Raptus Regaliter

Things have been slow as far as the DFRPG playtesting has been going. Fortunately, since my wedding is all done, and things have finally started to calm down, we’re actually getting a chance to play over the next few weeks. The hard part - character creation - is already done. As they come in, I’ll be posting the characters.

We decided to go with a standard naming convention for everybody’s novel (those of you who have played Spirit of the Century know what I’m talking about). All of them are a phrase that start with a number. This isn’t exactly supposed to indicate chronology, we just wanted a way to tie everyone into the same “series” as it were. The novels, preceded by the PC they are about, are as follows:

• Martin - First Edition
• Calista - Second Degree
• OK Tom - Third Wheel
• Kate - Fourth Quarter

I’m tempted to title the playtest scenario in the same way, but I can’t seem to come up with anything that starts with the word Fifth. If anybody has any ideas, feel free to post a comment.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how easy character creation went. Nobody at the table is exceedingly familiar with FATE/SotC, so it was nice to see that the character creation rules clicked pretty well for everyone. Not that they’re particularly difficult, but people latched on to them early on, and just ran with it. Even the newest player managed to create a novice Wizard with little problem. The only real issue we ran into was some confusion about the text, which was, I believe, an editing problem.

Probably the nicest thing was when we got to the “guest starring” phases, and people really started talking to each other about how they wanted their stories to intertwine. I really think that it helped get everyone on the same page and excited about playing the game.

On the mechanical side, it’s kinda nice not having so many Aspects in Dresden as there were in SotC. I think that people had an easier time coming up with things. Building the concept and theme of each character into an Aspect was also a nice touch.

As for skills, we went with the default 25 skill points, which gives a pretty good range of skills. Capping them at Great (+4) also gave the characters some room to diversify their skills. I don’t see this system as one that really rewards specialization as much as a lot of skill-based systems do.

On the downside, I wish that the character creation chapter talked about the Stress tracks, and how your skills relate to them. SotC starts characters out at 5 stress boxes, with skills and stunts that can push them up to 10. Dresden defaults to 2 boxes. This means that characters can get taken out pretty quickly (although, fortunately, the game isn’t designed to be particularly lethal), and are probably going to be picking up a lot of consequence aspects. The problem that I see is that the rules for increasing your available stress boxes are split between several chapters. I have no problem with them being detailed separately - like say, in the Skills and Stunts chapters - but it would be nice if there was a sidebar or chart that showed what skills and stunts increased your available stress.

All that being said, here’s the first character  that I’ve gotten turned in to me. This is OK Tom, played by my friend and TMD co-host, Randy.

Oklahoma “OK Tom” Tomorrow

High Concept: Psychic Rom Bicycle Messenger

Theme: Heritage v. Progress
OK Tom is trying to reconcile his family’s pressure to adhere to Rom traditions, and his own desire to understand the truth about the universe in all its scientific glory.

Background: Autodidact
He had to hide all his pilfered science textbooks from his family. He spent all his free time with his head in a book.

Rising Conflict: I slept in the bed, now I have to make it.
OK Tom cheated on his girlfriend while she was pregnant with his child. She aborted the fetus. OK Tom values family, and his actions destroyed his chance to have a family of his own. Now, he’s dealing with it.

First Novel: Eye for detail
“Third Wheel” OK Tom’s ex-fiance, one who his family arranged for him, has come back to town with a new squeeze. After an accidental use of psychometry, OK Tom discovers the man to be a serial murderer. Can OK Tom save the next victim all the while keeping it a secret from his family?

Guest Star 1: Watch Kate’s back
“Fourth Quarter” At Kate’s sorority party, OK Tom discovers the truth about an old book of spells just in time to save Kate from a fire she caused.

Guest Star 2: Shadowy contacts
“First Edition” OK Tom overhears Martin complaining about customs; he can’t get his goods across the border. OK Tom comes to the rescue, even though he had no clue how to do it. So he made some new contacts…shadowy ones.

Stunts:
Psychometry
Human Google Map (+2 to navigation-based Driving tests)
Backhanded Compliment (use Rapport for social attacks)
Quick Eye (Investigate twice as fast)

Skills:
Great (+4): Contacts, Rapport
Good(+3): Driving, Investigation
Fair(+2): Scholarship, Craftsmanship, Presence, Resources
Average(+1): 3 to be determined

Refresh: 4

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Saturday evening, I ran a Dread game at Endgame in Oakland. For those of you who listen to the podcast, you may have listened to the original recording of the playtest of the scenario.

All in all, I feel pretty good about how it went. Only one characte died, which is a little disappointing. Not because I particularly like killing characters in RPGs, but Dread is a little special. Dying can be pretty awesome in this game. In any case, things went well. My players gave some really good feedback, and managed to stay in the game pretty much the whole time. I’m going to go back and edit the scenario again, keeping their feedback in mind. I don’t usually run the same game multiple times, but I think that the Ghost Hunters scenario works well enough as a con game.

There were a couple of things that I changed for con play. First, I dumped one of the ghosts. I felt that, in the original draft, there was too much going on, and it distracted from the story. Also, there was a rape in the original scenario. While I haven’t removed it from the scenario entirely, I decided to omit it for the con. If I ran this at KublaCon, I would probably leave it in, since each game has its own private room. At Endgame, there were a great deal of people around (hell, a game of 3:16 was going on immediately behind me), so I figured that a murder/rape, even when described through the filter of a FLIR camera, might not be appropriate for all audiences. It didn’t take much away from the game, anyway.

I’m very strongly considering running this scenario, with some more edits, at KublaCon next year. I don’t think that Dread gets enough love, and it’s such a fun game. That being said, I’d like to thank The Game Master Show for introducing it to me.

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We created Portland in two sessions. The first took just a hair over three hours (from other posts, this seems about the right amount of time), the second took maybe an hour. We had an additional player for the second session.

Choosing a city - we started with a list of about a dozen candidates, purposely avoiding cities that other groups were doing - took us maybe a half hour. A couple of players weren’t jazzed about Portland at first, but once we got to sketching it up, the city started to take on a life of its own, and everyone started getting really excited. We found the Wikipedia article on Portland incredibly handy, and we had one player at the table on her laptop pretty much the entire time, looking up information as we needed it. Once we figured out the themes we were playing with, translating them into Aspects was a snap.

Creating locations was absolutely the most enjoyable segment of city creation. So enjoyable, in fact, that we went completely overboard, creating nine locations between four players (including myself as the GM). This is probably the root of our troubles during the second session. Still, this is what the players latched onto. They came up with locations, Aspects, and Faces almost faster than I could write them down.We also took some liberties with the city, creating one or two locations that don’t actually exist, such as the neighborhood known as The Woods, but were interesting in light of the setting. In any event, as I said, we wound up with nine locations all told. This process took the most time.

We hit the Touch of Magic section next, and found that, in our discussions of the locations, we’d already started addressing this point. This is about the time that the redundancy issues started manifesting. When we were coming up with locations, we basically asked ourselves, “Is this magical? If so, how?” for each location and character associated with it. So we found ourselves hitting this all in one fell swoop. So when we got to this question, we sort of went “Oh, this is already done,” and moved on.

The same issues occurred as we continued down the list of questions. The creation of locations and personalities gave rise to the answers to the last few questions organically, to the point where we were asking ourselves, “Why are we going over this again?” Again, it could be that we were just overzealous during the early parts of city creation, but the remaining questions just seemed redundant – they were the questions we were already asking ourselves as we created the locations.

One interesting thing to note is that we used index cards to create the city. Each location had it’s own card, so we were able to sort of map out the city physically as we worked, which gave us a visual aid to work with. Again, this could have contributed to the last questions seeming redundant. By giving ourselves a visual map, of sorts, we were able to see what the relationships between the locations, factions and faces of Portland were, which already put us in the mindset of creating conflicts and alliances and motivations. On the other hand, it could also have been the fact that three of the five players that were involved were also playing in a Burning Wheel game that we had just created the setting for, so we had an idea of what to expect.

Overall, the process worked well. One suggestion that we thought might help would be a step-by-step example of how city creation worked. Alternately, since the city is basically a character, itself, it might work to break it down into distinct Phases, similar to character creation. An example city sheet would be helpful as well.

Aside from that, though, everything seemed to turn out well. Despite the fact that we managed to answer several questions ahead of time, everybody at the table was stoked to create characters and get to exploring a Dresdenified Portland.

We plan on running through character creation in the coming week. All of us have read at least one or two of the novels by now, so we have a somewhat better idea of how the Dresdenverse works, and what characters should be occupying it.

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I’ve got multiple gaming groups. Occasionally they merge, but some of us have more interest in particular games than others. On Fridays, a group of four of us are going to be getting together to play a real, honest to Joe Pesci Burning Wheel campaign. To that end, we’ve started building the setting over on the This Modern Death Forum, but I figured that I could write up the condensed version over here.

Just to warn y’all, this is still a work in progress. Things are still unnamed, unclear, and undeveloped. But it’s a damn good start. We’ve been referring to the game so far as Burning Deadwood, but I believe it’s gone slightly beyond that by now.

So, here’s the setting as it stands. Special thanks to Xenith, who posted this excellent summary on the forums. Also, I’d like to thank Babe and Randy, my other two players, for their contributions.

A map of the immediate area, from the Field Roden perspective

What’s the Big Picture? What’s going on in this setting that makes it ripe for adventure. What’s changing, evolving, declining?

The Dwarves have found a mineral-rich stretch of low, old mountains which they have been raping for a couple decades in secret (as those greedy little fucks do). But, given emergent technology, word traveled fast. Men came from the east in wagon-loads to fill their pockets and make a name for themselves. They are motivated by their internal clocks. They know their time on the planet is comparatively short, so they take advantage of any opportunity. A fringe group of elves settled much of the area north of the rich mountains thousands of years ago. Settled is a light term, they conquered it. They think they have a right to land and don’t like others encroaching on it. Men and Dwarves used Orc slave labor to build their cities and railroads, but cast them aside once the work was done. If the Orcs ever rally it could get messy. The Roden and Orcs occupied the land long before the Elves, but were pushed out of their land by the other races.

But the land, having been raped for as long as it has, it’s definitely not producing except for a fortunate few. The good veins have been monopolized and everyone else is just trying to squeeze in where they can. The dwarves still own most of the proven veins, but the increase in people brings many problems. Quite a few dwarves who didn’t keep up with the times lost their claims through legal trickery. They try to find support, but the lawless, unclaimed land grants them no safe harbor. Once man put his name on the paper for the claim, he protects it with might, muscle, and gun.

But man is stupid at the same time he is crafty. The vices that attract men in such towns-the alcohol, the camp women-strip them of what they gain as soon as it lands in their pocket. Elves, unhappy with the degree of land desecration, run brothels and saloons and tobacconists, trading minuscule claims for a week’s worth of dick stink between the legs of a jaded woman. Their goal is to gain enough to have sway, like being a majority stakeholder somewhere.

Dwarves have changed tunes as well. As man begins to take over their claims, they too figure out ways to put their hand in man’s pocket as he did to them. Dwarves have started working procurement trades, getting man to pass back the money he stole in the form of exuberant mark-ups on mining gear. There’s a large band of them, too, that control trade. They’re an alliance, because they found out pretty quickly they couldn’t defeat man on a mono a mono basis, and they have to band together.

Rural life is declining. “Place” is devolving from sacred to commodity. People are favoring pidgin over their native tongue. Material is valued over action. All of the worst parts of capitalism are destroying the serenity of peasant/agrarian life. True belief is declining. It has become a convenient excuse for conquest and persecution. Most people out in the frontier do little more than pay it lip service, but otherwise it has become unimportant in day-to-day lives.

There’s an entire band of settlers who came out for this very purpose. They only come into the main bits of town and such during the day, before all the philandering and drinking begins, to preach, but a few battered women and a dead preacher was all it took to realize they weren’t welcome after dark. And the women fit the cult of “true womanhood” to a T - Piety, submission, purity and domesticity. They will follow their men, they will venture in to town after dark if a father or husband asks to prove the true godlessness and sinful ways of the other settlers. They will not raise their voice to the men nor a hand to protect themselves if one should get upset, for it’s a woman’s place to be subservient and accepting of the whims of the superior men. However, to the “camp women”, they are nothing but fire and brimstone. Half the whores go to church because they want some solace. The other half go to rile the believers during service.

What’s the world’s culture? What are the cultural analogs? Analogs can be taken from historical earth, current events or fantasy works.

Dwarves - Very traditional Tolkein-esque, but tone down the merriment and up the corporate capitalist.
Orcs - Nomads. Savage beasts. Hatred with a capital H.
Roden - Farmers, peasant-folk, “Agrarian”
Humans - What *aren’t* they like? Greedy, opportunistic, technological, frantic (short life spans)
Elves - What a sad little boy you are

What’s the conflict in which the characters are involved? What are the sides? What’s wrong?

The characters have recently…ah…”stumbled” upon an unmanned claim. Orlan, the big boy of Halcyon Falls, has a significant stake in the claim and does not take kindly to the characters sitting on it.

What physical place does the conflict take place in? What’s the ecology, environment, location?

Halcyon Falls is settled in the middle of a lush valley nestled up against the craigs of the Badlands. There is a big river running about 1/2mi east of of town. The area gets really wet winters, which usually floods the river and threatens outlying houses and settlements.

What’s the name of the most important place in this setting? Not the capital or any dumb shit like that, but The Place where all the action goes down?

Halcyon Falls, the claim the characters find themselves in possession of, and the surrounding area.

What’s the name of a faraway place that folks talk about, dream about or mutter under their breath about?

Sunday City lies further yet to the west. Halcyon Falls is many people’s hope of gaining enough wealth to be able to afford that final push to Sunday City. It’s what people talk about, what people toil in the mines for, what people mutter in their sleep during their most pleasant dreams. No one’s been there, but the stories of that friend who had a friend who went and returned are enough to turn the sourest of souls, the most pessimistic of men west as the sun sets over those high, cold crags. (I believe we came up with a different name during the first session, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was.)

Who are the antagonists? Who is opposing the goals of the characters?

Orlan, the big bad businessman in town.

The next two questions don’t have answers yet:
Imagine all of the characters are standing in a room/ruin/field with the antagonists or their minions. What do the antagonists want from that meeting? What do the character want from that meeting? That’s where your game begins.

Alternately, imagine the characters standing at the scene of some great disaster or calamity clearly caused by one of the antagonists. What’s the disaster? How did it happen? What are the characters going to do about it right now?

What type of magic exists in this world? Pick one or two of the magic systems: Faith (and Blasphemous Hatred), Sorcery (and Abstraction), Natural Magic, Spirit Binding, Summoning, or Enchanting.

Sorcery still exists, but is falling behind the surge of technology in the eyes of man. The other races, moving slower as a result of their different lifespans, still rely heavily on magic. Elves with their spell songs, dwarves with their arts, and orcs with their blasphemous chants.

Faith is powerful, but failing. Other races have their own versions of Faith…the Immortal Elves with their wearisome Grief, the Dwarves and their endless Greed, and the Orcs, with the deep and boundless Hatred.

Some of this may change when the Magic Burner is available.

If Sorcery is used, what’s its idiom? Does it require speech? Gestures?
Sorcery requires speech, and then gestures are a character idiom. Some sorcerers use them, some don’t.

If Sorcery is used, what spells are available? Which spells are inappropriate to the game world?
So far, all spells are available for use.

If is Faith used, what is the Faith idiom? What are the religions? Is Faith universal or does it only affect believers?
There are two major gods worshipped: Zoltec, the Sun and Turkis, the Earth. The names came from older cultures, but have managed to stick around. Many people just refer to them as The Sun or The Earth, so phrases such as “Sunblessed” and “The Earth take you!” are fairly common. As mentioned, most of the common folk simply pay lip-service to the gods. Some of the zealots claim miracles, but, as is common for that sort of thing, the doubters tend to see them simply as happy coincidences.

What character stocks are in play in this world? Which are restricted and why?
Men, Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, and Roden. Possibly Great Wolves at some time in the future.

What Cultural Traits apply to the characters of this game world? Pick three Character Traits for each culture.
Intrepid, Risk-taker and Cocksure for Men. The other stocks get their standard Common Traits.

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We started working on the city creation rules for the Dresden Files RPG last night. When it gets done, I’ll be sure to post it here, for everyone to see. Let me just say that the entire process is immensely fun, although somewhat time consuming. I have a feeling that, in practice, writing up a city will take pretty much an entire game session and character creation will likely take a whole nother session. On the other hand, withe the Fate system, creating both the city and the characters will most likely be like small games in and of themselves. I really enjoy the collaborative nature of the DFRPG city creation. As a consumately lazy GM, anything I don’t have to make up makes me happy.

During our playtesting session last night, we decided that we’d write up the Dresdenverse version of Portland, OR. So far, it’s a city of incidental magic - a perfect storm of history, custom, and intentional wizardry creating a fantastically interesting location.

Expect a full write-up soon, most likely cross-posted over at the This Modern Death Forums. I can assure you it will be fascinating. And the effect on player ownership of the setting will be awesome. I have some very high hopes for the Dresden RPG.

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So, my group played SotC as a one-shot last night. Rather than going for the standard pulp adventure feel, we did sort of a steampunk/pulp mix. The year was 1857 - during the Indian Revolt - and instead of having fought in the Great War, everyone was a former member of the now-defunct East India Company.

The intended plot was fairly simple. The H.M.S. Balthazar, a ship carrying tea and spices and other sundries from India to London is attacked by mysterious turbaned pirates during the night. The characters are awakened from their bunks, and run to defend the ship. After warding off the pirate attack, they find that a couple of clay tablets - the Tablets of Brama - have gone missing! This leads to an investigation upon their return to England, during which they discover that the Tablets were supposed to go to one Dr. Bartholomew Farnham, a Professor of Antiquities at the British Museum.

Dr. Farnhan is reputed to be working on some secret project for the Crown, and hasn’t been seen for some time. Investigating his office at the British Museum, they find one of the turbaned pirates rifling through the good Doctor’s belongings. When they chase down and capture the mysterious man, he crumbles to dust, but leaves behind a page from Dr. Farnham’s notes - a rubbing of a chunk of the Tablets, and the address to a warehouse on the banks of the Thames. Some research into the rubbing indicates that the Tablets of Brama, which, legend says had the power to end wars, were in fact an ancient blueprint, but a blueprint for what was unknown.

Making their way to the warehouse, they find hundreds of the strange pirates loading steam-powered boats with supplies. Dr. Farnham is there as well, bound and held captive. The characters go in guns blazing and fists swinging, causing massive chaos, and setting off some of the crates of gunpowder. After a vicious fight, Dr. Farnham is rescued.

He informs the characters that he was captured  by the real mastermind of the operation, one Sir Randall Dalton, former Leftenant in the East India Company*. It seems that he was unwilling to let the dissolution of the Company go, and was convinced that if he built the weapon, he could crush the Indian Rebellion and once again restore the East India Company as the rulers of India. Capturing the Tablets (actually, the remaining tablets) also allowed him to control their ancient guardians, who, through some strange Eastern magic, were undead slaves to whomever held them.

So, the characters track Sir Dalton to a small, rocky island off of Britain’s northeastern coast. They can plainly see the pirate ship that attacked them in the first scene. The island itself is dominated by a crumbling keep. Sneaking onto the island, they make it to the underground workshop where Dalton has finally completed the weapon - and modified it for his own purposes! During the ensuing battle, Dalton activates his monstrosity - a giant iron clockwork and steam powered elephant, armed with very large guns. Of course, the characters defeat it, and bring the keep down on Dalton and his mechanical monstrosity. As the keep crumbles, the characters make a dashing escape back to England.

Now, in practice, we didn’t make it all the way through. They managed to stop Dalton immediately after the scene in the warehouse. I do, however, really like this scenario, and I might use it for convention play at some point.

Some changes I’d make:

• The characters shoudn’t start off on the ship. If the players do well enough, they can prevent the theft of the Tablets and pretty much blow the game out of the water (no pun intended). Instead, they should be handed the assignment of investigating the attack of the H.M.S. Balthazar, and find out about the Tablets later.
• Use the quick character creation rules. Or, better yet, use pregenerated characters. For a convention, I’ll probably use variations of the characters that were created by my group. I really liked their ideas
• Really shave down the amount of investigation that the group needs to do. As awesome as it can be, if not done right, or if the players have no clear idea of what they’re after, it can take far too long and lead to serious tangents.
• I need to prep better. The minions are easy (SotC’s minion rules rock!), but I need to really work on my NPC’s.
• Finally, I need more steampunkish stuff. Maybe Dalton’s ship needs to be a dirigible. Even better, he may need a good henchman to foil the characters.

Despite the problems, the system itself is a joy to run - incredibly intuitive. I had some difficulty (by some I mean a lot) compelling one of my players’ Aspects. I’ll chalk this one up to poor communication of the rules on my part. Still, all in all I think everyone had a good time. Running this game was great practice for the Dresden Files playtest that we’re starting tonight.

*I don’t know if there actually were Leftenants in the East India Company. But it made for a decent plot, so fuck it.

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Wow, my semi-regular blog posting got totally hosed by my recent lack of Internet access. My thanks for that go to AT&T, who seem incapable of sticking to a connection date. Bleh.

Anyway, on to the meat of this post.

I’ve wanted to be a role-playing game designer since I was eight years old. My dream was to grow up and go to work for TSR so that I could write D&D books for the rest of my life. Until recently, I’d pretty much given up on designing my own game .

Fortunately, people like Clyde Roher, Ryan Macklin, Sam Chupp, Mick Bradley, and a whole slew of other folks have re-inspired me to try designing my own game. With that in mind, I figured that I’d start a design diary here on Raptus Regaliter, so that I can get some feedback on where the game is at.

I’m going to keep this particular post somewhat brief, since I’m still working on specific details. I’m just going to outline some of the specific design decisions that I’ve made so far.

• This will be a short-form story game. I was directly inspired to write this kind of game after having played John Wick’s Wilderness of Mirrors. I really find this style of game to be both fun and useful. They tend to be either somewhat lighthearted or very intense, and they’re great for just killing time, or for when a player doesn’t show up for your regular game.
• All the prep work will be done at the table. I want to design something that can be just pulled out and played. So, everything from character creation to creating the main conflict to playing out the scenario will be handled right then and there. Therefore, all the character creation rules need to be simple. Hell, all of the rules will need to be simple. If it’s made to be played at the drop of a hat, it should be able to be taught to new players easily.
• I’d like heavy player authorship. I see the role of the GM in this game as something of a moderator, more than a storyteller. Perhaps his primary role will be to start things off and nothing more.

Finally, there is the actual concept of the game, the answer to the question “What is your game about?”. So the concept is this: all the players have just died, and are waiting to pass on to the afterlife, but first, they have to come to terms with their deaths. So, who’s fault was it that you died, and can you forgive them?.

So far, that’s what I’ve got. Beyond that, everything is simply a nebulous collection of ideas. But, at least I have a starting point now, and can finally move on to some of the more important aspects of designing.

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