D&D 5th Edition: Classic Modules

There's a group of folks doing some conversions of classic modules to 5th Edition. Hence the name: Classic Modules today.

My longtime fascination with Mystara has naturally brought my attention to several modules set in that milieu, which are:

B2: Keep on the Borderlands
B3: Palace of the Silver Princess
X2: Chateau d'Amberville (Castle Amber)

Naturally, you still need the original modules. But you can find those online at DriveThruRPG as well at www.dmsguild.com.

I really wish that all the classic Mystara adventures could be converted -- but for me, that's just compleatist talk.

I'm looking at maybe creating some output as well for the 5th Edition rules, but with an approach that's slightly different from the climb to 20th level. Or perhaps, it's a back-to-classics approach after all. I'll post again when I've got it clear in my head.

Whew, it's dusty!

I've been gone a while. Writing takes time, as many of you know. And I've been writing other things. Mostly stuff for work, or letters for my child's schooling, or reviewers for same child.

And then there's the fiction that I'm trying to get back into.

Will I come back to this? We'll see -- dipping my toes again into it. Some quick things:

• D&D 5th Edition is the rough basis for the current game I'm playing in. Not sure what elements aside from the game summaries I'll be posting. Maybe an alternating post -- game summaries, plus one or two elements from the game as a useful bit of crunch or fluff in the next day's post?
• Fading Suns has a lot of possible new systems out there, and I've not even gone through the current system and updated setting yet.
• And of course, Things I Learned From Champions has a few more posts, and options for expansion into other games...

Dark Corners of Calidar: Cosmological Musings

I was looking at old posts. One of them was from this post by Bruce Heard a couple of years ago:

It is a snapshot of the planets and other celestial bodies of Soltan Ephemeris. And I immediately flashed back to the following image from my post from some years back as well.

It is a a representation of the magnetic fields of the Earth, protecting it from radiation somewhat. The field is, of course, believed to be "generated by electric currents in the conductive material of its core, created by convection currents due to heat escaping from the core".

I have theorised the following for Enigmundia:

"There are conflicting tales about Enigmundia's Hollow Earth is because the 'center' of the world actually a collection of spheres that roil and revolve and rotate inside Enigmundia's aetheric core. 

What are in the spheres? Some are Ages, preserved spheres of magical reality that act as reservations for races, zoos for creatures, and prisons for gods, titans, demons, and other terrible creatures. Others are pure spheres of magical principle. Others are broken remnants of realities, dimensions, and universes, and perhaps a dead or dormant god or three. Despite their seemingly chaotic dance within the aetheric core, they have settled into a semi-regular pattern for certain intersections with the material plane, resulting in cities and worlds that intersect with Enigmundia on constant, daily, nightly, weekly, monthly, yearly cycles, or the occasional weird every 100 years. 

Their movement and interaction has made possible the current, mostly stable set of magical laws that work on a relatively thin layer of the world's material and aetheric atmosphere that eventually shift and even get chaotic as you go further out. There are, of course, nodes of strange magic that wander here and there, and (very) occasional catastrophic changes in the overall magical field due to some inherent instability in the Dance of Ages, leading to (if lucky) the subtle changing of magical rules to (if unlucky) a rewriting of the rules of reality. 

However, the existence of this field protects us from the outsiders, who -- try as they might -- cannot penetrate this powerful, chimeric, chaotic field of energy borne from the fierce interactions between powerful sources of reality bending Ages, spheres, and realities."

I suppose something similar can be applied to Calidar and its planets. Something to muse on further, as I begin to populate the Dark Corners of Calidar.

Fantasy, Super-heroics, and Science Fiction

Dark Corners of Calidar

I do enjoy the potential of Calidar, and I think I shall try to begin converting many of my old Mystara posts to Calidar.

There will be some adjustments to those old posts (and I'll probably link back to them), but the full backstory of Calidar can certainly be tweaked to fit better.

The swashbuckling feel of Calidar's fiction, for me, needs to be roughened up a bit. Perhaps darkened and expanded more than a little bit. I do enjoy the promise of the second Kickstarter, and hope to see it when it comes out.

In the meantime, I'll begin perusing the old posts for consolidation and rewriting.

West Coast Champions

As the Kickstarter for Aaron Allston's Strike Force draws to a close at the time of this writing, I suppose I must embrace the gravity of my nostalgia and my mental synergy with many of the principles of the Hero System, and my love for the super-heroic genre.

Just not sure what posts I'll be posting here. Right now, I'm leaning towards a setting -- West Coast Champions -- that builds upon a trio of cities I was quite fond of: San Angelo (from Gold Rush Games), Bay City (under the Fuzion imprint), and Night City (yes, it's from Cyberpunk 2020, but it's such a fit for the Dark Champions genre).

Right now, I think that it's a matter of figuring out what it will be, because I'm currently focused on the series Things I Learned From Champions.

It's an exploration of the system, really. And a realization that it's a deep well, some of which is very geeky and tightly focused in terms of fandom, and not as general as I've been posted in the past.

Confederation Chronicles

A return to the twice-interrupted attempt at a complete-ish SF setting temporarily labeled Confederation Chronicles. It was originally meant to be implemented in the Stars Without Number system, and I am now equally tempted by the D6 system and by the OSR-based White Star in concert with the original Stars Without Number system.

Star Wars and Star Trek and Andromeda and a bit of Battlestar Galactica -- and all of the treasured source materials I've collected for the genre over the years.

A Welcome Diversion

But I'll be honest, it's all meant to de-stress and distract from the stress of many things going on in life right now.

Podcast Reactions: Play On Target -- Trust

Once again, a set of reactions to the Play On Target podcast. This time, the discussion centred around the issue of trust in RPGs. I highly recommend listening in on this one, as the issue is responsible for many a dissolved campaign (and even gaming groups).

Interpersonal Trust

To my mind, many of these 'violations of trust' seem to center around a case of a difference in expectations -- between the GM and the Players, or between the Players themselves.

They can be as mild as a difference in expectations for a horror game -- perhaps where the GM meant psychological horror, while the Players understood it to be supernatural horror.

On the other hand, it could be an outright violation of general etiquette, which we need not tackle as the differences of social maturity in groups (especially in the stereotypical demographic of gamers) are not really my area of interest right now.

What does intrigue me for this topic are cultural differences that we end up blindsided by, because gaming is a very different pastime from sports, joining a book club, or getting drunk at the local watering hole. While we may pretend to be different people at these events, or show only a particular side of ourselves at these gatherings, you're still generally being judged as 'yourself'. In RPG sessions, there's a "player character" that you can hide behind, or be confused by, especially if -- as mentioned prior -- the stereotypical demographic isn't that well-versed in social skills or introspection.

Admittedly, gamer culture is young, and varies from play group to play group, sp there's no commonly referred to body of knowledge for newbies to refer to. Solutions to many problems appear to be common sense, but rely on anticipating (through experience or a certain level of human empathy and cultural sensitivity) that specific problems are likely to surface. 

And to complicate matters --

Game System & Trust

That's right, sometimes the game purposely works to make the PCs betray each other, and thus (potentially) have the players feel betrayed as well. In real life.

If I recall correctly, Phoenix Command really messed with trust in the GM and the game itself. If I recall correctly, the players's book sets up a particular kind of game (rah-rah we're the best nation in the world), and the GMs book tells a different (post-apocalyptic rebuilding) game campaign.

Paranoia was a game that gave every character a secret society and a mutant power (both grounds for treason), and the secret societies often gave conflicting sub-missions to the current mission that the Troubleshooters were assigned to.

Cold City had a mechanic (much like to an optional rule in Night's Black Agents) that encouraged PCs to build up trust between the characters, so that when betrayal took place it would give a bonus to a particular action.

In these cases, these are by design -- with varying degrees of success per gaming group I'm sure. (After all, not everyone takes to the resultant lying and backstabbing in boardgames like Diplomacy).

However, +Lowell Francis points out that some games themselves violate trust, suggesting certain kinds of things about the gameplay and setting, but aren't supported by the rules.

I know how he feels, and it's part of the reason I totally support bell curve systems like the Hero System vs. any linear systems (unless they're coupled with something like the point-spend mechanic in Gumshoe). They make your PCs feel competent, instead of lucky amateurs.

Fading Suns' Victory Points had that problem, if you looked at the ratings of stat and skill levels. So did the classic WOD system (5 pips makes you one of the best in the world? Sure didn't feel like it), and one of my favourite systems for other reasons -- Interlock.

Summaries and Future Reactions

In short, the topic touches on many surprising aspects of the gaming experience. Once again, the Play On Target crew have unearthed a key topic that can be mined in more detail in future posts.

Which I hope to do some day soon.

Weekend Roundup: Deities of Erol Otus and other Makers

It started when +Chris Kutalik, Lord of the Hill Cantons, posted about some apparent deities and demons that the esteemed Erol of the Otuses had created in a little AD&D tome you might know called Deities & Demigods.

And he proceeded to name them. Not content with this act of co-creation, he then set his sights on another image from the same tome, the cover page illustration, and named them as well.

Spurred into action, +trey causey set about naming this latter pantheon himself, and came up with the following:

It has spurred me to not only follow anyone else who has begun their own pantheons based on this artwork, but also to look at the pantheons of Calidar that +Bruce Heard is currently working on as part of his recently funded Kickstarter for an expansion of the Calidar canon.

Thoughts about gods are in the air, it seems.

UPDATE:

It seems that +Mark Craddock is working on a related project. His ongoing work on the Clerics of the Otus Pantheon can be found at his blog.

Things I Learned from Champions: The Multiverse Is My (Potential) Sandbox (part 01)

Champions and the Hero System have been on my mind of late for several reasons: the Aaron Allston Strike Force Kickstarter, the DC RPG Hero Points Podcast under the Fire & Water podcast network. So when a recent talk of sandboxes and railroads slammed into the space for RPG thought, my immediate thought was: in a Supers RPG, The Multiverse Is My (Potential) Sandbox.

All my worlds, torn asunder!

What do you mean by sandbox?

You may know what a sandbox is, but my understanding may be different from yours -- so I'll expound on my particular interpretation. As I mentioned in a very old post, my understanding of a sandbox is

"...a style of play where players are dumped into a campaign setting that can be as small as a dungeon or as large as a  world map and are free to pursue whatever agendas they wish..."

Furthermore, my understanding is that sandboxes are often positioned as a diametric opposite to the railroad, wherein a gaming session / adventure must follow a rigid sequence of events, with little tolerance for deviation.

One key point about sandboxes is the implication of edges. In theory, you can do whatever you want within the borders of that sandbox, but beyond the borders -- there's nothing prepared.

But in the Superhero genre, there's a precedent for borderless adventures. Sure, Daredevil may be dealing with crime in Hell's Kitchen -- but from time to time Japanese Ninjas come 'round and kidnap him or his loved ones forcing a trip to the Land of the Rising Sun (and Sailor Moon). And occasionally, there's a team adventure in the Savage Land or some other strange corner of the universe. It's worse for characters who can travel to the other side of the world in the blink of an eye, or can sift through millions of minds in a split second, or can slide-shift into other dimensions.

In fact, that was one of the earliest things I got into when building my character -- years of frustration at not being able to move far enough or often enough in other RPGs led to a high DEX, high SPEED, high movement character build. Someone who could move across the battle mat in a single move (nothing compared to the more experienced characters who could, actually, race across the city in a single segment.

So, at power levels like this, there's no borders to where they can go during adventures, right?

No borders, no sandbox -- right?

The Invisible Borders of a Supers Sandbox

There actually are some borders in a Supers Sandbox. Some of these I've used, and others are those I've learned from my betters in Metahuman settings:

Beware: Here Be Boredom

For all the criticism of super-heroes being reactive, only waiting for crime to take place before doing anything about it, super-hero campaign players are rarely anything but reactive. Give them a mystery and they'll do anything -- even ill-considered, or downright stupid things -- to get to the bottom of it. Hit them with an attack that almost kills them, and they'll buy up a defense for it -- even if it doesn't fit their character concept.

The downside is, for those players who haven't learned yet that part of the super-hero genre involves their characters getting into progressively worse situations before getting out of them, they can start to turtle.

Ain't nothing wrong with being a turtle. As long as you're
teenaged, mutated, and ninja'd!

Rather than strike hard and fade away into the night (only old fans of TMNT know that one), they very unheroically pull into their shells and hide. They avoid encounters with the enemy, avoid following up leads on villains, avoid interactions with their NPCs or innocents in need.

This is why the view that Call of Cthulhu PCs are unheroic is flawed: there's a lack of appreciation about what true heroism is. Being powerful can mean having the fury of a millions suns coursing through your veins, but being heroic lies in using (or not using) that power even if it means that you might die.

So, the reward for repeated cowardice in my games -- beyond shame or ridicule -- is just boredom. Nothing happens to you. No one bothers you. The digits of your wall clock cycle through the seconds and minutes slowly. You overhear people talking about their work, their love lives, their cats, their trip to Japan where they watched a Go tournament. All while their teammates have the time of their lives, risking their lives and sacred fortunes to fight for what is right and true and just in the world.

No, they're not being forced to go back to the "storyline of the GM". They're just discovering that, just like in the 'real world', there are places where nothing interesting is happening right this second / minute / year / century. They have exercised their player agency to place their characters in a state of stasis.

In D&D terms, this is the equivalent of the PCs that refuse to go into any dungeon, or pursue any adventure hook or rumour that the DM dangles before them. They just get to sit in the tavern and ignore the growing table of increasingly drunk mysterious strangers in cloaks grumbling loudly about adventurers these days.

The Gravity of the Situation

Star Trek reference. My job is done here.
Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnn!

On the other hand, before we pull the trigger on that solution, Supers GMs often employ another technique to pull their players' PCs back into the thick of things. Perhaps they have a beloved NPC get kidnapped by the villain (a classic), or a helpless innocent is endangered, or a person / place / thing / ideal very dear to the player or the PC is threatened.

Or, out of sheer coincidence, that dame/dude picks the player's life to walk into, out of all the gin-joints in Gotham City.

These events, very much in the pulp-rooted traditions of two-fisted action and wall-to-wall suspense, will often bring the heroes -- who might be traipsing around in the backwaters of Earth-C -- back to where the action is.

The benefit of this kind of approach is that PCs are exercising a very traditional player agency ability -- the ability to get yourself into the trouble you choose! Yeah, you may not want to go into space to fight the Zekrit Warz, but you're sure down with knocking sense into fools who're trying to grab that bespectacled kid with the lisp and the adorable little chihuahua!

If you're enjoying these movie references, check out the
Film and Water podcast. It's a hoot!

One might say that these are just adventure hooks (as they would be called in the classic D&D milieus), but in a Supers campaign they do act as a sort of border -- much in the way that an event horizon acts as the edge of a black hole. No matter how far the players try to flee, these often pull them back in.

Well, most of the time. The real trick is having some kind of variety to your approaches. Sometimes it's a carrot (you'll get some information on a villain, some useful connection, some artefact of power that will help you in this adventure or in the campaign at large, a new NPC, etc.) and sometimes it's a stick (death, injury, social or financial consequences, ridicule or anger from the general populace, or other heroes hunting you down -- for a crime you didn't commit).

The Weirdness Magnet

This boardgame appeared in the pages of the comic. Fun!

I first encountered this in the Blue Devil comics, where it's posited that when the titular character -- a stuntman by trade -- gets fused into his costume by a blast of eldritch energy, he's been turned into a weirdness magnet. That is, unlike when he was a normal stuntman, he now 'coincidentally' runs into super-villain schemes, supernatural plots to destroy/transform the world, meets new and super-powered humans and aliens, and generally lives a life of constant excitement and bewilderment.

Yes, you no longer need to find trouble; trouble finds you! Constantly.

In fact, if you have to live a life of peace, you'll have to earn it -- by figuring out what the common thread of all these ninja attacks have (why do all their clan names have an appendage in them?), or by figuring out who's behind all these attacks on their loved ones (why do crooks always rob the store my mom's at?), or by determining why they're only ever safe from being bothered by homicidal maniacs and swarms of locusts when they're near holy ground or a holy symbol (I think someone done cursed you, Johnny. Now get outta my house, I gotta turtle.)!

Audience participation

What are some of the borders that you implemented (or experienced) in your super-heroic campaign? 

An Occidental Asian Geek: The Hardy Boys

It is hard to overestimate the impact of my Saturday trips to the bookstore with my grandmother. Every single Saturday, her day, she'd take my sister(s) and me to a bookstore to buy at least one book.

One of my early reading genres centered around mysteries, and I suppose that's where the Hardy Boys came in.

The Appeal of the Hardy Boys

Setting aside for now why a Filipino boy would identify with two brothers set in a generic American city, somehow continuously getting into adventures -- let me lay out why I liked 'em.

• Brothers and friends: early in Grade School, with only three channels to watch (and usually only one good thing to watch on any given night, if lucky), there was a lot of time spent with siblings, cousins, friends and sorta friends doing stuff. This makes it natural to want to go on adventures with them -- especially when you're young and think you're immortal.
• Semi-autonomy: with their famous detective father, Fenton, usually gone, Frank & Joe often get to do stuff that they can't do when given a direct order by their parent. Aunts and Uncles giving orders were often loopholes because they weren't parents; the important thing is that they could go out and do stuff without technically violating their dad's wishes.
• Be a detective: as a kid with little true influence or control over their lives and the world at large, there's a bit of wish fulfilment in the areas of righting wrongs, being recognised for it, and cleverly outwitting the adults committing crimes. Also, it was great to be exposed to the (somewhat outdated, somewhat stereotypical, sometimes accurate) work of a detective.
• Collector Mentality: somehow, the appeal with the episodic nature of the books, and the great appearance of these books on a long shelf, made me very focused on completing my collection (and reading every single one).
• Cozy Adventure: of course, the concept of a different adventure every novel was fantastic. I loved having that feeling that the boys and their friends were in danger, but -- in the back of my head -- I always knew the rules that the heroes never die, the heroes never lose were enforced and I just wanted to see how they'd get out of their scrapes this time.

Someone Like Me

Okay, here we go on the Filipino angle on this bit of Americana. Arguably, there's no way that one can concievably think that either of the Hardy Boys would look like me. But somehow I identified with it.

Sure, there is a strong influence of the U.S. over our culture: TV shows imported, books brought in, American Top 40 countdowns on our radio. But I felt that a large part of it was that child(ish) desire for independence, for relevance, for autonomy in my life and a sense of adventure.

And yet, the American Dream was very much imported into our country (as it has been into many countries), so there's a bit of that also in certain places. The dream of a stronger middle class, rather than that horrible gap between the rich and the poor; the dream of a better functioning system of law & order; the dream of a world where the guilty will ultimately be found and punished.

So is it possible that I can't really draw that line of division easily because of that long-standing influence.

However, I do recognise that this series of novels really did draw me into the world of Pulp adventure tropes -- and I liked it, and look fondly back on it these days. I'm curious to see if I can catch that old TV Show and see how it holds up.

On the Radar: Joe Dever's Lone Wolf

There is a game available on Steam, Google Play, and the iOS app store that takes the classic Lone Wolf gamebook experience and upgrades it for the digital age! It's called Joe Dever's Lone Wolf, and the free 1st chapter I've tried on my iPad is awesome!

There's that great thrill of 'creating' your own iteration of Lone Wolf -- primary stats, Kai disciplines, weapons, simplified and enhanced on the tablet. It still has that storybook feel -- right up until the moment you encounter combat, or have to use an ability, or have to pick a lock.

So, yeah, you don't select a random number these days. There's some skill involved -- but hey, you can upgrade gear and stuff too. And the combat engine is fun to go through. Your Kai abilities also help you out more in combat now (I like doing the Darth Vader on nearby objects on my opponents using Mind Over Matter), especially one ability which seems better than Healing in combat.

Lockpicking is a pain, though. Getting the hang of it.

An Occidental Asian Geek (preamble)

While it is true that much of my perception of the America was gleaned through the popular culture that reached our little South East Asian archipelago's shores, I also realized that much of it was also shaped through my particular areas of interest:

• Science Fiction Movies, TV Shows, Books
• Fantasy Movies, TV Shows, Books
• Pulp Movies, TV Shows, Books
• Comic Books
• Cartoons
• and, of course, RPGs

Therefore, once in a while, I'll be posting about my musings on these influences on my life and what I learned / mis-learned from them -- and how they reflected on my gaming life as well.


Upcoming posts in this series are:

An Occidental Asian Geek: Holmes, Poirot, and Marple
An Occidental Asian Geek: Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and the Three Investigators
An Occidental Asian Geek: The Fabulous Five and The Secret Seven
An Occidental Asian Geek: Peanuts
An Occidental Asian Geek: Trust Your Feelings, Luke
An Occidental Asian Geek: He's dead, Jim.
An Occidental Asian Geek: Doctor Who?
An Occidental Asian Geek: Agent 007 and Agent 00
An Occidental Asian Geek: Melancholy American Music
An Occidental Asian Geek: Two British Invasions

2015: Year of the Hamill

Mark Hamill -- who hasn't been idle since the original Star Wars trilogy, by the way -- seems to have had a banner year. He appeared in the movie Kingsman: The Secret Service not as himself (to be truer to the comic book source material), but as a new character called James Arnold.

He also reprised his role of the Trickster on The Flash TV show, and -- as shown on the internet (and in the movie, of course) -- he has once again stepped into the shoes of Luke Skywalker in the latest episode in the new Star Wars movie, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Though he may be in there only to pass the torch, it's good to see him in the franchise again.

Hamill, of course, is a genuine fan of many things geeky so it pleases me to see him active in two of my favorite fandom arenas (DC Comics and Star Wars).

Time to fire up my old Batman: The Animated Series vids to get a good helping of his other spectacular role, as the voice of the Joker.

2016: The Year of D6 and Diceless Gaming?

2015 was largely eaten up by other priorities. But this coming year I plan to post a lot more regularly.

Oddly enough, my game reading has begun to follow a pattern that may help in promoting RPG play in the Philippines (in some small way). And that is: studying games whose mechanics use regular d6s, cards, and/or tokens.

The games currently taking up digital space in my tablet for reading are:

• Night's Black Agents
• Lords of Olympus
• Lords of Gossamer and Shadow
• Champions Complete
• Fiasco
• FATE (Core and Accelerated)

Projects involving these for next year include:

• A FATE treatment for the Calidar setting
• Night's Black Agents + Dracula Dossier + Doctor Who setting (Torchwood / U.N.I.T. special ops crew vs. vampires)
• A continuation of the Lords of Olympus in Mystara idea
• Lords of Gossamer and Shadow + Doctor Who + TimeLords + Sapphire & Steel mashup

One can dream, yes?

You All Meet In An Artisinal Taco Bar

From ChicagoMag's article on Chicago Taco joints.

The much-maligned trope of a party meeting in a bar often gets addressed by suggesting other ways that the party (regardless of genre) is pulled into the action. However, there are benefits to meeting up to get briefings in public places:

1. Unless the person briefing you has their own facilities, there is often a need to find a place to talk business. 
2. Even if the person briefing you has their own place, if the proposed activity is shady (or needs to be deniable), then it makes sense to meet elsewhere -- someplace where nobody knows your name.
3. If, however, the person briefing you has little reason to stick their neck out, he/she/it may opt to have a meeting on neutral ground (probably with some backup) in order to stay safe.

What other options are there to the classic bar meet-up? One only has to think of the many places that freelancer briefings (or Multi-Level Marketing meet-ups) are held, why they are held there, and how these might be able to add to your adventure or campaign.

Favorite Cuisine

It could be a traditional Japanese restaurant, a run-down but consistently delicious hotdog bar, or a trendy Filipino-Asian diner. The benefits for this kind of venue are:

• little world details: you can talk about how this kind of cuisine is prepared in your setting -- how popular it is, how difficult it is to get ingredients, how the ethnic mix is handled in the city you're in, and how well-known it is in the local community;
• varied clientele: it could have a more working-class slant to its patrons, or perhaps a strong tourist segment that shows up on the weekends, or even a crowd of regulars who can advise the PCs about the person they're meeting with, and give warnings
• interesting interruptions: perhaps the next course arrives just at a point of much needed suspense, or maybe you can establish a mini-subplot of a wrong order that pays off later in your adventure (misheard order, reversed numbers), or even introduce those sometimes annoying birthday songs for another nearby table just as the client you're meeting with is getting to the good part.

Generic Coffee Shop

A counterpoint to the sometimes seedy, sometimes oh-so-cool bar meetup is the relaxed and painfully crafted atmosphere of a leading coffeehouse chain. The benefits for this venue are:

• contrast: relaxed, friendly atmosphere of the baristas and patrons vs. the subtle menace and mystery of your client and her mission;
• fauxnanimity: don't they always ask your name after you order your drink? It may catch some players off-guard and force them to either reveal their true names or give obviously false ones;
• strange mix of patrons: in the modern world, there are people who are just hanging out, others who are getting ready for their full day of work, others who are dealing with angst and breakups, others on dates, others who are working at the coffee shop, and others -- who are there to keep an eye on the PCs and are painfully bad at it.

Let's Read: The Dracula Dossier (Operation Edom: Eyes Only Briefing)

After the Foreword and the biblical quote referring to Lillith and Edom, we run into a short, succinct inciting incident for the whole campaign:

"In 1893, a visionary British Naval Intelligence Department spymaster codenamed 'Peter Hawkins' launched a plan to recruit the perfect spy: a vampire."

I can already see the scene with the crew, hunted by vampires and their thralls, knee-deep in sorting out warring conspiracies, then having this little nugget of info dropped in their laps. Cue the swearing, shaking of heads, and sarcastic revisitings of the ironic phrase: "What could possibly go wrong?"

And then, we're treated to a two page summary of what has happened as a result of the green lighting of that audacious, perilous decision from 1893 to the present. It is at this point that I run into one of my weaknesses -- dates and timelines.

A naked year or date often makes my mind go blank, unless I get lucky (or someone helpfully tosses out a name, incident, or location), as I scramble to establish the context. Fortunately, as I went through the general broad eras of the campaign, there were helpful labels that I kept in mind as I read the overviews of multiple generations of operatives somehow continuously thinking that the inciting incident above idea was a good one, and might just need some tweaking to make it work this time.

So, to my mind, the eras were:

• Classic Dracula (actual book subtitle: Bold Experiments)
• World War II (actual book subtitle: Desperate Measures)
• The Cold War (actual book subtitle: Hidden Hunts)
• Modern Day (actual book subtitle: Black Assets)

One thing that also made it difficult to follow, my date / timeline weakness notwithstanding, was the necessary vagueness regarding key events during these eras. Since the actual events and conspiracies will be filled up in the conspyramid as the sandbox investigative campaign moves on, most of the unfolding events in the summaries were done on broad strokes, to leave space for the players and the Director to play in.

Reactions to Classic Dracula

"A meet was set and made, a safe house and a headquarters in England prepared. Then it all started to go wrong."

This is the one I'm most comfortable with, as it's the type of stuff I expected from the main premise -- the novel Dracula being a sanitised version of the original after-action report of the failed op. Some historically resonant names and links to Bram Stoker. I do like the references to earthquakes coinciding with vampiric power, even if I'm not so sold on telluric vampires yet.

It seems to me that part of the joy of playing in, or uncovering the events in this era would stem primarily on how the true events diverged from the fictional account.

Reactions to World War II

"Rather than bring Dracula to England, however, this time the plan was simply to let him out and turn him against the Hitler-allied Antonescu government — if necessary, to back him as Romania’s new leader."

Quite on board with using Dracula in time of desperate need for Britain, when it was alone in Europe against the rising tide of expansionist warfare. However, my lack of knowledge in the lesser known theatres of war during WWII make it hard for me to envision what happened here, beyond the generic SNAFU labels and Murphy's Law invocations. (Note: read up on Antonescu and Romania in World War II).

At this point, tempting as a Dirty Dozen meets Castle Dracula exploit might be, this seems to be more of an interesting era to uncover clues, history, and trace how certain artifacts found their way into the hands of modern operators. It's the closest era, of course, to the original Edom operation -- and many innovations in modern espionage have their birth during this time.

Or perhaps one of the capstones at the end can serve as a climactic ending for this era?

(Aside: funny, I'm getting a hint of a Blackadder vibe to each era as a season. The same souls drawn back into each era as Dracula re-emerges to further his plans?)

Reactions to The Cold War

"Edom needed to find Dracula’s leavebehind network in London — after all, the analysts realized in retrospect, he had had months to build it back in 1894, and the power to keep it alive long after his seeming demise."

The closest era to modern day, and the classic espionage era (James Bond, I-Spy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., George Smiley, and a certain novel known as Declare). And while Edom was certainly questionable from the beginning, the background of this era -- with mole hunts and double agents and defections and betrayals -- makes it very inviting to run. Of course, my relative ignorance beyond cinematic tradecraft would hamstring me a bit, but for me this is the quintessential Government Spies vs. Vampires period. It should be noted that I have memories of a vampire in a Starsky & Hutch episode, so even a U.S. interlude or two wouldn't be out of place.

At this point, however, the campaign seems very daunting. Starting from the modern era and working backwards seems like more of a challenge than the chronological play-through -- but then, how would the actual Dracula Dossier artefact be used?

Then again, since I'm barely into the book, I'm sure that these questions and more are addressed later.

Reactions to Modern Day

"She began to keep her own record, annotating the Dossier as her predecessors had. She gave herself the workname “Hopkins” as she annotated the bloody fingerprints of Edom — and the trail of corpses left by Dracula."

Oh, there it is -- the narrative hook explained. Since Night's Black Agents is more of Jason Bourne meets Dracula, there is more of that independent operator vibe here.

Right now, it occurs to me that the introduction of Dracula has to be handled very well -- the campaign bears his foul name, after all -- and he cannot be introduced as campy or as a joke. Somehow the tone has to be sustained as the players are brought into the campaign and peel away the layers of secrets and deaths to be presented with choices and threats.

It also seems to be that, given this two-page set of broad stroke events and 'secrets' of the default campaign background, both the initial era and the modern era are most clear in my mind. The middle eras are a mess of questions and actual historical events and classic tropes for now in my mind.

I may be detouring from the linear reading of the back. Definitely need to see the proposed defaults and spines, but then I may jump ahead a bit to see some juicy characters, locations, and macguffins before returning to the earlier sections.

We'll see!

Let's Read: The Dracula Dossier (TOC and Skim)

The Dracula Dossier is a massive reading endeavour. In addition to the Director's Handbook, there's the Dracula Unredacted document, and Hawkin's Papers. So where to start?

Director's Handbook

Started with this, because it promises to provide the overall framework of the campaign and should explain how Dracula Unredacted (the original after-action report that was redacted and rewritten into the novel we know as Dracula) and Hawkin's Papers (various in-game artifacts and in-game documents that help reveal the mystery) fit into the running of the game.

I suppose that when trying to understand how to run what is essentially a sandbox investigative game (!), it's best to understand what the default / likely scenario(s) will be, before attempting your own spin.

As usual, I did a quick review of the Table of Contents (TOC) and skim through the pages, to get my bearings -- an overview, identify areas of interest to skip ahead to, become familiar with terms.

Table of Contents

Foreword, Operation Edom, How To Use This Book

Comfortingly, the first few chapters and sections do take the time to quickly explain what all the books are used for, what the default campaign might be like (with suggestions for variety and customisation), and some key questions that a sharp-minded Director might want answered right away, before going any further (such as: "In Life, Which Historical Figure, If Any, Was Dracula?").

The 1894 Network, Opposition Forces, People

Then, it moves on to detail the various characters from the 1894 Network and to the modern era. The book gives options for each character being exactly what they seem to be, or as an agent of Edom, a minion of Dracula, or some other twist that will not only keep your Players on their toes, but will offer satisfying twists and turns to your campaign.

Nodes, Locations, Objects

There is a LOT of material here for allies, enemies, third parties that may or may not oppose you. There are also fleshed out Nodes (organisations, corporations, conspiracies) to complicate matters for your players, various key Locations across Europe and in the United States and Israel that your players may want to visit (or be spirited away to), and some Objects of interest that may provide clues (like Renfield's Journal) or valuable anti-vampire utility (like Vanderpool Garlic) or unwanted violent attention due to its value (like the Cameos of Dracula).

Scenario Spines & Capstones

There are three scenario spines provided (London Heat, Covering Our Tracks, For the Dead Talk Fast), all of which give Directors a good idea of the types of scenarios that can be used to introduce players to the overall campaign, and give a feel of how some improvisation might go while running it.

There are four capstones provided (Zalmoxis Rising, Dracula's Mill, Russian Roulette, The Tomb of Dracula) which give you options, or perhaps seed ideas, on how you can end your overall campaign on a climactic note.

All these are structured in such a way that it makes comparing and comprehending the materials relatively straightforward, even as a Director might already be planning modifications to the materials provided.

Campaign Frames, Looking Glass: Bucharest, and Indices

The Campaign Frames are interesting -- apparently some non-traditional / high-challenge level campaigns for the advanced Director -- but will require more detailed analysis when I get to it.

Looking Glass: Bucharest gives some much-needed detail to this exotic campaign location.

Indices helps you find things in the book, that you might need at a critical campaign prep (or game running) juncture.

Overall

Seems like a very meaty book to dive into. So, we'll get to that in the next instalment!

On The Radar: Equinox

The Equinox RPG (www.equinox-rpg.com) by Vagrant Workshop is out. But wait -- it was already out in 2012, right? And then out again at the end of 2014 (right when I started my new job, which is probably why I missed it)?

A bit confused, but will figure it out later, because there are several books for it:

• the Equinox Setting Guide
• the Equinox Match System Guide
• the Equinox Storygame Guide

Based on naming conventions, some of the write-ups, and the bundles in RPGNow (see below), there are at least two different rulesets (Match System or Storygame) for the setting:

• Match System bundle
• Storygame bundle

Also, according to the Setting Guide, you're free to approach the setting (if you didn't already know that you're allowed to used whatever ruleset you want) with you whatever ruleset you want:

"You should be able to play in the equinox setting with any generic game system available. Cortex, D20 Future, Fate, HERO, GURPS, Savage Worlds, Open D6, TriStat, Unisystem, etc—all of these feature all the mechanics needed for this and come with guidelines for adapting futuristic settings. Just add a shot of magic!
In case you seek to make your adaption 'official:' we’re open for submissions. Contact us and we’ll find a way to get your rules adaption out in the open."

Sounds like a plan. Time to add these to the read pile! Setting first, of course.

Philippine Gumshoe: Smaller & Smaller Circles

Stepping away from the more fantastic elements of Gumshoe to a straightforward procedural hunt for a serial killer, my immediate instinct is trying to set it in a local setting. Sadly, there aren't many local novels that stray into genre fiction. F. H. Batacan's Smaller and Smaller Circles is one of those rare books.

When F.H. Batacan first published Smaller and Smaller Circles—now acknowledged as the Philippines’ first crime novel—she was calling for a revolution. Or maybe two. 

Early in Batacan’s prizewinning novel, the hero-sleuth, Jesuit priest and forensic anthropologist Father Gus Saenz, reveals his personal dream of overturning the popular national myth that there are no serial killers in the Philippines... F.H. Batacan also started a literary revolution by producing what is now widely acknowledged as the first Filipino crime novel. In the decade that has passed since its publication, others have begun to follow suit, and now the genre is burgeoning. (from the Soho Press blog) 

The idea of having the a priest as the protagonist / detective in the Philippines is an interesting one, as it affords some latitude for the 'amateur sleuth' archetype in the predominantly Catholic country. They  have a measure of respect that allows some access to otherwise prohibited locales of people, and their position in the political landscape of the Philippines affords them some protection from some of the ensconced powers-that-be.

Also, the nature of local crime scene investigation is exposed as being somewhat behind the more modern U.S. and U.K. approaches, rationalising why observation, deduction, psychology, and ground-pounding work are more than valid in a modern world where TV shows like C.S.I. became a phenomenon.

Perhaps more similar amateur detective archetypes can be thought up for a Philippine Gumshoe campaign.

Let's Read: The Dracula Dossier (Preamble)

Not the cover for The Dracula Dossier,
but a cover by John Cassaday for a
comic book series in 2009.

I backed the Kickstarter for The Dracula Dossier, and I'm finally getting down to a serious reading of it. Many Gumshoe games have piqued my interest, but I've yet to play or run any game.

The Dracula Dossier intrigues me because (a) it involves the seminal vampire in the seminal vampire story; (b) it layers in not only a secret history of the original story, but it also; (c) layers in more secret histories that bring it up to the current day. Here's the summary, in the book's own words:

The Dracula Dossier (without italics) is an in-game artifact, the first draft of Bram
Stoker’s Dracula. Written as an after-action report for Operation Edom in 1894, it was classified by Her Majesty’s Government, to be issued on a need-to-know basis to Edom operatives on later missions. Two of those operatives, tasked for Edom missions in 1940 and 1977, added their own annotations to one copy of the Dossier, providing a few answers and many leads. 

In 2011, that copy fell into the hands of a third denizen of Britain’s shadow realm, who added her own annotations — and when she disappeared, it showed up in your player characters’ computers, or in their hands. The Dracula Dossier is the annotated version of Dracula Unredacted. 

The Dracula Dossier (with italics) is a collaborative, improvisational Night’s Black Agents campaign, in which heroic Agents hunt and (one hopes) finally destroy Dracula, while they evade (and likely expose) the secret vampire program within MI6 known as Edom.

Bottom line: it's a lot of reading. But it does intrigue me in terms of how this improvisational campaign works. It seems a lot like (gasp) a sandboxy investigative modern game. It sounds really cool as an overall concept, and it also uses one of the things I loved about the classic Call of Cthulhu RPG: lots of in-game artefacts that are potentially critical clues or hints for the game.

I have a mad idea that I'll be able to shoehorn The Dracula Dossier into a Doctor Who RPG-powered game, with the team members all a part of U.N.I.T. -- but for now, I'll just read.

Armchair Reviews: DWAITAS -- The Ninth Doctor Sourcebook

I approached the review of this sourcebook with some trepidation. After all, the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space (DWAITAS) series of sourcebooks had been solid entries every time – with the Doctor series churning out astoundingly consistent source material in the tone and spirit of each of the eras, despite the volume (or paucity thereof) of actual episodes during that Doctor’s era.

However, this one was the incarnation of the Doctor that revived the franchise on TV -- and one that had eight sourcebooks preceding it. Was it going to live up to expectations? Or might it lapse into a boring re-tread of what had gone before?

A Solid Framework

Dedicated collectors and followers of this particular series of sourcebooks would, I’m sure, agree that some aspects of repetition are actually the strength of this series.

I’m very fond of the presence of the initial chapter of each of these books that give an overview of the peculiarities and strengths of this particular Doctor’s personality, and the character of the adventures during this era.

The roll call of protagonists and antagonists (statted out, with descriptions and explorations of their role during this era, of course) is also a given. But it’s unarguably essential to a sourcebook like this. It’s also very well done: character sheets for each with a great selection of iconic imagery for each. As always, I love that the TARDIS has its own writeup.

Perhaps that’ll be my next campaign idea: a Doctorless campaign with “companions” recruited by the TARDISes of various incarntations. Hm, a Storm of TARDISes has a nice ring to it.

Unique Challenges

This era only saw one Season / Series, meaning a quite a bit less source material in terms of episodes (we’ll come back to the Eight Doctor’s sourcebook as soon as I pick it up), but these episodes – in conjunction with the section tackling handling adventures in this era in greater detail – really give players a lot of options in running Doctor-y or Doctorless campaigns with the mix of personal drama, neo-pulpish adventure, and witty banter.

I really have to say that these synopses are well-written – and have been over this series of because. Concise, but filled with easy-to-follow details (useful for the GM who hasn’t quite reviewed every single episode in the given era, and may not have the time to do so). They also always raise concerns regarding continuity (that some sharp-minded GMs and Players will likely tackle in or out of play.

There’s also great notes on running your players through the episode as an adventure – fantastic I’m sure for the fans who’ve always wanted a chance to be a real companion of The Doctor.

Furthermore, the smaller pool of adventures does give the writing team an opportunity to really go in-depth and all-out in mining and milking these episodes for (a) adventures; (b) spin-off adventures; (c) motifs and leitmotifs of the Doctor’s adventures to reinforce the feel; (d) ideas on using location and enemies in different or expanded ways.

For the Fans

There is some added benefit here for me as a fan – some of my favorite episodes can be found here (“The End of the World, Dalek, Father’s Day, and The Parting of Ways), along with the first appearances of some enigmatic continuing characters. Much of the analysis and extrapolation here helps feed that fan prediliction for speculation, and is a rich source for both theories, and possible adventuring in the continuum of Time & Space that the Doctor inhabits.

Highly recommended.

Game To Play: Worlds In Peril -- Redline

Here's my current character (perhaps incorrectly created) for Worlds In Peril.

This is my take on a speedster. A riff on the Barry Allen version of the Flash.

Shifting Priorities: Read, Review, Play, Run

Time is such a valuable commodity. Commitments to work, family, and the realities of time, distance, and traffic in the Philippines make it hard to get game time. So I must decide how to handle all my gaming interests by classifying them.

Read

Games, systems, and settings that I'm only going to read. Doesn't mean it's not good -- it just means that in terms of priority (for a variety of reasons), they're not going to be going acted on further. For now.

Review

Games, systems, and settings that I'm going to review. It's a little bit more work here (writing takes time and effort, naturally), but it's worth it to review & promote it.

Play

Games, systems, and settings that I'm going to try to find a way to play (either offline one-shots or online campaigns). Have to be moderately familiar with system and setting. And time is spent scheduling and playing and building characters and so on.

Run

Games, systems, and settings that I'm only going to run. Have to be familiar with the system, setting, and have some kind of adventure ready. Then find players and a venue (online & offline).