#RPGaDAY, Day 21: Favorite RPG Setting

by ThomasNo Comments

Day 21 appears to be Favorite Setting here at #RPGaDAY2015, or so I think. I haven’t really been looking at the schedule.

So, favorite setting? I’m of two minds on that, but one’s a cheat: the modern world, but with a twist. It’s something that’s too overly-broad, but dangit, it’s fun to place the iPad on the table, open up Google Maps and say, “You’re right here.” Swipe to street view. “And this is what you see.”

I’m going to Blue Planet for my real answer.

underwater_elena_kalis98

Now, despite the flaws of the game itself — the unfocused skill list and lack of guidance for what to do in the setting, for starters — the setting is fantastic. Here’s the basics:

We find a wormhole to another planetary system, find a habitable world there and send settlers. However, bad things happen back home — a global blight nearly starves the planet — and we can’t afford to send a resupply mission. Generations pass and we’ve crawled back up from the ashes, and send a ship to the world we found a century ago. We expect to find the remains of the initial two thousand. We did not expect to find that they survived: they survived and flourished.

Then we found unobtanium on the new planet and suddenly a flood of immigration. It’s a gold rush — over the decade after Recontact, the population of the new planet goes from 75,000 to over two million.

Just that is a fine, fertile field to start a game in. Play as the Natives, resentful of the Abandonment, angry at the Earthers coming in and taking the land. Play as the eco-cops, trying to keep corporate marauders from laying waste to Poseidon, just as they did to the Earth. Play as a new arrival, grateful to have escaped the hellscapes of the Earth system, now trying to make their way on a paradise world.

Who is in the right here? Who has the right to this planet? Cases can be made for all sides, really.

bp_modguideBut that’s just one thing I like about the setting. There’s the oddness that the game is set up with all this history and — initially released around the time of your World of Darkness, your Shadowrun, your Deadlands — there was no metaplot designed to prompt people into buying supplement after supplement. “Here’s how the game world is set up in the now of 2199,” Blue Planet says. “Now go make it your own!” ((My “short” campaign wound down maybe two sessions before the actual end. I was going to end it with terrorists destroying the orbital station that transferred people to the planet.))

The third thing I really like about the setting is that make it your own philosophy. The major setting book of BPv2 looked at island clusters: a big map of one area with named cities, towns, and outposts. Following that, a listing of just some of the areas. In the Zion Islands, Kingston is given a full on writeup, New Fremantle is described in a few paragraphs, Pearl is given a bullet point, and Retreat is only a dot on the map. How much hand-holding do you want when creating your play space in Blue Planet? If you want a complete setting, grab First Colony and play in and around Haven. Want to make up your own place with some supporting material? Retreat is a nice town. ((..or is it? You choose.)) Or if you want to do all the heavy lifting, there are three more huge archipeligos that you can detail to your liking! Carve out your slice of paradise!

Man, such a fun setting. Ancient mysteries, current grudges, a boiling pot of hard science, transhumanistic cyberpunk on a world of water and islands and conflict and hard, driving rain…

I’d love to go back and explore.

#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 21 – Favorite Licensed Game

by ThomasNo Comments

A year ago, the topic was What’s your favorite licensed game?, which complements the this year’s “What game would you like to see licensed?” question. My answer still remains the same, although I’d add a third runner-up: the Ghostbusters RPG from West End Games.

Here’s my response from last year:

 

Second runner-up would be Marvel Heroic Roleplaying from Margaret Weis Productions. It’s the first superhero game I’ve played where the game actually felt like a comic book. Our cosmic-level hero was ripped out of space and time to be rebuked by his superior for all the choices he made, right in the middle of a huge fight, with the mental battle against the angelic supervisor just as important as the physical battle against Ultron. It felt just like a comic book – a Marvel comic book.

First runner-up is the Star Wars line of role-playing games from Fantasy Flight Games. I have only run a few games with that as a one-shot, but man, do I love the system and the way that players can have input into what’s happening. While I liked the d6 system from West End Games, the FFG versions seem to add more action and adventure into the game session. Plus, the artwork and layout of the line is fantastic.

prophecy girlThe two above are great games and are serious contenders for the top spot, but I have to give that to Eden Studio’s Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. The writing style (and overwrought trade dress) are perfect to drop the player right into the setting. The Cinematic version of Unisystem was developed for the action movie feel displayed in the show, much how the Heroic version of Cortex Plus was developed for Marvel, above. The terminology for skills – fighting with weapons was termed “Getting Medieval”, shooting was “Gun Fu” – echoed the Buffiness of the setting.

Not only is B:tVS fast to play, it’s also low on prep – a huge bonus for GMs like me. Players stat out their characters, breaking them down into about twenty skills plus a handful of attributes. Antagonists only have three stats to keep track of. It’s a good mix of traditional roleplaying game character creation for the players and ultra-simple light gaming for the GM. (It also made me realize that I didn’t have to play the same game that the other players were. To create a Blue Planet character, you have to go through this insane lifepath system (for NPCs, too!). While the players did that, all the NPCs they met were effectively Ghostbusters characters with Muscle, Moves, Brains, and Cool.)

The action is all on the heroes too: if you play Buffy, it’s the players making all of the dice rolls (which felt very strange the first time I played it).

Even though I haven’t played it in years, Buffy is one of the older RPGs that I still own in print format. It’s just that good.

#RPGaDAY2015, Day 20: Favorite Horror RPG

by ThomasNo Comments

chill

Favorite Horror RPG? To play fair, I’m not going to list anything I’ve worked on or are contracted to work on. Around this time, last year, it seemed that if there was a horror RPG in the planning stages, I was on it. Chill, Demon Hunters, and Urban Shadows come to mind. There’s probably another horror RPG in there I’m missing.

So for horror–hang on a second.

What is horror, anyway?

Would Buffy, the Vampire Slayer be classified as “horror”? Even though it follows the same steps as your Chill does — there’s a monster, and there’s some monster hunters and they track down whatever is threatening Normalville — the same can be said of Dungeons & Dragons with that game’s monster slayers.

No, it’s got to be something else.

Something about a modern setting and “dark forces” manipulating things from the shadows? Some sort of urban fantasy like the World of Darkness (which even the Hunter game with humans against monsters probably comes closest to “horror”, but I really have doubts it should be classified that way). But that way also leads to Dresden Files.

Maybe it’s something that involves scaring the players? Making them uneasy, the way Dread does. (Does Call of Cthulhu evoke that feeling?) I might go with that.

We played The Armitage Files, which is an excellent campaign for Trail of Cthulhu, a GUMSHOE-driven game, but GUMSHOE didn’t click with the group. While I loved the heck out of the campaign, the system didn’t work with us — I’m not sure if we missed something key in the game or not. While we had some neat spooky bits, I don’t think we had anything creepy as Lacuna, Part One.

Like humor, I think most horror comes from play. If a game is set up to facilitate that, all the better.

Lacuna was a great horror game when I ran it.

lacunacoverIn Lacuna, you’re basically travelling into the land that everyone travels to when they dream. You’re hunting down serial killers in this dreamland — the murderer has already been caught and is sleeping right next to you — where you can cleanse his or her personality. It’s heavily implied that your characters were psychopaths who had been cleansed in the exact same manner. It’s also implied that the organization behind this rehabilitation isn’t reliable.

So, off to the city you go, where party balloons are filled with cockroaches, where the city’s spider-faced policemen hunt you down, where each action you take to survive might send your body in cardiac arrest.

As an aside, most horror games give crap advice for making a scary atmosphere. Turn the lights down low. Use candles. Use a soundtrack with scary music. No, no. What you want to do is turn all the lights on in the room. Then open the curtains and drapes to the night — all the windows in the room. It’s dark outside. Anyone could be watching. It’s a little unnerving. It’s a little unsettling. It puts your players in an uncomfortable spot. The unease comes in and that’s what you want. I did that in the Lacuna game we ran, and man, was it effective!