantasy?

I’m going to go with Old School Hack. It’s got that D&D vibe, but it’s a super simple system that has always delivered really fun games in my experience. It’s generally delivers over-the-top games with crazy action, and is abstract enough that it can pretty much do everything from low fantasy to science fantasy.

D&D 5E gets the nostalgia vote – the majority of my gaming time has been spent with D&D, and I like 5E the best of any of its versions. D&D 5E is also a fun game. I enjoy it. The problem is the amount of prep time it takes. Still, for the D&D experience, 5E is my favourite taste.

Honourable mention goes to Jaws of the Six Serpents. This is as close to an off-the-shelf sword & sorcery game as any I’ve played. It was the inspiration for Sword Noir.

And back in the day, I really enjoyed True20 for fantasy. It’s the best complex (or semi-complex) RPG out there, and I had a lot of fun running my historical/fantasy Viking campaign with it.

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Metro: the Cursed Path

I’ve been thinking about a Metro 2033-style campaign set in Toronto. Maps would be easy enough, as TTC and PATH maps are available on line, and there are city maps with subway and PATH entry points marked.

As I mentioned, I have a game (unpublished) that I would run this with, but what about games already out there? I would honestly be tempted to hack Old School Hack. Kirin did a great job of replicating Star Frontiers with OSH. A Metro game would require a bolted on resource management mechanic which would certainly mess with the simple elegance of the system.

So there’s Savage Worlds and True20, both of which I am relatively familiar and both of which already have resource management as part of their core. I’m not the kind to run gritty survival games, so a pulp or action port of the Metro aesthetic would suit me fine.

For the setting, I wouldn’t have nuclear post-apocalypse. I’m thinking of an eco-plague event, in which a comet collides with the Earth and airbursts somewhere above Russia. This allows the schockwave to dissipate enough that Toronto is not totally destroyed but could plausibly cause nuclear war-level devastation. The Earth’s orbit is shifted slightly messing with our climate, and the comet released something into the atmosphere so that the air is toxic. Something else came along with the comet, creating “Others” similar to the monsters of Metro or even Monsters.

I wouldn’t follow the storyline of the books or the computer games. I think I would start it out very lowkey – maybe a Yojimbo-style game, where the group enters a small station/habitat, like College, and messes with the gangland détente established there. Following this, a Searchers-style game, in which a family member of a PC is taken by slavers from some other part of the Cursed Path and the team has to track the slavers and release the captive. Throw in a Dredd/the Raid-style action porn episode.

And then comes the “Dark Ones” storyline, in which the Others are really threatening the stations, and the PCs set out to find a way to end the threat permanently. Because Canada doesn’t have conveniently stationed nuclear deterrents, there would need to be a different climax and sequel.

This would be easy enough to port to any major city anywhere in the world with a sizable underground infrastructure.

You can learn more about Metro 2033 here.

You can learn more about Metro 2033 Redux on Steam here.

You can find TTC maps here.

You can find a map of the PATH here.

You can find a Toronto city map here.

You can find Old School Hack here.

You can find Savage Worlds here.

You can find True20 here.

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Skiffing the Sand

I mentioned on Google Plus that I am playing in the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate’s Booty downloaded content for Borderlands 2. I mentioned this because that part of the game includes sand skiffs, similar to what we saw in Return of the Jedi. But my initial excitement at seeing these vehicles wasn’t due to that connection, it was due to a connection to an Old School Hack game run by Kirin Robinson at Gen Con 2011 in which myself and the Accidental Survivors were able to participate. It had a very pulp-y John Carter’s Mars kind of thing going on, from the desert to the villains, to the final city in which we faced the big bad.

And it was hella fun. This was the game that really opened my eyes to the potential of Old School Hack.

It’s also fun in the Scarlett DLC because it has a very post-apocalyptic feel to the locations – although that’s pretty normal for Borderlands. The two together make a potent combination for a media hound who chewed through post-apoc b-movies in his youth. Heck, I was even disappointed when they cancelled the Highwayman (did anybody else watch this? No? Guess that’s why it got cancelled).

This was another reason to love the Warden’s High Plains Samurai when he first introduced it. The setting has a very dusty post-apoc feeling to it, mixed with spaghetti westerns and the Good, the Bad, the Weird – in other words, a love letter to my sensibilities.

As usual, seeing or reading something makes me want to play it. A High Plains Samurai playtest is coming soon (fingers-crossed) but I can’t run anything for my Ottawa group after promising them a year-long campaign (instead of constantly pulling the rug out from under them with new systems and new adventures). However, there might be an alternative . . . if I am willing to commit the time to it.

Dare I?

You can find more information on Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate’s Booty here.

You can find more information on Borderlands 2 here.

You can find more information on Old School Hack here.

You can find more information on the Highwayman here.

You can find more information on High Plains Samurai here.

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Games On Demand

For those not in the know, at Gen Con 2011, I’ll be a GM with Games On Demand at the Crowne Plaza in the “Pennsylvania Station C” ballroom on Thursday and Saturday mornings from 10:00 to 14:00. My main purpose to to run “Crossing the Millers” for Sword Noir and “Suffer the Witch” for Kiss My Axe. I will also have Old School Hack for improv gaming (meaning nothing prepared, but ready to run it) and I will have a military special operations adventure set in Khorforjan to run with True20. Come and see me if you want to game.

You can read about Games on Demand on Facebook.

You can buy Sword Noir: a Role-playing Game of Hardboiled Sword & Sorcery here.

You can see the pre-generated characters for “Crossing the Millers” here.

You can get Old School Hack here.

You can buy the Khorforjan Gambit, an adventure for d20 Modern, here.