Vivid, Weird Adventures: Famous Athlete Template

In a prior post, I mentioned I'd be creating a series of templates for the Weird Adventures setting, and created a list of those templates. Then I mentioned I'd be doing those templates in the Vivid system instead, as per Gods of Gondwane.

However, creating a template is rather easy in the WaRP and Vivid Systems, so I decide to try and create full characters, then adjust later to finalize the templates. So here's my first, though I do have to get a nice pic for it -- I have a temporary one for now.

FAMOUS ATHLETE:

Saul "the Fireball" Barlow
Ex-Major League Pitcher

Roles
Scorching Southpaw Pitcher 4d
Two-fisted sports writer 3d

Assets
GUTS 4d
Throws a mean fastball 4d
Still in shape 3d

Has a way with words 2d
Keen eyesight 2d

Hooks
Bitten by adventuring bug
Harassed by Malebolge Family
Staunch believer in sportsmanship
Enemy: Samson Duggan -- former prizefighter exposed by Saul for throwing a fight
Article deadlines, darn it!

FATE 0d

Armchair Reviews: On the Docket for September 2012

What do I have to crank out this month?

Well, aside from the long-delayed Gods of Gondwane (which I have read already, and curse vehemently for its Vivid system that has me thinking of shifting away from the work I've done for WaRP + Weird Adventures), there are a number of other books:

• Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Event: Civil War -- The Initiative
• Fading Suns Revised (also known by me as Fading Suns 2.5)
• Blue Planet Revised (can't believe I'm reading this, as I have the older version and never played it)
• Worlds Apart (Traveller rules for a Fantasy RPG? Interesting.)
• Savage Worlds Deluxe Edition
• Doomed Slayers (a campaign premise & setting)
• and, of course, Shaintar for Savage Worlds

Good god, why does the industry keep cranking out interesting stuff?

D6 Digressions: Weird Adventures

My stilled Weird Adventures work has seen new inspiration due to several things: one, the new OGL Wanton Role Playing System and its parent RPG Over The Edge; two, a surprisingly addictive browser game calling itself Fallen London; and three, Naked City -- a contemporary fantasy anthology edited by Ellen Datlow.

Because of WaRP (the acronym for the Wanton Role Playing System), I've decided on a change in game system strategies, because writing and real life do demand more of my time than I'd anticipated. I'll be doing my initial statting out of templates inspired by WaRP and OpenD6 and, of course, Dariel Quiogue's Vivid system for the templates I listed before for Weird Adventures.

Because of Fallen London and Over The Edge, I've begun looking at characters, locales, and signifiers that really evoke the sense of the strange, the feeling that there's another place elsewhere that makes more sense, the gothic, moody, claustrophobic feel you get even out on the beach in a strange land where everyone seems to almost speak a language you don't understand and you have no idea how to get home or find someone you trust -- but have no choice.

Because of Naked City, there's a different sense of something I'd always looked for in what would later be called 'settings' or 'sandboxes' or whatever -- the feeling that no matter what direction you go, the GM has something ready for you and you can't fall off the edge of the world. In Naked City, there are different types of magic, different realities, and most importantly, different types of characters that aren't necessarily easily assessed by a quick scan of the surface and a quick review of their credit rating. Hidden depths and histories.

Weird Adventures: Recent History

One of the hurdles of creating characters in the world of Weird Adventures is hammering out the recent history to get a sense of what the recent past of the characters might have been influenced by. While this is normally fairly straightforward in a standard Pulp or D&D game, the combination of both in the setting can give one pause.

Fortunately, there is a major element of Weird Adventures history that works for both: The Great War. It serves two purposes:

• for the Pulp game, it is a direct analogue to the War to End All Wars, World War I;
• for the D&D game, it is an indirect analogue to a recent-ish apocalyptic event from which the glorious old empires did not recover.

 Here's a direct quote from the book:

Acid fog was released from sprayers to discourage attackers or to soften defenders. Amorphing solutions delivered via artillery shells sowed terror by making flesh malleable, dissolving limbs, or even melting soldiers together. Thaumaturgical explosives and blights laid waste to cities and farmlands. Rays of searing light or jets of intense cold fired from zeppelins cut swaths of destruction across enemy trenches. There were also weapons calculated to cause more terror than direct damage. Fear rays lead to mass panic in population centers. The battlefield fallen were briefly reanimated to turn on their grieving comrades. Squads of murderous constructs with the appearance of children’s toys were sent into unsuspecting villages in the dead of night.

It's a great broad stroke take on a major historical event that leaves enough space or lacuna for the GM to embellish great or little known events. For some inspiration on the matter, one might pick up the trade paperbacks of Arrowsmith (by Busiek and Pacheco) on what an eldritch WWI might look like. Check this out:

Holeeeeee Moley! Bane bearers! Front and center, bane bearers!

Weird Adventures: List of Adventurer Templates

One of the many excellent illustrations in the
book Weird Adventures.

The thought-provoking idea of mashing up old school D&D tropes with the pulp genre made me rethink how to group together the various types of adventurers. I wanted to adhere somewhat closely to the Fighter / Mage / Cleric / Thief approach, but there are certain pulp tropes that break out of those archetypes. I figure that Fighters are Muscle, that Clerics and Mages are Arcanists of different flavors, that Thieves can be broadened into different types of Expertise. Last but not least, there's the folks who have different types of Smarts and are quite useful in the modern idiom.

Along these lines, I began organizing a starting list of package deals (the standard HERO way of doing things), but looked at tweaking them more as templates ala the classic d6 Star Wars RPG, for faster character generation.

Here's my first pass on the list of customizable templates I'll be building for my attempt at Weird Adventures in the HERO System:

MUSCLE
Famous Athlete
Crusading Cop
Tough Gangster
Great White Hunter
Hulking Sailor
Sharp-eyed Soldier
Two-fisted hero
Wild Man

SMARTS
Eccentric Archeologist
Amateur Detective
Bookish Professor
Nosy Reporter
Curious Scientist
Sultry Spy

EXPERTISE
Reckless Aviator
Suave Dilettante
Grizzled Explorer
Eager Gadgeteer
Grease Monkey
Jazz Musician
Thrillseeking Criminal

ARCANA
Traveling Priest
Haunted Missionary
Gifted Innocent
Craven Wizard
Exotic Sorceress

I'm going back to the book to find out if I've missed some more setting-appropriate terminology for the templates.

Modern Era Classes -- Having Weird Adventures

Not as clumsy or random
as a pistol or a barrel-fed
tommy gun.

I've been thinking about this for a while -- what kind of classes or character templates does the Weird Adventures setting call for?

As a mash-up of traditional fantasy RPGs and a more modern pulpy feel, it makes sense that the classes would have a little of both. So I racked my brain for the very basic types of classes or templates on both sides.

For fantasy, it would seem that you'd have the basic fighter, mage, cleric, thief contingent along with their respective variants. For pulp, it's a little bit less defined; the modern world is rife with strange backgrounds and combinations of talents and skills and professions.

Since I decided to use the Hero System anyway for this exercise, the wide variety of possible classes isn't a problem. It's finding those sets of archetypes that are appropriate for the genre. And that starts with the basic campaign frame or the types of adventures you're looking at having. Let's start with the classic types of D&D adventures and see what Weird mash-ups we can inject into them.

Dungeon Adventures

For dungeons set in the wilderness, these could be your basic criminal overlord lairs, your strange tribes of creatures preying on nearby settlements, your awakening evil stirring, your portal to a strange underground world, your journey to the center of the earth (or hollow world)!

This was an awesome series of Tintin meets Cthulhu
Mythos faux covers. Maybe hecan do Tintin in
classic D&D modules as well?

For dungeons set in the cities, sewers and subways immediately come to mind. In addition to any of the options above, you can have underground communities that run by different rules from the surface world, and perhaps some strange remnants of a wondrous, long-forgotten era in the city's past that has found new uses by less than scrupulous inheritors.

Wilderness Adventures

Weird Adventures has a lot of interesting options for these. Monster hunting springs to mind, as does extending the reach of civilization into wild areas. Investigating strange rumors for wealth, power, knowledge or science are more than sufficient motivators for expeditions -- and expeditions to other lands or lost civilizations are a staple of both FRPGs and Pulp RPGs!

City Adventures

There's no shortage of story hooks for this (you've read Weird Adventures, right?), but the types of non-dungeon adventures I'd run would include the monster-loose-in-the-city trope, the city-predators-in-disguise trope, the series-of-strange-crimes trope, the find-the-macguffin trope, the murder-mystery trope, the break-the-curse trope, the race-to-get-all-the-pieces trope, the stranger-dies-and-passes-on-the-mystery trope, the dude/damsel-in-distress trope, it just goes on.

Okay, I think I've got a better handle on it. Next step is to come up with a campaign frame or two and start listing classes / templates.