Skull Shot: A Sword’s Edge Adventure

They tried to kill your handler, someone you kind of thought of as maybe a friend. That wasn’t nice.

Then they tried to kill you. That was a mistake.

Now you are going to find them, you are going to mess them up, then you are going to figure out how to profit from it. Sometimes, just sometimes, profit doesn’t come first.

A science-fiction action adventure for Sword’s Edge, Skull Shot is the sequel to Face ‘Splosion.

Skull Shot is a possible project slated for a vote on my Patreon.

Directorate 7: THE SOURCE

Directorate 7 is the government’s expendable solution to the most dangerous of problems. It offers a simple deal with people that have done wrong: make the world better and we can make your life better. Cross us, and you die.

THE SOURCE

A D7 contact team is working undercover as bodyguards for the family of an arms trafficker. When he crosses the wrong person, the trafficker and his family come under threat, and D7 offers a deal: work with us and we can protect your family. But that’s easier said than done, and as the clock runs down, the contact team needs to get the family to safety.

Directorate 7: THE SOURCE is a possible project slated for a vote on my Patreon.

Directorate 7: ASSASSINS

Directorate 7 is the government’s expendable solution to the most dangerous of problems. It offers a simple deal with people that have done wrong: make the world better and we can make your life better. Cross us, and you die.

ASSASSINS

A third-world republic has seen a seismic shift in its political landscape, as bribery and crony capitalism has led to a grassroots movement that has shattered the ruling party’s hold on power. Now a firebrand politician offers real change, and the implications have led D7 to activate a contact team to protect them from their enemies—who are numerous and powerful.

Directorate 7: ASSASSINS is a possible project slated for a vote on my Patreon.

Directorate 7: Warmonger

In case you weren’t following it, Sagas of the Sea Peoples failed to fund. My Patreon is ongoing, and I’m going to be posting the various possible projects here for reference.

The first is the project due in April: Directorate 7: Warmonger

Directorate 7 is the government’s expendable solution to the most dangerous of problems. It offers a simple deal with people that have done wrong: make the world better and we can make your life better. Cross us, and you die.

WARMONGER

When reliable intelligence indicates that an arms dealer has access to a strategic weapons system and is ready to sell it, Directorate 7 recruits a contact team to recover the system by any means necessary. The stakes are high, but for those doing the deal, the payoff is even higher, and they aren’t the only pieces on the board ready to kill for what they want.

Lawless Heaven Now Available

Four cops. One hundred criminals. Countless broken bones.

The Sword’s Edge adventure, “Lawless Heaven” is now available through the Composed Dream Games RPG Marketplace. You can also find Sword’s Edge there.

In this homage to modern Korean action cinema, Three cops and an intelligence operative in South Korea’s industrial heartland face off against a local gang involved in a heroin smuggling ring. The cops have only one order: bust the ring, but no one realizes the true depth of this particular cesspool.

This is an adventure for two to six characters for Sword’s Edge. It includes six pre-generated characters and supplemental rules for chase scenes.

This adventure, and others, are part of my Patreon campaign, which I would appreciate you supporting.

You can find out more about “Lawless Heaven” here.

Killin’ Zombies! Nazi Techno-Zombies to be Precise

In my last post, I mentioned a short campaign idea based on the movie Outpost: Black Sun. The Outpost series (I see there are three of them) is basically a zombie movie franchise with a slight different: the zombies are technological in origin and they are Nazi. That makes them extra fun to kill.

Kill it! Kill it! From Outpost: Black Sun

But killing zombies isn’t easy in the Outpost series. Killing zombies at all is kind of difficult in most media portrayals. A headshot is not an easy shot to make, and in Outpost, the headshot won’t do it. The zombies are animated by an electromagnetic field that keeps them active even after catastrophic injuries. An electro-magnetic pulse renders them vulnerable, but those things – in the movie – are large and one-shot. After you fire it off, you’re just out of luck.

There’s no way I would put my players up against un-killable foes. Actually, I might, but it would be a very different game. It would be about remaining unseen and losing foes who have spotted you. That’s not the kind of game I was envisioning.

They’re here to kill zombies and chew bubblegum. And they’re all out of bubblegum. From Outpost.

So what are the mechanics of facing Nazi techno-zombies? I would throw out “the EM field keeps them undead” and switch that to “the EM field keeps them powered.” You mess up the device that routes the power within their body and they are rendered inert. You could put that device in their head no problem, and then the headshot trope works. I’d put it in the chest, behind reinforced ribs – I mean you’re cracking them open to put the device in anyway, why not leave a little extra protection behind?

The actual game mechanics are pretty simple. In a game like D&D, you’d have a super high AC but very low HP. You would make the target area really hard to hit, but not terribly difficult to destroy. In the games I’m running, it would pretty much be the same thing. Give them a target number of Olympian proportions, but the damage threshold of a Mook. Really hard to hit, but one shot can kill.

Inspiring Outpost

I recently watched Outpost: Black Sun, the sequel to the movie Outpost. Both movies offer some gaming inspiration, but I think for a short campaign, Black Sun offers the most grist.

The story of Outpost: Black Sun is that of a young Nazi Hunter (second generation) who finds out about a secret Nazi project from World War II and in pursuing it, stumbles upon an old acquaintance who seems to be some kind of engineer/researcher of weird science – like Dr. Zarkov in our A Team of Losers Pulp campaign, but saner. In the Balkans, they stumble across an expanding bubble of electro-magnetic sciency wiency stuff. And the Nazi zombies are there. And there are evil special forces guys who are also good.

And loud roar! Scary!

Okay, anyway, Outpost was also inspiring, but much more of a “survive the night’s siege of supernatural monsters” game. That’s cool, but not really a campaign. I see Black Sun as a short campaign. I’d break it into four or maybe five one-pagers.

The first would be hunting down the evil Nazi who clues the team on to the Zombie-machine (of course he never admits that’s what it does, and since he’s old, if they are about to get that out of him . . . heart attack!). I’m thinking either the PCs are a group of famed, globe-trotting trouble shooters hired by McGuffin Exposition or they are a super-secret team from government of your choice. They know something about something – this scientist dude was involved in something and they finally have a bead on him – but they don’t know the whole story.

The second would be finding the outpost. It should be someplace remote and also shitty. There’s a low-grade civil war going on and both sides are firing surface-to-air missiles at everything, so no helicopters allowed. Besides, they don’t have an exact location, just a bunch of vague clues or half-remembered directions using long-lost landmarks. This is where the PCs hear all the crazy rumours from the townsfolk. Everyone says the village was ethnically cleansed, but the locals talk about werewolves and ghosts. This should also be the part where the team meets their first Nazi Zombie. And those things are tough to kill, not like regular zombies.

The third adventure would be chasey, shooty fun, as the team moves through a no-man’s land created by the expanding bubble of science in which the Nazi Techno-Zombies can operate. The PCs have a chance to help villagers and realize just how tough these bastards are. There’s also a dude that’s with the Zombies, and he doesn’t seem techno-zombified.

The fourth would be the Outpost – dungeon-crawl! It’s an underground base, a secret factory for putting stuff into people so that they are super strong and super tough to kill. The PCs need to destroy The Machine (patent pending) and then the Zombies will be regular Nazis – which are evil, but not so hard to kill. Of course, the heroes succeed . . . or get wiped out. It depends.

I’d do a fifth based on another team of specialists that seem to shadowing the PCs. If they are caught, it turns out they are working for the same employer OR for the same government, but a different agency. These guys are here to bring back all the techno-zombie tech so that employer or government can build their own zombies. In the fifth, I’d give the PCs a chance to track down the baddie, and stop the spread of techno-zombies!

While Nazi Zombies are pretty cool, I might do Soviet Zombies as well, and set it in Siberia or one of the Central Asian republics.

You can learn more about Outpost: Black Sun here.

Mr. Fancy Pants!

A Guy This Fancy, You Call Mister

Nefertiti Overdrive Quickstart has been sent to layout and my crew in Ottawa has settled in to A Team of Losers Pulp Edition, so I have no more pressing design issues. There is work to be done on Nefertiti Overdrive since I want it to be 90-100% complete before the Kickstarter (trying not to contemplate what happens if it fails to fund again), but this is not really what I consider design work, although it is explaining a process (creating adventures and campaigns).

My work on the need-a-new-name RPG based on the Borderlands computer game series has stalled because it is not something I’m ready to pursue right now. The concepts are laid out, but the work required to realize it as a game is daunting, especially since I see no opportunity to playtest or market it. It was and remains a thought experiment, and it was a lot of fun. This was an exercise in disassembling a game in another medium and reassembling it as an RPG. Perhaps in the future this is something I will pick up, but a modified version of Nefertiti Overdrive or the UGS would work for me running a Borderlands-style game with my crew (should that happen after the pulp campaign).

That’s Right, Fancy-Pants

Or I might use Fancy-Pants the RPG (working title).

Every time I’ve gone to Gen Con, I’ve gamed with JJ Lanza (formerly of Fist Full of Comics and Games). The last two times have been with JJ and his two sons. I’ve decided I’m going to Gen Con 2015, and part of my excitement is to run a game for the Lanza crew yet again. This time, I promised something even more over-the-top than Nefertiti Overdrive, and so I have created the basic framework for a game of even more insane action, which I’m calling Fancy-Pants for absolutely no reason whatshowever. The design goal is for a game that is fast, easy, and promoting crazy action.

I have no idea if the concept I’ve laid down will do this, but I have a little under a year to prepare.

I have come to the realization that my games tend to focus on cool people punching bad people in the face with outlandish style, and I am very okay with that.

The pictures of fancy-pants action are Chow Yun-Fat, the Killer himself.