Thursday Tales

Following on from last week I thought it might be interesting to take something from the Zero Point oracle that our group put together for a far future sci-fi setting (which sits within our Microscope-generated "To The Stars" universe), and see what falls out of the elements selected. This is just my interpretation - the story set-up that I see. If you see something else, then tell me in the comments!
The Oracle says...
Jack of Hearts: Monks plot revenge on those they envy.
Eight of Hearts: There are ghosts in space who worship Satan.
Five of Diamonds: After civilisation collapses, an AI takes the form of an ancestor spirit to relate to the survivors.
Seven of Diamonds: A grief-stricken soul dreams of a new life as a ship's captain.

Some thoughts on a Time Travel RPG

I've been thinking about how a time travel tabletop RPG for some time now, wondering how it could be put together in a neat way without being burdensome in terms of rules. noisms is responsible for two provocations that started me thinking about it. The first was introducing me to Microscope, which works really well in terms of role-playing and world-building, and which has the neat mechanism of populating a worldline with cards that put things in historical places.

While playing it I thought about how the end result was really neat, but that if you took a picture at the end you might not have a clear picture of the timeline of the player actions (i.e., the order in which the group put things down). A simple way around this would be to just number the cards as they come in to play. That was the first seed which went in to my mind.

The second thing that noisms did was talk about Continuum on his blog:

Part of [what makes Continuum compelling] is all the talk of time-travel combat: trying to "frag" your opponent by making him cease to exist due to historical discrepancy. And undoubtedly, a large part of the attraction was the air of enigma surrounding this apparently excellent but impossible-to-possess gaming grimoire.

But he went on to say that there were plenty of reviews and notes out there from people who had played the game that it inevitably lead to a kind of railroading. Not so much Doctor Who as the Time Tunnel by the sounds of it: instead of exploring the whole of time and space to explore you have to contend with a "mission" at a particular instant. Again, I have not played Continuum, but having played RPGs that have been presented to me more as "story games" the idea of this described game doesn't appeal all that much.

But it did spark a couple of ideas... (continued after cut!)

Games Night: GHOST/ECHO

noisms has already beat me to writing about games night, where we played GHOST/ECHO. GHOST/ECHO is really stripped down, which is pretty freeing I think. We were using it as part of our shared universe that we generated with Microscope, and were playing it as a one-shot in just one of the events that we had determined.

'Blueprints' for Zero Point Way Station stolen by spies

GHOST/ECHO works by giving provocative words - names for PCs like Coil, Demon, Grip, names for places like Heartbreak Square, Echo Park, and names for 'Wraiths' (enemies) like Dogs, Spiders, Hawks - as jumping on points, and a really simple but deep dice mechanic (more on that in a moment). The names really worked well as the provocations for an interesting world, that just kept building up around us. We "knew" some things already, there was a hint of what kind of tech level the world was at (from our Microscope play), and the rest just came along as we encountered it.

I really liked the concept of the "Ghost World" that we came up with ultimately: a globally persistent augmented reality that had been partially corrupted, somehow infected and then abandoned. People still went there (we went in to look at a dead letter drop) and it was safe from snooping because any sane person would stay out, lest whatever does exist in there should hunt you down. Quite a chilling place. I'd be interested in playing another round of something where that was a part of proceedings.
 
The dice mechanic for GHOST/ECHO works like this: in any situation where you roll dice, you have your Goal and a possible Danger - kill someone and take damage, hack someone's brain and suffer neural feedback, etc. You roll two d6s, high is good, and then you choose where you assign each die: so if you roll two 6s then you have your goal and avoid the danger.

But say you are in a knife fight with a street-thief: you roll your dice, and get a 6 and a 2. What do you do? Do you stab the guy in the throat (6) but suffer an injury yourself (2), or do you fumble shivving the guy (2) but manage to dodge his blade (6)? It's an interesting mechanism, almost like compounding the "what do you do?" of Apocalypse World - the GM asks you "what do you do?" to state your intentions, but also "what do you do?" when you get the result of a roll. This is a pretty neat mechanic, and means that you can avoid stats and everything. It's not about how strong you are, how tough you are or how dexterous.

Another great thing from the table last night: Patrick, at the start of the game gave us ten syllables to describe the equipment that our characters have. I will have to remember that for future games.

Next Games Night: a story from Zero Point Way Station, another one-shot, generated by an In A Wicked Age style Oracle. And I'm GMing!

More Microscope

My friend P, from our gaming group, has put together a timeline of the space-time continuum that we built on Tuesday playing Microscope and posted it on his blog. Go and check it out, it's particularly cool I think, especially for paragraphs like this:

Karl-4 the Hyper-Neanderthal President of Humanity is persuaded to let Echelon VII lead the Ontological-Warhead strike by Stanislaw Brock the Grand Hierophant of Earth. Echelon VII will encode humanity in the Sun's Corona then seed Jupiter with self-creating nanoswarms that will transform the Jovian mass into a Hypermind that can re-constitute and recreate mankind. Sigmund Ross - Chief Warlock, and mutated psychic, and Augustus Schwarzkopf, 11-Star General of the United Military of Mankind, decide not to accept the offer and will stay and to fight to the death.

(yes, that really is how things played out; we took every single half-remembered hard sci-fi idea we had ever heard and spewed them out over the course of three hours)

Really looking forward to our first one-shot game in this shared universe now!

Games Night: Microscope

As we don't have a regular campaign/game running at the moment we decided to play Microscope last night. This was for two reasons:

1. It's a really great, engaging and fun game to play.
2. We're going to use the shared universe we created last night as the jumping off point for a series of one-shots and mini-campaigns that we're going to play over the coming months.

It was my third time playing, and again we started from scratch in our universe-building. It was the first time that we had played it as a whole group, but it didn't take too long before we settled in to the groove of establishing periods, then events and then launching into (often) crazy scenes. We were detailing a hard science, space opera, man reaches for the stars universe. For a flavour of things, this is what our "yes and no" lists looked like.

Yes

• Technological plagues
• FTL travel
• Geneered humans
• "Horrible costs for psychic powers"
• Mechs and powersuits
• F*cked up but explainable alien demons
• Artificial consciousness

No

• TNG humanoids ("no bumpy fore-headed aliens speaking English!")
• Terraforming
• Single biome planets ("welcome to desert world", "welcome to frozen world", "welcome to the land of hats!")
• Time travel (other than normal relativistic effects)

This was quite a departure from previous shared-world-building with Microscope, as previously we had always gone for more fantasy-style settings. It worked though, just as it had in the past. We had a really rich and varied timeline building up, with concentrations of interest around the first near-collapse of humanity (centring around very small, personal moments) and an incursion into our reality by Schwarm-Laden beings from beyond normal space-time. Imagine being on the bridge of the only starship, when a wave of 5 times 10^15 ships from beyond ab-reality arrives, too many ships occupying the same space, computers and space marines going insane...

Really, really good fun (so much so that two of us were crying with laughter at one role-played scene), and will lead in to next week's first one-shot/mini-campaign, based around the game GHOST/ECHO.