Game Review: Entity

Author: Peter Scholtz
Publisher: Candlenaut
System: Ironsworn-based d10 System
Marketplace: DriveThruRPG 

Entity caught my attention when it appeared in my recommendations on DTRPG. I looked at it, and wrote it down as a possibility for a future review. Then it started to haunt me: I heard it mentioned again and again in discussions with solo gamers, on TTRPG podcasts I follow, and even unexpectedly in ChatGPT windows. The other night, I was surfing DTRPG and found it front and centre on my recommendations once again and on sale, and decided to heed the gods.

I'm glad I gave it a try! My playtest was a little slow to start, but once I got into the rhythm of the game, I thoroughly enjoyed my journey across the bizarre, desolate and dangerous world of the game. It played fast, put interesting challenges in front of me, and things often came together with compelling serendipity. 

In Entity,  you play an IAP, an android built for deep space exploration by NASA in the late 21st century,  and that has served human expansion for 10,000 years. After a Rogue primordial black hole destroyed the Solar System,  IAP crews became the scouts who serve the dispossessed remnant of humanity by seeking out new places to settle and resources to help them survive. The campaign begins when a  mysterious alien pyramid capable of bending gravity destroys your vessel, and brings your escape pod down on an alien world full of strange vistas, unexpected perils, and ancient ruins.

You conduct missions to gather resources and perform research that will allow you to construct a colony that might make the world survivable for you and potentially safe for human habitation.  As you progress in building your colony, you also begin to discover secrets about the purpose of the alien ruins, the pyramid, and the planet itself.

Entity is built entirely as a solo game, and intended to run through 10 procedurally generated missions of varying complexity. Individual IAPs can be destroyed, but the campaign can continue with the same facilities and discoveries carried over between PCs.

The Far Horizon: A Setting Doodle

 I've been toying with a new way of writing campaign ideas down that is fun and idiosyncratic.

Start with the name of a god or faction, and describe its members. Then name how they are troubled by another group in a way that lets you flow into the next paragraph.

So, for example:

The Faction, who are a shifty group of people that terrible at coming up with names. They are insanely jealous of ...

The Appellomancers, wizards who have the power to rename things and transform the thing at a fundamental level. They are in an intellectual feud with...

...and so on. if you have a neat quirk or characteristic that didn't fit this format, add it as a footnote to your document.

I did an extended brainstorming session in this fashion, and found that it does a great job of getting you into a creative flow, and forces the creation of a more cohesive world.

My first experimental setting created in this manner I call The Far Horizon: an arctic tundra and mountain range that has recently been flooded by settlers and refugees. 

Here's what I came up with on my first attempt at using this method:

Finding Art for Undeadwood

Every week both before and after I run a session of Undeadwood Weird West RPG, I work on the book. It has been a truly enriching and enjoyable experience taking so much time to build up a game, and fine tune it. I now have 6 months of playtesting under the belt, too, and I will very soon be ready to both update them development podcast, and release the full version of the game. 

It will come bundled with a VTT-ready 3D map of the sample adventure, a form-fillable character sheet, and a couple of other extras to make sure I am giving people a great head start with the game. 

If you are interested, there is a preview version of available on Drive-Thru RPG at the moment. That will eventually be updated to serve as a quick start kit for the game.

One of the biggest joys in building Undeadwood has been the way I have been hunting for art to fill the manual.  I have been pouring over pulp magazines dating from the 1870s through to the 1950s to find images to integrate into the manual. Because of it, I feel that I have created a very visually pleasing book. 

Uncredited cover from Spicy Western Stories,
A Western Pulp that ran 1936-1942

I wanted to share with you all the method I use for finding the art I am using in undeadwood so that you can use it to find artwork for your own role-playing game materials. 

Now, there is a caveat to this. I am working within the framework of Canadian copyright law. It is a slightly more restrictive form of copyright law than many countries have, but also less constrained than American copyright law. Check your own local laws before you proceed. 

Magazine cover by Rudolph Zirm (1894-1952)

In Canada, a work of art falls into the public domain 50 years after the artist's death if they died before 1973. After 1973 we updated the laws so that the work does not pass into the public domain until 70 years after the Creator's death. This means that currently, anyone who passed on before 1972 has had their work enter the public domain. Anyone who died in 1973 or later will not have their work enter the public domain until the 2040s. 

If a work is uncredited it passes into the public domain 75 years after the date of publication. 

Music and video recordings are not included in this: they enter the public domain 90 years after publication, meaning any recording after 1935 is still not available in the public domain in Canada. 

In order to find large color pieces, I started by looking for exciting pulp covers. Thankfully, there is an amazing blog that publishes nothing but on a daily basis: pulpcovers.com. Every piece of art is well tagged, and if the artist is known it will be mentioned in the tags or in the comments below the piece. 

Uncredited magazine cover for Western Short Stories
Which was in syndication from 1936-1957

Another option is to simply download a pile of pulp magazines to scour for images you like. Archive.org has a vast pulp magazine archive. To be on the safe side, I don't download any from earlier than 1950 for that purpose. 

If the artist is known, the next trick is to go to pulpartists.com and check the biography of the artist. Out of respect, I tend to do my homework on the artist in their life. It's always good to know a little more, and it feels less like a ghoulish activity. 

Interior magazine art by James McKell (1884-1956)

Magazines from before 1936 often didn't publish the artist's name anywhere in the magazine. And before the 1950s they often only credited the cover artist and none of the interior art. It pays to look up the staff artists for magazines of that era to do your own due diligence. If the artwork is signed, it's not considered anonymous even if the magazine does not present a clear signature for you to work with. (Google lens is very helpful for hunting down signatures) Some artists can be quite hard to pin down; either because they use pseudonyms, or were very private people.

Most of them are somewhat easier. If they aren't featured in pulpartists.com, certain Arts auction sites or newspaper archives can be very helpful. 

Once you feel safe that the artist is in the public domain, it pays to look at any other art of theirs available on the internet. And to look at magazines where they were frequently featured artists. It may give you a larger selection to work with. As pulpcovers.com tags by artist, this can be very useful for finding a selection of art you like. I absolutely fell in love with the art of Albin Henning, and was very fortunate to find almost four dozen of his pieces on the internet and in archived PDFs of pulp magazines. 

Now, the photostats of pulp magazines are rarely good quality, and often have a great deal of print on them. Especially in work published after 1930-40 or so, where book design trends had changed. pulps from the 1920s and earlier tend to have better separation of texted image. 

If your image is in a PDF rather than being simply a downloadable image, you may need to use the print screen button on your keyboard to collect a copy of the image at the highest zoom you can manage.

This is where Photoshop or GIMP can be very handy.  I recommend looking up tutorials on repairing images, as it would be hard to provide a good tutorial here. 

Once I got this method down it was easy for me to find hundreds of excellent, thematically appropriate art for my projects, and I thought it might be a helpful tool for the rest of my amateur designers.

A World-Building Experiment: Heroes & Homelands (pt. 3)

 Over the past two weeks I have created a simple D&D retro-clone called Heroes & Homelands that is intended to be easily copy/pasted and edited to make new bespoke games as I need them. You can get the current version of it in .PDF here, or in .PDF, .html, .odt, and .docx formats in a PWYW bundle on itch.io.

Then I sat down and brainstormed a campaign I called "Into the Mistlands", a surreal magical adventure into something like a weird psychocosm. Here is the pich:

A World-Building Experiment: Heroes & Homelands (pt. 1)

 

So I am starting a new campaign this weekend, and I have an idea for the world that I want to develop.

I've decided that, in order to get me producing more content for this blog I am going to do my campaign planning here on the blog.using tools I have presented in a number of my game hacking and experience design articles. I am going to discuss my world ideas first, then consider how they are going to be reflected in the game, and in the end, I will have what should amount to a pretty solid custom TTRPG.

But to do that I needed a starting place.

Defining a Campaign by its PCs

Setting map created with
Campaign Cartographer 3

 I'm doing things a bit out of order here. I have quite a few articles planned, and finally a good rhythm in which to get them done, but I wanted to share an example of world-building done backwards that I attempted last month.

Quick Context

My wife and I have had constant interruptions from family emergencies to illness to extreme levels of stress that have prevented us from getting a role-playing campaign off the ground since late August. We were getting to the point where she was feeling frustrated, un-creative, and had no idea what she wanted to play.

In the past when we have had this kind of creative logjam I have simply made up a short scenario and handed her a character for it I thought she'd find compelling. We'd play a one-shot (IRL, usually a three-shot with the meandering way we like to play) and  that would be enough to get us grounded in the game, which suddenly got us a better sense of what we actually wanted to do.

A few weeks ago I decided to do both that, but also give her choices and try an experiment in world-building at the same time. I wrote up eight characters, each with a one-page backstory and statistics for Low Fantasy Gaming, one of my favourites for a good swashbuckling, high-action adventure. Each backstory had common elements, bits of history, common contacts, and small samplings of lore to play with. I figured one of them would sing to her, and I could mash up the plots to Torchlight II's act III and Diablo III's acts I & II with a touch of Warhammer: Vermintide II  and a copious amount of Legend of the Bones to have a good gothic fantasy.

I made it specifically a point to ensure that each PC had a family member who could be a useful PC, connections to some interesting cultural institution that would need some history, and would find themselves poised to get involved with one faction or another.

I've put the characters behind a spoiler if you don't want to sift through the specific content and want to just get to the conclusions I have come to.

World Building is a Complimentary but Separate Hobby to RPGs

My map of Wonkatonkwa County,
Created using Campaign Cartographer
Poster-sized version below.

I've been going all-out trying to get Undeadwood ready for my play testers this week.

I know it is not the most efficient way of going about it, but I have been arranging and laying out the manual as I work. It gives me a great sense of accomplishment when the rules and ideas that I am putting out there look good and are easy to read.

Hunting through old pulp art for illustrations has been an engaging way to keep me inspired. And has got me reading some great 1930s Western pulp for fun.The end result is that I now have a pretty good-looking 60-page manual that is growing rapidly as I hammer away at it whenever I have a free moment containing a game engine that is custom tailored to the exact campaign experience i want

• It is designed to be extremely fast and robust.
• it is entirely player-facing.
• The way rolls are played out feels at least a little like shooting craps at a casino table.
• It is saturated with cowboy slang and mechanics to evoke the conventions of the game.
• It puts a heavy emphasis on players making hard choices when 
• Mechanics to make the environment as deadly as combat is.
• It is a system where there is magic, but it is not complex, and does not rely on things like complicated spell lists.

I embraced the Free Kriegspiel Revolution philosophy that "we are playing the World and not the Game," by making every design decision in service to making sure my players were experiencing the Weird West setting in as high a resolution as I could manage.

It is very liberating making the game to suit the world rather than the world to suit the game. You stop wondering about how you can fit or modify magic-users in your setting, and instead wonder about how exactly magic works in your setting, and how you can represent that without creating snarled and unweildly rules.

I also found that once I had a map, it was much easier to figure out what content I needed. I made some random encounter tables for Olvidado flats, the central desert area east of the big river on the map, and suddenly I knew that I needed stats for Skinwalkers and poisonous snakes, because I knew that they are something I wanted PCs to have to worry about at different times of the day.

In the ghost town in the centre of the map, I decided that there would be a haunted well with a lesser Lovecraftian horror down at the bottom of it that had infested the aquifer for miles. One that whispers terrible secrets if you have the guts to be out in the town after dark. What and how Lovecraftian horrors work in my world is something entirely down to me.

Often, I didn't feel much need to work rules out at all. That is a bridge I can cross when I get to it. If I even need to.

World Building as Hobby

It has left me with some thoughts on World Building as a separate hobby from Table-Top Role Playing Games. And it is a hobby that I enjoy quite a bit. In many ways, I use role-playing games as a medium to help me know where to start in building the world. Which,is backwards from the original AD&D method:

 In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition, it was recommended that you make a dungeon and a village, or borrowed one from a module, and then built the world outward from the starting point as needed, often using random generation, and only when your PCs are ready to explore outward.

This isn't news, of course. World building first and then exploring later was a passion of many of the fantasy and weird fiction authors that informs Dungeons & Dragons.

J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth certainly had an influence on D&D, even if it was only a integrated to increase the possible market audience for the game. Tolkein was forever building lore, languages, cultures and history for Middle Earth as a way of exploring a world where the best element of the Pagan ethos could stand side-by-side with Salvation and the Christian ideals of the Divine. It is clear that he spent a lot of time in his head just creating the nuances of the world, and then used fiction to invite others into it.His method of building maps, and then placing stories within them has remained a template for modern World-Building for good reason.

Jack Vance rightly awards for his incredibly rich world building with the Dying Earth. He set a new bar for creating a rich and immersive experience for his readers... and for leaving so many questions you always wish you could go into it and find out more for yourself.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' later Pellucidar and Barsoom books became less about a cowboy story of a hero settling a new and untamed land, and became about an adventurer experiencing a strange world with totally alien history and ways. The Chessman of Mars is a perfect example of this: John Carter takes advantage of the fact that he lives in a world of wonder and ancient advancements, seeks out some lost technology or knowledge that might repair Deja Thoris' broken spine, and along the way encounters strange and terrible beings who breed perfected slaves in order to steal their bodies when they have need of them (Probably the inspiration for Stargate's Goa'uld). This is definitely not the Western saga in SciFi drag that the first couple of John Carter novels were.

 Roger Zelazny's Amber has a rich cosmology of shifting planes in multiple worlds as characters move through. Often taking advantage of the differences in flow of time and availability of resources to make themselves rich and powerful on different worlds. And where the stakes of the game are the cosmos itself, with the enemies taking advantage of their own quirks of the laws of the magic of the setting.It is a compelling and challenging series to read, and deeply immersive precisely because Zelazny had spent so much time exploring the possibilities. 

As kid I developed a fascination with the world of Pern. I honestly didn't have much access to the novels. I lived way out in the country and the public library was a 50 minute drive from home. But, for Christmas when I was 11 my aunt gave me a copy of the Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, which is a beautifully illustrated text covering nuances of clothing, creature anatomy, early history, and the geography of Pern. I could look at that book for hours and wish that I had a chance to go and visit it.

At the time I lacked any knowledge of an existing Pern role-playing games, nor did I have the design skill necessary to build one for myself, but I certainly spent a lot of time there in my imagination thanks to the richness of details that that book could give me. 

Thanks to all that detail, I yearned to be able to explore it first-hand.

Role-Playing as Exploration Tool

Role-playing games offer a new way other than reading to enjoy the complex and nuanced worlds that these authors created. And I suspect the opportunity to go fighting Tharks in Barsoom or pitting your wits against the Courts of Chaos in Amber was a big driving force behind the development of role-playing games.

Ed Greenwood created The Forgotten Realms about ten years before Dungeons & Dragons really hit it stride. The original short stories created a view of Waterdeep and other places along the Sword Coast from the viewpoint of a canny merchant living in a fantasy world that once connected to Earth by magical portals, but those portals had become mostly closed, connected to realms of darkness, or were taken over by evil cabals. He saw the potential in Dungeons & Dragons to allow him to step into and explore his world and share it, and so adjusted the Realms to fit the D&D paradigm, and shared it through The Dragon. And his efforts eventually led to The Forgotten Realms going from his private World-Building creation to the default setting for D&D.

I think that is also why we saw the incredible success of Dragonlance. Not only did you have the Dungeons & Dragons modules, but you also had the deeply engaging novels by Weiss and Hickman that created a world that one would really want to go see and explore. Characters one would love to be able to meet. Then D&D offered you the portal to do exactly that.

I also think that you can safely say that Matthew Mercer's World building in Critical Role is a good portion of its success as well. There is not a session of the first campaign that I watched where he doesn't build up some details about the culture, people, and landscape of Tal'Dorei, and there were a lot of fans who enjoyed that part of the viewing experience, even if they weren't Dungeons & Dragons players. Prices back at the colossal sales of the Tal'Dorei world books for D&D were in part people who never had and never intended to play Dungeons & Dragons, but we're intrigued by his world building.

I have yet to have a chance to look at Daggerheart, but, I expect that the richness of the material that is being built out of helps build a game that has some interesting flourishes and nuances that will set it apart from its Pathfinder / 5e roots. 

Why Understanding That World-Building is a Separate Hobby is Valuable

When you understand that World building can be its own hobby, and that there's a rich tradition and a great number of examples and tools available for you that are not directly linked to role-playing games, you suddenly will find yourself with an incredible range of resources available to you

And when you embrace the idea that rules are, and ought to be hackable, or the FKR idea that you play the World first and let the rules be subordinate to its logic, it can allow you to create a far more tailored role-playing experience for your group.

And as a corollary to that, as they are separate hobbies, you needn't necessarily engage with World Building if you don't want to. It isn't required in order to run a fun, loose, beer and pretzels kind of game. So much DMing advice is actually rudimentary World building advice that doesn't need to be there..

It's one of the reasons why I recommend anyone who runs role-playing games check out the AD&D1e Dungeon Master's Guide. It had within it an endless supply of tools for building a game that didn't need the world to exist a priori. It allows the DM to explore and experience it as well at the same time. Chaos, after all, is one of the best sources of fun 

Back to Undeadwood

In Undeadwood, I started building the game in order to create a fast and easy system for building Cowboys who fit into a pulp Western as you might read and Lariat, 44 Western, or Spicy Western Stories. 

The game didn't start really developing the richness it now has until I had what I needed to offer that character generation mechanic to my friends then put the rules aside, and instead drew a map.

Once I had a map broke it into 10 sections, I made promise to myself that would make it last four pages of each area, complete with two settlements for each, several points of interest, and some terrifying supernatural threat lingering at each location. Once I staterd on that project, the game really started to come into its own, and I really started getting excited about making it.

And it made the rest of the project flow so much more quickly, I no longer need to ask what the game needs in it. Now I just need to get the time to get these ideas out of my head and onto paper.

Over the next couple of them articles, talking a little bit about the World Building separate from role-playing games, then the complexities of role playing games using role-playing games to explore them, then discuss how to play a role-playing game without the burden some task of building a world in the first place.

In the meantime, check out this awesome map!! I am very proud of how it turned out. Created with a mix of Photshop, GIMP and Campaign Cartographer.

Enlarge it to see more!

Summer of Game Development

 Summer has come and gone. And like many others, I'd hoped I create more content than I did. Especially here on Welcome to the Deathtrap,

Over the Summer I ran a campaign set on Hot Springs Island that I specifically structured for more casual play. I framed every game session as a foray onto the island from a neighbouring colony. If players didn't get off the island in time, the boat would leave without them.

I used dynamic rumour tables to give them several some things they could choose to do except would only necessitate one or two city encounters or possibly a small five room dungeon. As it was the summer and many of my players are parents, it was quite hard to wrangle enough people and a few sessions ended up being nothing more than a cat between them myself and one or two players.

Overall it was fun and my players came out of it with a few excellent stories, which I consider the mark of a game well dungeon mastered.

Pitching New Games

Now that the summer is over, I don't particularly care too continue with Hot Springs Island, however. I've had an itch to do some World building and some rules hacking. And, as it stands, life is a little hectic for some of my players and have not been able to show up for many of my Silver Gull campaign sessions. Creating a game with that same ability to just drop in and out is critical if I want to keep playing games with players aged 34 to 60 on weeknights.

So, I prepared for game pitches in the last week of my Summer travels that would both meet my desire to try and create something new, and continue to enable players to drop in and out, while taking advantage of the fact that they will be available a little more often than they are over the summer.

The pitches were as follows:

• The Temple of Elemental Evil played in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, eventually fused with the giant saga, and the underdark saga, possibly going all the way down to the demonweb pots.

• A Norse themed campaign running in Low Fantasy Gaming where the player characters would play new arrivals to a colony at the edge of the world we are humans work with the easier to drive the frost Giants from midgard.

• "Undeadwood," A pulpy Weird West game where the characters find themselves in an extra planer realm parallel to Texas where creatures from American folklore like hodags and jackalopes and thunderbirds are real, the hungry dead walk the desert at night, and the Devil himself will gamble for souls.

• And finally, a two-fisted post Noir set on a 1950s science fiction Space Station. Essentially a fusion of Babylon 5 and LA confidential. With a twist of 70s SciFi Sleaze, which I tentatively called "Two-Fisted Tales of Omikron Station"
  

For those last two prompts I decided that system would be to be determined. Whenever I was going to settle on, I would need some heavy customization to make it work the way I want it to.

Jumping the Raygun

I got excited enough about that last prompt that I put some serious thought into it and started creating a game for it using the Drakken engine, with liberal borrowing from Star Adventurer and Alpha Blue.

I was, after 4 or 5 days of tinkering in my free time to the point where everything that needed to be overhauled for Drakken had been, and I'm to the point where I'm adding new content and tables to make a complete game. 

I figured that it was the most likely pick for my players, and even if it wasn't, it's a setting I will pitch again in the future, and something that my readers might enjoy playing.

Hold on There a Minute, Pardner...

Of course, they surprised me and went for my Undeadwood pitch. Quite frankly, the only game I have that even remotely if it's a weird West setting in my collection is Cowpunchers by the Basic Expert. 

Now, I suppose I could have tacked hey magic system is a monsters onto Cowpunchers and done just fine. It's a cool system that I bought ages ago and haven't had a chance to play. But, I wanted something just a little bit lighter on the rules, because I play in a very limited time window, and want to keep the burden of character generation down to an absolute minimum.

And so I have started writing not one but two games and already made significant progress on both.

I will be posting a lot of thoughts about the development process as I go, as it has really got me thinking about Word-Building in particular.

My Go-to Pantheon to Plagarize for Fantasy Religions (Majesty)

I am addicted to the process of world-building. Creating new places with interesting cultures, unusual people, and compelling disasters is something I never get tired of. I have home-brewed dozens of worlds.

In fact, if I have a weakness, it is that I have a hard time staying happy with a world for very long. It is a rare thing if I keep a world running across multiple campaigns. There have been only two of my home-brewed worlds that have seen more than one campaign.

Building worlds and hacking a game to make it fit that world give me incredible pleasure... except for one pain in my rear end: gods. I have had a terrible time in the past coming up with gods. I don't generally like using real-world pantheons for a number of reasons. I have used the Greyhawk, Eberron, or Golarion pantheons from time to time... but they have some pretty significant limitations to them:

How We Lost Faction Play, and Why it is Valuable

 When I was a kid, I taught myself to play Dungeons & Dragons from the Red Box. I have a lot of praise for the design of the Mentzer Basic set: It was the first version of Dungeons & Dragons with a really clear how-to play guide, as well as two introductory adventures played solo in a way that was pretty familiar to a Choose Your Own Adventure addict like me. Castle Mistemere was a pretty clever design as well, giving you the first floor of the dungeon, a map of the second, and mostly a question mark for the third, it eased the Dungeon Master into learning how to play their role; perhaps not as well as Keep on the Borderland, had but it gave you a more methodical approach. 

There was one way adventure with Aleena at the beginning of the book was deeply flawed, however. As a tutorial it was great, even as a piece of fiction it was pretty good. You got attached to Aleena, and then her death broke your heart, especially if you were 6 year old boy at the time...

...But, it also set up the idea that you were going to be playing the hero in a high fantasy narrative. You had an evil sorcerer, on the run, and, if you carried on with the PC you started with, were hunting them. You had a friend to avenge. Castle Mistemere reinforced that by suggesting that Bargle will be placed somewhere in the lower levels of the dungeon as a mastermind. 

This is great Dungeons & Dragons; don't get me wrong. But, unlike Keep in the Borderland, you don't start as a mercenary looking for a quick score. Nor do you start as an escaped prisoner, or a castaway. From the beginning, the introductory adventure and castle Mistemere create the kind of plot are that we now associate with the kind of ""trad" play that was soon thereafter refined by Tracy Hickman in Ravenloft and the Dragonlance saga. In other words, it was a heroic journey,  not a sandbox adventure,

Detectives in Space, Desperate Cowboys, Freezing Barbarians, Mystic Pilgrims... Or all of the Above!

Looking to start a game? I have some campaign ideas that might inspire you.

How I Pitch my Campaigns

When I am ready to start a new campaign, I put together a handful of "pitch documents" that give the players a taste of what they might expect with the game. The style of my pitch documents varies a lot by mood and inclination.

Recently my wife and I concluded a one-to-one Fabula Ultima campaign, and have been, after a couple of false starts and a few weekends where life just got in the way, looking to start something new. I recently prepared a document with four campaign pitches for a one-to-one game based on our current leanings, taste, and media intake.

As this could be a useful tool for assembling a group, I thought I would share a (slightly tidied up) PDF version of the document.

Pitches May 2024

Generally speaking, I give a fictional preview either written like a movie trailer, or a summary of precipitating events written like the back of a book cover.

Then I create a couple of paragraphs explaining the game of choice, the role the PCs might start with, and what kind of overarching experience I hope to provide.

I used to add in some evocative art hunted down on Pinterest. These days, I try generating something custom using an AI. It seems like a good, non-commercial use for the tool.

The Pitches

In this case I have a Scifi Detective Noir that is drawing a lot on Philip K. Dick, as well as an old favourite podcast, Black Jack Justice; a natural fantasy story based on a fusion of Babylon 5: Crusade, The Slayers: Try, Legend of Mana, and Sorcerer Hunters; A cowboy story that is intended to be a massive and dark expansion of my Vulture Rock wargame scenario played in Cowpunchers; and there is an AD&D scenario there inspired by the copious amount of Manowar that has been on my CD player in the last week (I'm also on my 15th play-through of Skyrim).

Feel free to steal and use these, and I am happy to answer questions, if you want more information about how I intended to use them.

But these particular campaign pitches just didn't sing. They weren't quite what we were looking for.

Trying Again

I sat for awhile trying to think of what I might try differently, and started taking the most appealing elements of each into a totally different beast.

I am currently enjoying the novel Hyperion by Dan Simmons as well. If you're not familiar, it is a dark and surreal (and much more serious) science fiction take on The Canterbury Tales which involves a group of pilgrims being sent to their deaths on an alien world, telling about their experiences on a previous voyage there. Hyperion is a pretty influential book in science fiction media, but is not itself very well known. If you have played Borderlands, Bio-Shock, Mass Effect, or Amnesia games, you have probably heard a lot of references to it.

I decided to blend my four campaigns together: a dark western story, but with a mystery focus, set in my own science fiction world, to which I would add in some heavy metal notes. And while I was at it, I decided to toss in some elements of Mass Effect and Borderlands (a fantastic Sci-Fi Western setting)

 What I ended up with is a frontier space colony world full of ancient hyper-tech ruins that can create miracles, where runaways, psychics, criminals, and cultists are rampant. I called it Adaro. 

I've written a lot about realizing a science fiction setting in the past. One thing that I find to be axiomatic is that if you are not using an established setting, you need to work a lot harder to tell your players about it. When I write science fiction pitches, I add a lot more detail to it before I pitch it.

Adaro is written as a series of three monologues from very different perspectives, and two dossiers written for a government agent, plus a couple of definitions, and I feel it does a great job of doing heavy lifting.

Steal This Planet!

Tragically, it just didn't sell to my wife as a home game setting. However, i feel like Adaro might be just the thing someone else is looking for, so I am going to toss the pitch document up here, and see if any of my readers want to steal it and make it their own.

Download it as a PDF here:

Adaro: A Mythic Space Western

Day Tripper, Analysis and Thoughts

This is part two of my discussion of my experience with the AI game master and role-playing game Day Tripper. See my previous article for a transcript of the actual play 

When I played Day Tripper, one of the first things I noticed was a slightly wonky pacing. While the game doesn't have a limited number of interactions, the AI game master is designed to really hurry things along: up to and including taking agency away from the player to desc

My A.I. Gm Experience: "Day Tripper" pt.1

 It is no secret that I love playing around with machine-learning models to create images, songs, and the like. "Generative A.I." is entertaining, even if its products are usually dull and uninspired. And you can get some damned good results with ethically sourced tools.But the moment you try to create anything too complex with it you end up witnessing otherworldly horrors beyond human comprehension.

(Believe me, if my hand's weren't fucked up, I would be doing my own illustrating! It would be less traumatic.)

I seriously doubt that an A.I., especially one trained by a large corporation, could do a great job running a game. But could one carefully trained by an indie developer do a halfway decent job? Recently I tried out the Scifi LLM "A.I." role-playing experience "Day Tripper" by Tod Foley, designer of Core Micro and Uniquicity, (and generally fun interlocutor.)

I am still processing my experience with "Day Tripper" and I am going to present a transcript of my first adventure here. And then I will pick Tod's brain to clarify my thoughts, and share my analysis of the experience with you in my next post.

In Search of the Best Crapsack Future

 

So I have had two (video-) gaming obsessions and three podcast obsessions that have managed to collide in a perfect storm of inspiration

And that has had me grinding away like mad at my google docs for about a week now.

Deathtrap Lite: the Keep on the Borderlands Principle

When I set out to build Deathtrap Lite, one of the core ideas I had in designing the game was that I wanted it to be compatible with most TSR-era D&D modules and OSR adventures on the market, while still being mechanically distinct.

Inspired by a video from Questing Beast, I made one of my rubrics "Can I still play The Keep on the Borderlands with this?" If the answer became"No." I adjusted until it could.

The whole point of the exercise was to make a game that was built on a particular mechanic, just to see if I could: a player-facing one based on an evolution of the Taps & Tankards simple skill system and Stephen Smith's World of Weirth adjustments to it, but what would be the point if my readers, who are mostly an OSR crowd couldn't use it, after all?

I also was curious to see if there is a market for OSR-comaptibke non-D&D games.

Sourcebook Review: Fabula Ultima TTJRPG Atlas High Fantasy

Author: Emanuele Galletto

Publisher: Need Games

System: Fabula Ultima

Marketplace: DriveThruRPG

 I have been playing a lot of Fabula Ultima: TTJRPG lately. I am about 8 adventures in to a campaign that has been nothing short of epic. I can add to my observations, having played it as long as I have that combat is terrifying in Fabula Ultima despite its twin roots in the combat-heavy Final Fantasy series and the cozy storygame structure of Ryuutama.; I have never seen so much fleeing in terror, running and screaming on the behalf of PCs as I have playing Fabula Ultima. And that is while balancing the game to be within the parameter recommended by the system. Also, that the storygame elements don't suit my play-style very well, nor are they my favourite as a GM, but my most important player, my wife, is loving them, and they have been useful for hacking a particularly complex sequence in White Star as well.

It is painfully prep-heavy, but once you get into the rhythm of designing NPCs it speeds up dramatically.

One of the most useful parts of the early game is in the section on collaborative world-building (which, as an activity, I have mostly just thrown out, tbh.) In that section it describes the most common modes of play that have appeared in Final Fantasy games, as well as other Japanese RPG video game series like Ys*, Phantasy Star, Dragon Warrior, and Earthbound. Namely High Fantasy, Natural Fantasy, and Technofantasy. It covers the tropes, plot structure, world design, and antagonist character development principles of each of those subgenres.

When it was clear that my family was hooked on this particular Fabula Ultima campaign, which I had decided to go whole hog on the High Fantasy tropes for, and I saw this come out only a couple of weeks after the campaign got rolling, I decided that I needed to grab it. I have found it a very useful and well-designed tool, and I have referred to it quite a bit over the course of the campaign so far.

How I Used One-to-One Time in the Silver Gull Campaign.

Time Magician's Academy
Generated with Unstable Diffusion

One-to-One time is making the rounds again on Twitter, so I decided that it was time I gave a concrete example of how it worked for me in my Silver Gull Campaign. 

You can see reports about and articles inspired by my campaign here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

Silver Gull is part of my Xen: Weird Fantasy setting, and I played it with a mix of Swords & Wizardry and Deathtrap Lite. (and supplemented with AD&D1e) Xen is a world with an eight-day week and a fairly elaborate calendar you can read about in my setting document. This document also contains a summary of two months of downtime activity.

My rule was that, barring my own ill health, every week of real time was eight days of time in Xen. So, after each Monday night session, my players had seven days of downtime before the next session. I would advance the date in Xen seven days after the last date that passed in the session.

Japanese TTRPGs for Beginners

Deedlit is one of the original 
Record of Lodoss War PCs, &
an icon in Japanese pop culture 

 About a year ago, I did a deep dive into the history of Japanese tabletop role-playing games ("table talk games") out of curiosity.  I shared what I knew, and what I learned, on a Twitter conversation, but my attempt to turn it into a post for W2tDT fell by the wayside when I fell ill. I am finally putting down what I know for those interested.

TTRPGs are a hobby that has had a small, dedicated fan base since the 1980s that has been intimately paired with their video gaming culture.  The two have had feedback loop that has given them something of a unique flavor.

Comptiq, Group S.N.E., and Forcelia

In the early 1980s Comptiq (a portmanteau of "computer-boutique") was Japan's up-and-coming PC magazine. While they started off with a focus on hardware and applications,  their audience quickly steered them more towards computer entertainment.

P.C. video games at the time included a lot of attempts to simulate D&D and Traveller. Series like Wizardry and Elite. A small portion of the PC gaming community took an interest in the pen-and-paper antecedents to popular gaming series, and became the first market for Japanese translations of Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons and Traveler. A fair chunk of Comptiq's reader base took at least an academic interest in TTRPGs, and Comptiq became a hub for discussing them. With the pace of life being what it was in Japan in the 1980s, however, finding a group and he time to play was a pretty big ask. 

Record of Lodoss War

In 1986, one of Comptiq's PC gaming correspondents, Hitoshi Yashuda, persuaded Comptiq to help him put together a gaming group and publish a series of articles about the experience of learning and playing B/X D&D.

Redefining the Wargame (for us Lunkheaded TTRPGers)

A while ago I wrote an article on how wargaming has a great deal to teach role-playing groups. The reaction I got was interesting, and best in cancellated in this comment:

It occurred to me that when a lot of people think of wargames, they think of something like Warhammer 40K, and so the definition they're using of wargames is very narrow. It is hard to understand where are the idea of Dungeons & Dragons being still heavily influenced by, and improved by cleaving its wargame origins might be confusing.

I thought it might be helpful to give a broader picture of what a wargame is, and why that is relevant to modern Dungeons & Dragons.

Current Project

 When it comes to my hobbies I don't so much choose my project is they choose me. I come up with an idea and I chase it as far down the rabbit hole as I'm willing to go. Because of this, some projects get done very quickly, some get put on the back burner. I have several books I'm working on that I do in small doses because they are either such a huge project doing it all at once would be masochistic,, or because I don't feel any time crunch to do the . The ideas that capture my imagination usually get the Lion's share of my energy.

Over the Summer I spent a fair amount of time running a solo game. I used the Mythic GM Emulator, Alone Among the Stars, the Science Fiction Codex of Lists, and RPG Pundit Presents #100: Star Adventurer as the engine let me scratch my itch to explore space in a tiny spaceship with a small crew.

One of my goals was to discover a rich, and lore-filled campaign setting over time. I wanted the joy of discovery as a part of how I was playing. To that end, I use the 'Codex and some random online tables mixed with the Alone Among the Stars to create the worlds I would visit and the alien races I would encounter. Whenever I encountered an alien species or culture, I use the 'Codex to flesh it out until it at least felt like something you might read in a Star Wars is extended universe Wiki entry.

I even used AI to help me enhance the experience. And wrote computer software inspired by the random star system generation tools of Traveler, the Cepheus Engine, the random space jobs generator from Donjon, and the jobs and commodity generators from the 'Codex. Once I had a bare bones, I would let my imagination run wild for several hours to flash in more details until I had entire worlds and cultures built up for my characters to explore in.

It has been a really engaging experience that took up much of the copious free time I had while on vacation in July. Because I was using random alien species in a Sci-Fi setting rather than creatures with a folkloric basis like in Dungeons and Dragons, I was constantly surprised and rewarded by what I learned. And my notes can now comfortably fill a whole role-playing game or a TV series "setting bible."

I even taught myself to use some AI tools to help generate some of the content for myself.

As you can imagine, I have been dying to share more of it with you all. I have a blog of the individual adventures with some of the notes to cover my first five voyages in the setting before I lost my crew to a TPK.

But, as of late, much of my energy has been directed towards building a unique role-playing game that borrows elements from White Star, Star Adventurer, Cepheus Engine, the 'Codex, and far more.

As I've written in the past, one of the biggest obstacles to a good SF setting is its total lack of predefinition. Fantasy games have the benefit of several canons of folklore, pagan mythology, and established conventions to work on, science fiction does not. Science fiction has to put effort into building a world and informing the reader, the viewer, or the player about it well enough that they can immerse themselves in the setting. This is time consuming. The only shortcut that ttrpgs have to this is to build a game based on an existing franchise.

This is why, the majority of SF games are built on franchises such as The Expanse, Star Wars, and Star Trek. Generic science fiction role-playing games are not as common, nor are they usuallysuccessful. Where a science fiction game tries to build itself out of whole cloth, it generally has to do so by spending an immense amount of energy on lore. 

Some games have been quite successful at this. Traveler, Shadowrun, Rifts, Numenéra,, and the Strange have done a great job of building enough lore that players can dive in. In the case of Traveler, Rifts, and Shadowrun, they have done so through years of slowly building a sizable canonwith the help of fan engagement. In the case of Numenéra,, it has been done through very intelligent World design and conventions.

Some science fiction games suffer from over-development. For example, Shadowrun has so much lore now that a player who knows the ins and out of the setting has an even better advantage over a new player that it is even more important than mastery over the rules. The same is definitely true of Rifts. 

I find that sits in a sweet spot where there is enough to go on to run the game well, but it is flexible enough to allow you to put almost anything you want for your scenario in it. You can learn all you need to know by reading just the core book. That is the balance I strive for. Enough information on aliens, culture,and technology to let the players have a sense of what they might be able to accomplish, but, not so much that I am being prescriptive of how the game plays, or giving advantage to someone who memorizes the lore.

I also decided to build my game on PANZA, as the race / background / class  / subclass structure of PCs is actually pretty close to olde-school SF games like Traveler, and that 5e-style engine can actually a lot of fun for a grognard like me, if you throw out a few things. Personally,  I am making the following changes:

• Characters are reduced to 4 attributes instead of 6: Wisdom has become conceptually meaningless, and STR and CON should be interlinked.
• Pcs have randomized starting HP 
• Death saves are gone
• CHA serves as a measure of luck, as well as attractiveness and savoir-faire
• RP inspiration is optional
• B/X D&D morale & NPC reactions (modified slightly) are imported 
• Diplomacy is now a skill governing protocol,  trade, and information gathering, it cannot simply change NPC reactions.
• Doman level play is incorporated by adding rules for colonizing a Star System
• A slot-based encumbrance system is added as non-optional
• Sense Motive, Investigation, and Perception skills are removed; these can be handled by askimg questions from a high-info GM.
• Formalized random encounters are imported to feel more like AD&D's Structure
• Only a few character options grant psionics, rather than the widespreaf magic use of modern systems
• XP system is simplified, CR is discarded
• Monster stats are simplified
• My own eight classes will replace the fantasy-themed ones, each with 2-3 subclasses .

I am hoping this offering will offer a new, original Sci-Fi game experience.  I ha e also built in a way that my game Eternal Ocean can take place in the setting.