Designated Marksman for Starship Commandos

Starship Commandos should be out soon. It is in the final stages of layout right now. It’s going to be 6X9 or digest size. Right now, we’re looking at 47 pages, which means it may be possible to put out a very thin book. I have to look at the cost per copy to see what the price might be, but the PDF will be out first.

image by algol

To give you an idea, here’s the character that’s presented in the book. It’s different than what has been presented before because the game uses the mechanics from Riggers. The way Riggers runs is pretty much perfect for Starship Commandos.

So here is Sgt. Sara Cooper, the designated marksman for the 121 Marine Special Armour and Tactics squad.

Sgt. Cara Cooper, Designated Marksman

Concept
Scout d8

Traits
Physical d10; Mental d12; Social d20

Training
Stealth d8, Awareness d10, Marksmanship d10, Athletics d12, Survival d12, Tracking d12

Harness
J25S Long-Range Reconnaissance
Stealth d6; Long-Range Sensors d8; Indirect Fire Support d10

Flaws
Disconnected, Unconventional

Pivot
Never the Innocent (Cooper will not target non-combatants, Ever)

Heinlein Meets Cameron

Right now, a second proof copy is winging . . . rolling? . . . posting its way to me and I’m in a holding phase until all is settled. I don’t feel it’s wise to move forward on other projects publically until I have fully delivered Nefertiti Overdrive. For those who don’t know, I technically delivered Nefertiti Overdrive‘s PDF on time, but things are not looking good for the print copies. And I can’t market Nefertiti Overdrive to the wider world until the backers have their chance to get their product, so probably November.

Until then, I am in a holding pattern, but I can tell you what is coming next.

Starship Commandos.

Armor by Odobenus

This game has been around for a year and a half, maybe longer, but while I was working on getting Nefertiti Overdrive out, I didn’t have a chance to do anything with it. Right now, I’m cleaning it up and preparing it, hoping that it will get the chance to get out into the wild.

Starship Commandos is about the MARSAT – Marines Special Armour and Tactics – a special purpose squad within the Colonial Marine’s MEU – Marine Expeditionary Unit. The conceit is that human colonization has identified life on other planets, just not sentient life.

Until now.

The idea would be to publish an 8,000 to 10,000 word rulebook and then the introductory adventure which sets up the opposition in the game I ran.

How is this coming out? I don’t know yet. Do I want to try to Kickstart a 20 page PDF? I might be able to get some real art, but then again, the Kickstarter itself is a whole separate project from the creation of the work, and sometimes takes more effort – since it hits on talents I don’t have.

I’ve mentioned before about Patreon, and that is something I am strongly considering.

Or do I just say “fuck it” and release it with some stock art, a very basic cover, and see how many I can sell for $2.99 USD?

We shall see. But likely not until November.

You can find out more about Starship Commandos here.

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.

Gen Con – Train in Vain

As you may have heard, I’m running a couple of games with a system I was calling Fancy Pants but now has two names – F#ck You Up and Face ‘Splosion. Yesterday I told you about F#ck You Up: Gangwar. Today, let’s looks at Face ‘Splosion.

I’ll be running Face ‘Splosion: Train in Vain Thursday evening. It sees the characters arrive on the planet Anesidora in an attempt to get the secret location of a vault filled with alien artifacts known as the Pithos out of a mole within Cronus a mega-corporation with both mining and manufacturing interests. Anesidora was once a mining colony but has since been mostly abandoned. Mostly.

Just in case it’s not clear enough, this is a riff on the concept behind the Borderlands video games.

The characters for Train in Vain are:

The Assassin (picture Zer0)
Elements: 2d6/1d10 – Alertness; Stealth
Tools: 2d8/1d12
Plasma Blade; Hologram Projector
Traits: 2d4/1d8 – Physical; Social

The Deathbot (picture Gaige’s Deathtrap)
Elements: 2d4/1d8 – Electronic Brain; Hover Drive
Tools: 2d6/1d12 – Plasma Claws; Laser Eye Beams
Traits: 2d6/1d10 – Physical; Mental

The Gunslinger (picture Nisha)
Elements: 2d4/1d8 – Fast; Cunning
Tools: 2d8/1d12 – Big Bore Pistols Akimbo; Attitude
Traits: 2d6/1d10 – Physical; Social

The Leader (picture Maya)
Elements: 2d6/1d10 – Presence; Mythic Entity
Tools: 2d4/1d8 – Communications; SMG
Traits: 2d8/1d12 – Mental; Social

The Mad Scientist (picture Gaige)
Elements: 2d8/1d12 – Science!; Make things go BOOM!
Tools: 2d6/1d10 – Electro-static Plasma Atomizer; Sonic Screwdriver
Traits: 2d4/1d8 – Mental; Social

The Scout (picture Mordecai)
Elements: 2d8/1d12 – Awareness; Survival
Tools: 2d4/1d8 – Bioform ISR/Strike Asset (hawk); Big Ass Rifle
Traits: 2d6/1d10 – Physical; Mental

You can find my Gen Con calendar here.

Read more about Fancy Pants here.

Fallout Noir

Those of you who have been around here a while are aware I’m a big fan of the computer games Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. Fallout 4 has been announced, and already it is providing inspiration. How is that possible, you might ask, given that we know next to nothing about the story? It’s the imagery that has piqued my interest.

One of the initial pics from Fallout 4 had me thinking of F:NV. F:NV is a mix of the post-apocalyptic and western genres. This image made me think that Fallout 4 would also mix genres, specifically post-apocalyptic and noir. Given that I’ve published a sword & sorcery noir, you can imagine how this might have grabbed my interest. So what about post-apocalyptic noir?

The one aspect of noir that I think is important is an urban setting. Post-apocalyptic adventures don’t really need urban centres. In fact, most work without them. Fallout, though, has regular urban areas of different sizes, from towns to cities. These are represented in the computer game by groups of buildings and characters of varying sizes, but all much smaller than the populace they are to denote. New Vegas is actually a pretty small geographic area, but one can imagine that it indicates one of the larger urban areas in shattered North America. Rivet City in Fallout 3 is the same.

With examples like those, and the urban density the image seems to suggest, it is easy to imagine cities with governments and rudimentary law enforcement in this setting. Most of the plots and macguffins of hardboiled detective fiction could be ported into such a world as easy as they could a sword & sorcery one.

You could easily take your standard travelling group of troubleshooters that are regularly getting into messes as they move between points of light in the wasteland and bolt that onto hardboiled plots. Imagine something like Raymond Chandler’s the High Window, in which the characters are hired to find a treasure their employer believes was stolen by an estranged daughter-in-law. This could totally work, and work well, in New Vegas or Rivet City. Instead of a rare coin, it could be a piece of technology – though this would make a couple of the twists in the story a little bit difficult.

There’s also something like the Dashiell Hammett novel the Thin Man, in which Nick and Nora Charles investigate a dead body and get involved in a pretty messed up family. The key points of the mystery and the family would work just as well in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Just take a look at that picture and try to figure out the story behind it. I’m pretty sure it includes corrupt officials, femme fatales/homme horribles, criminals, and snappy dialogue.

You can find out more about the Fallout series here.

You can find Sword Noir: A Role-Playing Game of Hardboiled Sword & Sorcery at Amazon and DriveThru RPG.

You can find out more about the High Window here.

You can find out more about the Thin Man here.

Edge of Inspiration: Armoured Up

There’s a lot of really cool stuff happening in Edge of Tomorrow, but the thing that caught my eye first was the power armour. It seemed very low-tech, like some of the rigs that have been proposed and even tested. Given that my game Starship Commandos also uses power armour, I think it’s evident I dig the idea.

But how do you use power armour in your game. What does it do?

It really depends on the system you are using. It might not even be noticeable, just another power/talent/feat that gives some advantages but doesn’t super-power the PC. In other games, it might amp up the character so much, she is far more powerful than characters without it.

For Starship Commandos it provided a series of benefits, and if one of these benefits applied to the situation at hand, the character gained a bonus die (best two dice added together against a target number). Without power armour, the characters weren’t defenceless, but they came to rely on their “harnesses” a lot, so when they lost access to those benefits – say, when someone triggered an EMP – they felt exceptionally vulnerable.

MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armor from Halo Nation

For a game like D&D, powered armour could basically be highly enchanted magical armour – giving AC bonuses as well as stat bonuses and perhaps some other benefits. In Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, power armour – like Iron Man’s – is simply the narrative framework for powers and does not necessarily make the character better or worse than any other character.

And, honestly, it’s not the mechanical benefits of power armour that intrigues me – it’s the aesthetics of it. Power armour just looks cool, whether it’s the armour from Edge of Tomorrow or something more like the suits in Halo.

You can read more about Edge of Tomorrow at Wikipedia and IMDB.

You find more Edge of Inspiration articles here.

You can find out more about Marvel Heroic Roleplaying here.

You can find out more about Starship Commandos here.

Edge of Inspiration: Purposeful

Once again, let’s look at Edge of Tomorrow as inspiration for your game. I’m having a lot of fun doing this, so I think I might continue on with other movies. Suggestions are always welcome.

Okay, so you have time travel in your game similar to the involuntary time travel from Edge of Tomorrow – why is that? I’m not asking why it exists in the game world, I’m asking what purpose does it serve in your game. There were likely many design reasons for time travel in the movie, but the narrative purpose was to allow Cage to go from a coward to a hero through intense training over a long period of time. It was a training montage, but actually lasting one day . . . one day that occurred over and over again.

You can use this conceit as well. As discussed in earlier articles, this might be to train up characters or to change their intent or outlook. They might live the same event over and over again, unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to reach the preferred outcome, until they find a solution with which they are happy. This might be teaching them skills, or forcing them to examine their own motivations – which also happened in the movie. Cage didn’t just learn to become a warrior, he accepted self-sacrifice as necessary. He became willing to give it all to save the human race, something he had not accepted at the outset of the movie, in contrast to even the worst of the soldiers which appeared as supporting characters.

How else might you use involuntary time travel in a game? This might not be Groundhog Day, rather you might have the involuntary time travel move the character’s back or forward a set amount of time each time a character dies. It could be moving them back to the ultimate cause of the event that set the time travel in motion – maybe they all died during an epic confrontation with the being or power that initiated the jumps.

The time travel could also send them forward, jumping past events or situations on a road to a final confrontation. They might already be ready for the confrontation skill- and attitude-wise, but must leap over otherwise insurmountable barriers. Imagine your group faces a Balrog with no Gandalf in sight.

“Who’s turn is it?” asks Aragorn.

“Mine, I guess,” says Merry, reluctantly.

And Boromir cleaves off Merry’s head. BOOM. It’s a day later and they are in Lorien. Or, the fight the Balrog and someone dies. BOOM. Lorien.

In this case, it might almost be better as a total party kill triggers the jump. You might even go kind of videogame on this – if a character dies, there will be a jump, but the remaining characters need to complete the scene to trigger the jump. In the fight with the Balrog, even after Merry goes down in the fight, the fight continues until either everyone is dead OR the Balrog is overcome and this triggers the jump with dead characters brought back to life.

A kind of off-the-wall version of this would be fighting some kind of chronologically powered enemy and characters encounter periods of nul-time – time does not pass. The PCs, outside of time, are unaffected, but they cannot make progress – they are traversing time rather than geography to reach the opponent – and they must restart the movement of time by sacrificing one of their own. An interesting twist on this is having that PC permanently gone. A new PC needs to be created. You would need a lot of buy-in for that, and I think it works as a one-shot but nothing more.

I think time travel works best as it is used in the movie – as a method to allow characters to advance or otherwise learn and grow while experimenting with solutions to an apparently insolvable problem. This is much more a one-shot or single adventure rather than a campaign. I think this could wear thin relatively quickly.

You can read more about Edge of Tomorrow at Wikipedia and IMDB.

You can read my review of Edge of Tomorrow here.

You find more Edge of Inspiration articles here.

 

Edge of Inspiration: On Time

Last time, I looked at the character arc of Edge of Tomorrow and it could apply to your game. What about the rest of it? What about the time travel?

Just to mention: I’m writing a few articles on Edge of Tomorrow not because I think it is a superlative movie (I think it’s a good sci-fi actioner, but it’s not ground-breaking or extraordinary). I’m writing about inspiration and Edge of Tomorrow because it is a movie I’ve seen recently. I can take a fair amount of inspiration out of almost any movie, novel, or comic, and this is just today’s example.

The time travel in Edge of Tomorrow is interesting because it isn’t voluntary. Much like Groundhog Day (the most common comparison), at a certain point time resets back to another point. In Edge of Tomorrow, it’s the main character’s death.

This is difficult to port into an RPG unless it is one-on-one gaming, or you are using a system with multiple inputs for the same character. My experience and knowledge is with games which have multiple players playing multiple protagonists, and this presents one specific problem for this scenario – is it the death of one, some, or all of the PCs that trigger the reset?

Looking at this, I would decide first whether this is one character’s arc with the others supporting that arc or is this a story arc, one that encompasses the whole group?

Having a single character as the lead with others providing support does not need to relegate the other PCs to secondary status in an RPG. It generally does in a movie, but we aren’t shooting a movie. While the other PCs might not be changing, they can be more active than the PC who is. The main character might be indecisive, hesitant, ignorant, or have any number of personality traits that could make the other PCs indispensable and more active. Each character could have a role to play, a task they must complete within their niche that helps the main character advance or change. These tasks could each require the assistance of the other PCs to move forward. Everyone can be involved even though they are moving through a single character’s arc.

If it is a single character that is important, it is that character’s death which triggers the reset. This creates an interesting conundrum – do all the PCs retain knowledge of what occurred before the reset or are they like Vrataski, who doesn’t retain memories but is aware of the system and so ready to immediately side with the main character following the reset. Either can honestly work and be fun.

If it is a group story, I would argue it is best that the death of any of the PCs triggers the reset. This means the player with the dead PC is re-engaged immediately and it doesn’t split up the group. This also follows the logic of the movie: the Omega alien is said to trigger a reset whenever any of multiple Alpha aliens are killed, and this would map to how it could be done in a group dynamic.

I think the conundrum of death triggering the reset is one of the easier problems to address in adapting concepts from Edge of Tomorrow to an RPG. A tougher one, for me, is why does a death trigger the reset. What is the purpose of time travel in the game? Let’s talk about that next.

You can read more about Edge of Tomorrow at Wikipedia and IMDB.

You can read my review of Edge of Tomorrow here.

You find more Edge of Inspiration articles here.

Metro 2033+ . . . Seoul or Toronto?

Another computer game, another set of inspirations, another consideration of how I could port the experience to a tabletop RPG.

This time is it Metro 2033. This is a game I have long enjoyed, but because of its unforgiving nature – resource management is both very strict and very difficult in the game, especially the filters for your gas mask, absolutely essential when you go above ground – I have never got very far with it. I recently purchased the update – Metro 2033 Redux and Metro: Last Light Redux – and there is a version one can play on Metro 2033 Redux that is less resource management with the trade-off that there are more enemies to fight. I’m better with that, and have progressed further than I had previously.

I dig post-apocalyptic stories, and so Metro 2033 is right in my wheelhouse. For a guy like me who likes first person shooters but is actually quite bad at them, the game is extremely challenging. My only real issue with the game is that it is very railroad-y. One is following a specific story, rather than something like Fallout 3 and New Vegas – still my favourite computer games overall – which are totally open. So imagine something like Metro 2033 in an open world.

And there you’d have a great tabletop roleplaying game. My unreleased modern Spec Ops RPG, Direct Action, would work really well with only minimal additions – resource management is such an important aspect of Metro 2033, I’d need to include that in the game. I believe I would set it either in Seoul or Toronto – cities I know well that have very extensive subway networks and subterranean environments. Toronto would probably be the choice because the cultural starting point would be more recognizable for my players, and it can have really brutal winters, that I would like to weave into the plot.

What to call it? If this were Toronto, I’d probably call it the Cursed Path, since Toronto has an underground pedestrian network called the Path.

You can learn more about Metro 2033 here.

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

You can learn more about Direct Action here.

You can learn more about Toronto’s un-cursed Path here.

 

Starship Commandos – LC-427 the Landing

MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armor from Halo Nation

Here’s a quick rundown of what happened in the first playtest for Starship Commandos. For those not in the know, Starship Commandos has the PCs as specialized troops in the far future who utilize power armour. This is as much for my gaming group as for your entertainment, but I hope it sparks some curiosity and maybe some inspiration.

The PCs are attached to 121 MARSAT (Marine Special Armour and Tactics) with the 71st Fleet Special Purpose Force as part of the ground combat element of the 7th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard the Command Support Vessel MARLOW. On anti-piracy patrol in the Tau Ceti system, the MARLOW is diverted to the Asterion system (Beta Canum Venaticorum) for a possible support to civilian authorities operation. LC-427 (also known as Logan’s Cross) has gone dark – no signals, no transmissions and they haven’t broadcast their no-fail signal for three days running.

On planetfall, the PCs learn that the MARLOW’s ARVs (autonomous reconnaissance vehicles) have all been neutralized by EMPs created through electro-static discharges (ESD). While it might be natural, it sure looks like a coordinated attack, and so MARSAT is sent down using landing pods (atmospheric entry person torpedoes) to secure a landing site. Further ESDs bar the use of landing craft, and so a follow-on security detachment is sent down also using landing pods. The site secure, MARSAT advances on the civic centre (city hall) to seek survivors.

On the way, MARSAT uncovers a collection of bones, lacking any tissue or garments, beneath a building that has a signals relay tower on it. Triangulating all known ESDs, the team traces the events to buildings with signals relay towers. Sending their own ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) assets, they discover more bone pits in the basements. Investigation uncovers biological residue very, very similar to native species similar in size to racoons and squirrels, however other information leads the team to believe the beasts that undertook the killing and eating ranged in size from a large tiger to a rhinoceros.

Further, short range sensors uncover a flow of energy beneath them. Scanning for further such flows, they plot them and expect they will intersect under the civic centre.

Reaching the civic centre, the team uncovers a mainframe and server centre beneath the building that is awash in glowing green goo. They also discover an area the size of an aircraft hanger beneath the building that is not identified on the blueprints. The lieutenant decides to lead MARSAT into the unknown area.

The unknown area turns out to be a laboratory with a bio-hazard containment area. Inside that area is a container of glowing green goo.

Sundown, and the xenomorphs come out to play. Sensors detect movement burrowing toward the building while the team’s ARVs witness an attack en masse on the landing site. The security detachment loses more than half its force before barricading in the terminus of the off-line orbital elevator and calling down an orbital bombardment, destroying the surrounding area.

MARSAT is trapped in a lab as the xenomorphs advance. A fight ensues during which a marine accidentally initiates an ESD which leads to an EMP shutting down the team’s power armour. At about the same time, a grenade is dropped. Blood, terror and lots of damage ensue for 30 seconds while the armour reboots, and then the team destroys the xenomorphs.

They are left out-of-breath, cut off, and more than a little nervous.

You can read more about Starship Commandos here.