[Europol-X] Feats

 FEATS

Europol-X' system, although it is based on the fifth edition of the OldOne™, is a class-less and level-less system.

Feat based experience

All character improvements are acquired through feats, as do most character features that are usually packed in a class in the d20 system derivations.

You want to have another hit die? There's a feat for that...
You want to have expertise in SNEAK? There's a feat for that...
You want to deal more damage while backstabbing? There's a feat for that...
You want to have psychic powers? There's a feat for that...

Examples

I've started writing the feats, and I'm already finished with the proficiency / expertise feats.

I do have others ready and written, but not layouted and illustrated yet, so i'll only show you the 3 first pages of that chapter 😇

Community

Don't be a stranger, leave a comment on the blog 💗, I normally validate the comments quickly.

For a longer conversation, you can join the discord of my publishing outlet (from outer space games):

From outer space games Discord

There is also a facebook group focused on my creations:
From outer space games on Facebook

[Europol-X] Advancement Report

 Advancement report

Writing a game is more akin to a marathon than a sprint. Once the enthusiasm of the first days fades, it's not easy to sit down and write what's already developed.

How to keep the flow going?

It is always helpful to run your game parallel to developing it, to keep it on you mind and seeing problems before you wrote them down.
In the case of Europol-X, I've run about 5 sessions with a group of 2 friends, and the introduction of a 3rd player was the kick I needed to end writing the character creation tables.
Since they have received experience, I also was obliged to create the XP system, based on feats. Those are now being developed and written down (this is my next step in the book dev).

So what has been done?

Well I'm happy that, apart from corrections, the careers of the system are fully written down and illustrated. This is maybe not a cornerstone of the system, but the D10 "PAST PROBLEM THAT COULD COME TO HAUNT YOU"-tables are a big help in introducing side-problems and flavor to the game

And layout?

Well I actually try to do layout and writing simultaneously, because both steps don't seem to be a chore if I can do the other one, once I'm bored with the first... It also helps showing nice results before the product is final.
Sure, one could argue that someone might steal the stuff, but what I share is only pictures, and normally, not all the stuff is available. Certainly, one could steal my stuff, but I can't imagine someone giving that much fucks about the game to redo the work from my originally posted stuff as images. You could surely produce something as nice and personal in the same time. I expect the game to be pirated after it is available on Drivethru, not before 😄

Anyway, what I wanted is to show you how the careers look like, as of now (I've already spotted things to correct)

Community

Don't be a stranger, leave a comment on the blog 💗, I normally validate the comments quickly.

For a longer conversation, you can join the discord of my publishing outlet (from outer space games):

From outer space games Discord

There is also a facebook group focussed on my creations:
From outer space games on Facebook

[Europol-X] Career preview - Soldier

Soldier

Project advancement

I've started the first play test round with friends, even though the system is not totally finished (but I know where I wanna go), because it's motivating for me to have a kind of urgency...

As sure as 1+1=2 , they chose careers that I had not developed, so I had no "Past problems table" for them, therefore I let them roll on the existing tables (I present here the 5th - I do not post all of them on the blog), and luckily they rolled some entries that were not too specific to the career and generic enough to be adapted easily on the fly...

The Soldier Career

Europol-X recruits for their cell on two criteria:

• You had contact with an unexplained phenomenon and survived
• You have interesting skills

In the case of a soldier, it can be both, since their skills are always in high demand (in RPG at least), and in Europe (where guns are much less  available than on the other side of the Atlantic), it is rarer to find shooters without a military background (shooting ranges exist, and so does hunting, but you don't get to practice outside a controlled environment).

The Table

As always, remember that the "past problems" are optional... You can also just use them as inspiration for your character's past, but having troubles to add to the game will help your DM (or GM, or Storyteller, or Control, whatever you want to call them) personalize your troubles and make them feel more real. Up-close and personal, if you will...

My players

The characters that have been created are:

• A marketing Expert that was Head of Marketing at the Royal Dutch Shell (the oil company), where he has a lot of enemies - (expert in Manipulate skill) - He has a 12 y.o. daughter in a closed private School in Switzerland. A lawyer wants to put him in Jail because he influenced his star witness in a case against Shell.
• An intrusion specialist - like a white-hat-hacker, but for security systems (expert in Sneak skill), from Frankfurt. Her ex boss still long for their past relationship, and his secretary hates her for her special status in his eyes. She was abducted as a child and the only surviving abductor just got out of jail.

Plot Preview

Next week, they'll be confronted with the corpse of a Duplicate (a dupe) - Half robot / half human creatures that can copy the apparence (and therefore steal the identity) of any corpse...

Quick question

If I were to create a tipee/patreon page for this project, would you be interested?

Discord

If you wanna join my Discord ("from outer space games" is the name my publishing entity), click here:

From outer space games Discord

[Europol-X] Career preview - Olympic Fencer

 Europol-X's system is starting to really take form.

I will not post all the "past careers" (you should still want to buy the book someday 😁) but from time to time, so you see the work advances.

Remember that the "past problems" are optional... You don't have to have one, and it doesn't have to be one from the list, but they are a good help to help create some drama for your storyteller (or DM, or GM, whatever you call him).

This is the 3rd career from the twelve I want to develop (one per skill).

This time with the illustration included

By the way, I've opened a discord around my creations (all of them, not only what's posted here), so if you like my work and use this platform, come over and chat !

https://discord.gg/usYXJG7zBu

[Europol-X] Career preview - Brute

Brute

 I've decided to create a system extra for Europol-X.

It is heavily inspired by 5E and the Year Zero engine.

4 Attributes, 12 skills (3 for each attributes).

And a previous Career, for before you joined your EU-X-cell. These can be compared to the backgrounds of the 5th edition, but without a feature.

I present you the first Career, the "Thug" which can be any kind of very bulky and physically imposing character, specialized in demonstrations of shear strength.

I will probably make an illustration for the rest of the page...

Anyway, tell we what you think of this ! 

And happy start in the new year !

And I've opened a discord around my creations (all of them, not only what's posted here)
https://discord.gg/usYXJG7zBu

Edit: I renamed the Career Brute bc of the negative connotation that Thug has gained in the last few years

[Europol-X] Which game system ?

 Europol-X

Game system

I envision Europol-X as an investigative RPG, with an healthy dose of action and then some sense of wonder, once the possibility to "step sideways" has been discovered.

Therefore, I need a game system which will support these ingredients.

I could certainly brew a D&D based system (3rd edition proved it was possible, with Spycraft for example), but somehow, it feels like too much work, for a system that would be working, sure, but not supporting the gameplay any more than any other generic system.

GURPS has a lot of support for this kind of elements (even a completely described ecosystem for time and dimension travel), but as much as I love reading the GURPS books for their ideas, I can't see myself running that system (Don't like how perception is handled, for example)

TORG also has support for dimension travel (dimension war, to be precise), but the power level is a notch too high for this project, nearing cinematic level.

Don't start me on Rifts, I've never put my nose into one of the books, but from what I heard, the system is too outdated too, for my taste.

My favorite Game of the last 10 years is Mutant Year Zero.
I love the game for its perfect support of the system to the kind of fiction to be emulated (post-apocalypse).

So I started to work on a "Year Zero Engine"-adaptation for dimension war. There is a SRD online, it's actually quite easy.
I developed a 1st draft for a character sheet, and I like it.

But after a dinner break, I had one of these moments of realization:
This is not the right system for this project.
So I lose some work, sure, but in the end, better see now that attrition is not an important part of this game and that this system does not support the investigative play-style more than any other generic system (so it basically has the same problem as D&D)

Square 1 ?

Somehow yes...

There are still alternatives that I can think of:

• Savage Worlds is a good candidate (it can run Rifts, so it could definitely work), but the power level might be too high and the system is not OGL
• The Strange by Bruce Cordell is also about dimension hopping and could work quite well, but is also not OGL
• The Chronicles of Darkness would work too, and normally they'd be my favorite (they have the right amount of support for action and investigation) but I'd like to maybe publish Europol-X one day in a zine format, so I need an OGL game system (or one I've developed myself)
• The same problem exist with Modern AGE: they have a multiverse setting, but the system is not OGL either (and probably too technical for my taste)
• Develop something else, unique? If I had a second life, maybe?

But as you see, nothing seems good enough. There is a very cool, simplified, and streamlined version of D&D3 to play investigative cases in a native reservation (like the books of Tony Hillermann) that was published in France. The processes of the Bureau of Indian Affairs are certain.

Well, we'll see... I'll sleep on it and you'll be amazed at the wonderful character sheet i've built, that probably will never be used 

[Setting] Europol X - Setting overview

Europol-X

My love for parallel universes

This is a setting I've longed for since the first time I've heard of the concept of parallel dimensions.

I love time travel and alternate history, and they can meet in the concept of parallel dimensions.

I always find it difficult to make dimension travel "believable".

And in the past, I couldn't think of a plausible way to make the players travel.

Influences

Lately, I've had great influences in the science-fiction spectrum that I want to use as inspiration.

First and foremost, I want to talk about the "merchant princes" books by Charles Stross, which are a masterfully written story about dimension travel, but also a masterpiece of reflection on the subject of interactions between forces set on parallel universes.

Second, I'm re-watching the show FRINGE and it's a gold-mine for the beginnings of a dimension-travel-agency.

Third, the 2005 South-African TV-series Charlie Jade, which has only 3 worlds (ours, an utopian-hippie reflection, & an early-cyberpunky-dystopian reflection), which also depict credible interactions between universes

Last, there is a bunch of settings I'd like to send my players to, but never will have the chance to, otherwise... A lot of them are described in the GURPS alternate earths books (I & II), GURPS infinite worlds, some alternate history settings or novels (The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, the Fvlminata rpg game setting, a bit of fantasy, some Shadowrun-esque, some nazi dystopia like The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick) and I'll steal stuff from the Strange (at least the system, which is perfectly tuned for dimension travel) but I'll drop the process of translation - I don't like that a character changes when changing to an alternate reality.

Bits of time travel shows (like Quantum Leap, Terminator, Primeval, Counterpart, and many others) might find their way into this setting.

The Cosmogony

I envision the multiverse as a d20 with each of the sides being one of the realities.

Each reality could have access to it's 3 "neighboring" sides (the sides on each of the 3 sides of its triangle) and the opposite side (on a die: one and twenty, two and nineteen, and so on).

Players would play as members of a secret unit of Interpol, the section X, which is tasked with resolving "paranormal" cases. Other such units exists internationally (as division of the FBI, FSB, or any state police organisation you fancy), but I've decided to play in Europe, hence the choice of Europol.

Main plot would be a cold war between our reality (Earth Prime, as we call it) and Earth Second, a slightly more technologically advanced reflection of our reality, where 9/11 happened differently and Covid-19 never left China.

The 20 Realities in short

For the place of the numbers on the convex regular icosahedron (d20) we will use this model (which should be standard)

Our earth (Earth Prime) is situated on the side numbered 20 and Earth Second is logically situated on the side numbered 1 (the other 18 realities have not yet been discovered, as of the beginning of the campaign).

In my campaign, the other realities on the 3 other sides of the icosahedron will be Pan-Germania (a reality where the Nazi and their Imperial Japanese allies won WWII - side number 2), Al-Kīmiyā (an arabic-persian dominated world where alchemy works - sometimes), and Batuutaa (where the world was conquered by the Dogon Empire, using their astrological prescience techniques)

D20	Description of the local Reality
1	Earth Second: slightly advanced early cyberpunk reality. Their US, Chinese, Russian, and European governments know of dimension travel, the Quantum Rupture and have access to advanced Fringe-science gadgets. They spy on our reality and try to destabilize it. It is fairly certain that they started the Covid-19 infection centers in Italy at the beginning of 2020
2	Pan-Germania: In this dystopian reality, Pearl Harbor never took place, Charles Lindbergh was elected president in 1940 and Nazi Germany conquered Eurasia with their Imperial Japanese allies. They then conquered north america, with the Nazi overtaking all US and Canadian territories east of the Rockies and the Empire of Japan the West Coast
3	Zǔguó-Ming: The Black Plague decimated the whole world but the Americas and China under the Ming dynasty. The main powers are Ming-China, the United Tribes of America, the Polish-Lithuanian Empire and the African rivals: the Kingdom of Nri and the Kingdom of Imerina. Early 19th Century technology and Chinese colonial hegemony.
4	Rule Britannia: the world is dominated by the colonial views of an unchecked Victorian England. Main powers are the Crown, the landed aristocracy, the Anglican Church, and the colonial companies. All persons not born of English descent are considered inferior, at best. Most are legally enslaved by the colonial companies. Early 20th Century technology.
5	Roma Eterna: Instead of disappearing in decadence, Rome reinstated the Republic and used Chinese black powder to create weapons (and not only fireworks) and gain victory over the barbarians. Eurasia and Africa are all parts of the Great International Roman Republic, a network of federal city-states with a great deal of autonomy. Early renaissance technology but much better guns. America was never "discovered".
6	Sovietica Materna: Instead of fighting an arms race with the USA, the USSR continued to grow its influence and took over Europe, mostly through the democratic process. Accessing European technologies and foremost the microchip allowed the USSR to better plan their economy and be a competitor to the USA while allowing a much better standard of living to all its citizen (and not only the russians). The technology level is equivalent to ours, but surveillance technology is everywhere and the world wide web is segmented. The balance of powers is different, but the world is similar to ours.
7	Necrotica: This world was quite similar to ours up until the 1980ies when a pandemic did hit their reality like a truck on the highway. Thing went from bad to worse when the dead started to rise again with a hunger for human flesh. Only a few islands (Iceland, Madagascar and New-Zealand) have achieved the feat to ward off the zombie pandemic completely.
8	Batuutaa: Early in history, the Dogon Empire developed ways to predict the future by means of astrology. Their empire has spread over the whole African continent and around the Mediterranean Sea. Their society is planned years in advance, family is the core value and social peace is achieved through prescient politics. Population control is strict to avoid depleting the natural resources. Low technical level, but high life expectancy.
9	Solar Federation: Creation after WWI of the European Commonwealth, which would grow twenty years later in the Human Commonwealth (all of Europe and their colonies, with equal rights and access to development). Landing on the moon in 1939, worldwide political unification under the Human Federation in 1945. Landing on Mars in 1969. Trojan independence wars in 1991. Creation of the Solar Federation in September 2001. Advanced technology and strong welfare state with a lot of personal freedom and private sphere.
10	Pharaohland: Old Egyptian Gods exist and their prophet, the Pharaoh Akhenaton CCXXIV rules over the Mediterranean basin, the Arabic peninsula and the silk road. Technology is a mix of antic artisanship, advanced agricultural techniques through genetic selection, advanced seafaring techniques but wind-powered and bronze age metallurgy. Advanced divine magic for true believers can turn the scales of a battle, even against modern weaponry.
11	земля трех дочерей (zemlya trekh docherey): Baba Yaga and her two sisters have taken an interest in the fate of humanity and helped scientist melding high technology and magic. During WWII, the sisters decided that humanity did not deserve to be free and took over governments. Baba Yaga rules over the Soviet States, Mala Yaga over Asia southern of Mongoly, and Mengma Yaga over Europe. Technomagic surveillance state akin to a kind of theocracy. Transhumanism and compulsory human trials are the norm, not the exception
12	Transylvania: Vampire exists and have conquered Eurasia from their East European roots. They won dominance over the Werewolves in Europe, but they still continue to resist the vampiric oppressors. Vampire have the advantage of being able to create new vampires at the whim of a bit, whereas lycanthropy is only hereditary. Technological level is ~1950ies.
13	Atlantis: The Ancient Astronauts left earth during the Antiquity, taking off with their into the stars. 1947, they came back and declared Australia to be the new Atlantis. They have enforced peace on the whole planet and warring parties have been known to be disintegrated into thin air. Every year, 666 willing candidates are taken into the stars and never come back. Technological stagnation without wars mean technology like the year 2000. Ancient Astronauts' technology seems to be magical.
14	Al-Kīmiyā: During the middle ages, Persian and Arabic scientists discovered ways to treat the Black Death and could easily take over a decimated Europe. The Democratic Califates Union now spans over all North-Africa, Europe and Near-East and borders with the Indian Mughal Empire and the Russian Orthodox Empire.
15	Draconia: No big bad meteor hit earth to extinct the dinosaurs. Some of them evolved into the Dragons. Using their magic, dragons created elves, dwarves and other humanoid beings. Around 10.000 years in the past, humans started to appear and have spread all over the world and prosper in each of the Dragon Empires
16	Azteca: advanced blood-magic techniques have allowed the Aztec empire to conquer most of the american continent and send back the Europeans into the ocean, not without stealing their technological wonders. Currently, while the Europeans power fight for their colonies in Africa and Asia, the Aztec Empire prepares to invade them using their flying pyramids. Advanced blood magic and Napoleonic technology level in Europe and Russia
17	Pace: Here, all humans live in harmony with nature, in small societal structures, independently from each other, without technology. The clan delegate can speak with the spirits of nature to ensure that everyone is healthy, well fed and happy. Weapons are unknown. Wrath of nature is the only natural danger.
18	Tyberium: Instead of immigrating to the united states, Nikola Tesla gets recruited by the Soviet Union and develops Tesla-coils based weaponry. Nazi Germany never attacks further east than Poland, but conquers Western Europe and North Africa completely. The US annex Canada. A peace treaty is signed between the main 4 powers (US of North America, USSR, Nazi Germany, Japan Empire) but evolves in a ruthless cold war with shady alliances.
19	Echo: This world runs very similarly to ours, but with a 555 years delay. Right now, the most important man on the world is a visionary, an artist and scientist named Giovanni Da Rambaldi, working for the Duke of Florence, but way ahead of his time. He might be the first to pass through to an alternate reality without creating a Quantum Rupture
20	Earth Prime: Our world, which has been infiltrated by agents from Earth Second and their technology. They spy on us, destabilize the main powers and field test the worst of their technology in our reality

Quantum Rupture

It is possible to "slide sideways" to another reality, when possessing the correct brain chemistry (which can be attained through zen meditation) and willing your body to get through (the sudden change of state from complete zen to absolute willpower is the hard part of sliding). Those two requirements are the same as for Psi powers.

It is also possible to tear temporarily cracks in the fabric of reality to pass through to the reality on the opposite side of the icosahedron, but these cracks never heal fully and could lead to the complete destruction of all realities linked on this icosahedron.

Feedback ?

So, do you have any feedback on these "worlds"?

Is there a world you think should be included but is not here?

Would you like to play in such a constellation of worlds?

Would you be interested in more content for this in Zine format?

Please be kind and answer in the comments !