Final Fantasy 7

When the idea that I might want to make tabletop games first wormed its way into my brain, I set myself two goals. I wanted to make an RPG based on Metal Gear Solid; and I wanted to make an RPG based on Final Fantasy 7. Neither of these projects ever went anywhere, as is typical with the wild aspirations of youth.

Recently, a thread Dan D posted on G+ set me to thinking about this for the first time in years. I’m surprised how many ideas I have. I want to let them pour into my keyboard. Let loose with an unmoderated stream of consciousness and see where things go. I make no promises about the quality of this post, or how many follow up posts there’s going to be. This might become The FF7 Fangame Blog, or I might never mention the thing again once I’m done here. Depends on where my heart goes.

The first question that needs to be answered is: what do I want out of an FF7 game? The PS1 original was a jumble of bland gameplay strung together to justify a poorly written melodrama. It’s not the sort of game I’d like to make, or run, or even play in. If I’m rejecting the core essence of the original game, what is left to play with?

Looking back on the game 20+ years after its release, there are a few elements that still speak to me:

The juxtaposition of high and low technologies.
The phenomenally underrated art of the backgrounds.
The music, obvs.
Exploring the destructive impact of capitalism not just on the environment, but on the very idea of what it means to be human.
The grand sense of scale. Starting out feeling insignificantly enveloped by the megacity of Midgar; then seeing Midgar disappear over the horizon as you set out into the wider world.
The feeling that these characters had real agency (even if I, the player, was on rails). They subverted my expectations. They changed their circumstances. They strove, and overcame.

That sense of being an agent of change in the world needs to be the core of the game. It doesn’t matter whether the players are a force for good, or for evil, or just for some obscure personal cause. What matters is that they strive to make their will manifest in the world.

Which leads nicely into the next question that needs to be asked: what rules need to be different from the way I normally play D&D? I have no intention of reinventing any wheels that can be avoided. Attacking by rolling a d20 against your foe’s armor rating works just fine. I see no reason to change it.

However, gaining experience points for treasure or for killing monsters makes no sense to me in this game. Seven isn’t a megadungeon, nor is it a hex crawl. It’s something different from what I’ve done in D&D before. The best term I can come up with for what I’m thinking is Political Sandbox. As in: it’s a world full of people and communities and systems, and the job of the player is to enact their will to power. I’m not 100% happy with the term, but it’ll do for now.

What I’m driving at is that players should get experience points as a reward for the change they create in the world. They might affect their change in any number of ways: they could employ persuasion, or trickery, or bribery, or brute force. So long as the world is altered to suit their will, the players get rewarded.

It’s not something I’m going to be able to figure out in this post, but I’d like to systematize this somehow. I don’t want the referee to be completely responsible for arbitrating what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps any change has a very low baseline chance to go the way the players want? The players then need to accomplish tasks and put assurances in place that will raise the chance that the player’s desires will be carried out?

That feels like it could be made at least as easy to manage for a referee as treasure is.

Regardless of the specifics, I think I ought to actually be able to use the Simple XP system I wrote way back in 2011. I wrote that thing in literally the first month that I took blogging seriously. It’s among the most popular posts I’ve ever written, and it’s kinda cool for it to be relevant again.

Okay, I wrote a lot about how experience gain will work. What else needs to change from how I normally run D&D?

There’s some irrelevant stuff we can get rid of to free up space for increased complexity elsewhere. This isn’t a game about managing diminishing resources, so most of the bookkeeping I normally insist on can be relaxed. Encumbrance can be a vague “whatever feels reasonable.” Nobody will need to worry about rations. Ammunition is inexhaustible.

It’s tempting to wildly inflate health and damage numbers to better emulate the feel of a Final Fantasy game. It’d only be fun for about 10 minutes, though. Eventually all the 4-digit calculations would get tiresome. I’ll stick with d6s for most stuff, I think.

Materia are a vital part of the setting. Bits of congealed souls which grant the character wielding them special abilities. Not only will this need to be the magic system, but in the original game it’s also how characters gained mundane abilities like “Steal.”

I’m thinking that materia should not only replace the magic system, but should replace character classes as well. The PCs are all 1hd shmucks without their materia. When the players earn experience points it doesn’t make them any inherently better. Instead, the players spend their experience points to decide which materia they want to advance.

I don’t know what will determine how many materia a character can equip simultaneously. I don’t like the idea of just slotting them into weapons and armor. Maybe characters have to swallow their materia? It’s inside your body, part of you. If you swallow too many of them you get sick and can’t function. If you want to swap one materia out for another, it takes a couple days to get everything sorted.

Materia would be used to cover even very basic advancements. Early in the game players would be able to acquire a Vitality materia, which they could level up to improve their health beyond its starting value. Other materia might grants common class abilities, like bonuses to attack, or sneak attack damage.

There’s no need for MP. Materia which allows their user to cast magic spells can be used a number of times per day according to their level. So, when you first get the Fire materia, you can cast Fire once. If you put experience points into it and get it up to level 2, you can cast Fire twice. There’s no need for more advanced fire spells (Fire 2, Fire 3), because we’re keeping everything limited in scope.

I realize there’s a lot of potential for exploitation in letting people mix-and-match class abilities, but it sounds fun, so I say try it.

I don’t think the game would need any kind of skill system, just a simple resolution mechanic for handling skill-based tasks. A baseline 2-in-6 or something. If the character wants to be really good at a skill, they’ll want to seek out an appropriate materia.

I am out of ideas for now. Thank you for indulging me.

Fuck the King of Space

I’ve done something stupid.

I agreed to take over refereeing responsibilities for one of the games I play in. This means I’ll be running two games every week. The very idea of it is exhausting, and I’m honestly a little worried about how I’m going to hold up. If this blog ends up becoming even more of a word slurry than it already is, you’ll know why.

The first hurdle is figuring out what I should run. Should it be something I’ve already put a lot of work into, like Dungeon Moon? Or, I could run a second party through ORWA, and let the two groups see one another’s influence on the world. But both of those are post-apocalyptic settings, and I’d really like to branch out and do something new. I briefly considered running a game in a very traditional fantasy world, but as much as I do want to revisit that concept someday, it just doesn’t hold much appeal to me at the moment.

What I really want to do is run a game in space. And I want it to be the opposite of post apocalypse. I want it to be a galaxy of plenty. A society at its peak, but one with enough stark inequality that the players are hungry.

So, here’s my campaign pitch:

Faster Than Light travel is a technology so profoundly ancient, that it may as well be The Wheel. It’s prehistory, interesting only to the dustiest and most arthritic of archeologists. Commensurately, the whole of the galaxy–down to the tips of each spiral arm–was originally charted so long ago that many worlds have been forgotten, rediscovered, and forgotten again many times over.

Every star system of consequences is ruled by a member of one of the 36,000 families. Less consequential systems are nominally ruled by them as well, but usually by some minor relative who prefers living in a manse on a more cosmopolitan world, rather than moving to some backwater to govern it.

To say the hierarchies among the 36,000 families are complex, is akin to saying the galaxy is rather big. There are entire universities of scholars dedicated to understanding the finer minutia of who is in charge of what, and which person is subordinate to whom. But, bloated and directionless as the bureaucracy is, it all manages to muddle along under the guidance of the one supreme authority that is completely indisputable: The King of Space.

The current dynasty came to power four generations ago, in a series of ruthless wars pursued by Kulga “Bloodfist” Osbert. Her son, Ruldin, fought many of her later wars at her side, and was himself a powerful ruler in his day. His son, Trost, was competent enough for peacetime. The current King of Space, Trost’s daughter Bassiana, is a pathetically pampered creature with a cruel sense of fun. The only reason no one has usurped her yet is that dealing with her is slightly less terrifying than the prospect of succession wars.

None of that really has much to do with you, though. You’re just some dirt farmer who grows cantaloupes all year, then loads half of them onto a ship that transports them to some more important world you will never visit, where most will rot before anyone feels like eating them.

Or maybe you work in a factory, making fittings for mounting Repulsor Lift Dishes into Repulsor Lift Housings. You live in company housing, and every day you work a 16 hour shift at the conveyor belt, performing the same rote solder over and over again. Eventually, each fitting will be sold for 2 Darics, which is the same amount you make for every 100 you complete. So long as there are no defects.

Or maybe you’ve seen your share of the finer things in life, as you stood still and silent in some minor noble’s manse. Far enough away that nobody had to think about you, but close enough to respond instantly if any of them wanted a cup from the pitcher of wine you held.

The point is that you’re shit. You’re at the bottom of the pecking order, and always have been. But, recently, you resolved to change that. To take control of your life. With all your meager savings, you booked passage on an independent freighter that came through the local port. You hoped to disembark on some nicer world, and hopefully make a real life for yourself there.

Unfortunately, that didn’t pan out.

The Bozac

Two hundred years ago, The Bozac was a top-of-the-line pleasure cruiser, intended to ferry hundreds of passengers around in style and luxury. After many years of enduring more and more demeaning service, the Bozac was finally headed for the scrap heap, when an enterprising young fella bought it on the cheap.

Nine-tenths of the ship isn’t even pressurized. The remaining tenth is falling apart, but if you cram it full of people and cargo, it runs just well enough that you can call yourself an independent transport.

Things were going well enough, until the ship was ambushed by pirates. The crew and passengers of The Bozac never had a chance. If it had been one pirate with a marshmellow gun on a skateboard, they still would have been too fast and too well armed for The Bozac to get away. One shot crippled the ship’s engines, and one hour is all it took to steal all the cargo worth taking. The crew and passengers were herded into slave pens, and a few minutes after that, The Bozac was a deserted hulk drifting in space.

Deserted, except for a handful of player characters who managed to hide well enough to be left behind. Now all they’ve gotta do is find some way to get the ship moving again, before the life support system gives out.

Gameplay

My hope is that the players find some way to repair The Bozac, becoming its de facto crew. From there, the game would unfold as a sort of open-ended hex crawl, with the ship playing dual purpose both as the facilitator of their adventures (by allowing them to move around the Galaxy), and a lodestone around their neck (constantly eating up resources for fuel and repairs). Over time, they could customize the ship, or just buy or steal a better one.

Of course, the game could develop in any number of directions, and I don’t want to presume too much about how the players will solve their first set of problems. If they don’t end up with a ship of their own, they can always adventure on a single planet for awhile, and book passage on freighters whenever they want to move to a new one.

I’d like to put together a rules document before play begins. Nothing terribly fancy, mind you. Basically just the same rules I’ve been using in ORWA, but with some of the modifications that my ORWA group wouldn’t let me get away with.

A variety of alien species exist, but humans are the dominant race. No alien species has settlements on more than a handful of worlds, and the galactic nobility and monarchy are exclusively human. Player characters are assumed to be human unless some alternative is negotiated in advance. Classes are fighter / specialist / magic user, but I’m open to whatever weird class the players found on a blog somewhere, if they want to play it.

World of Bellumus

Of late I have become completely preoccupied by the history of the Roman Republic and Empire. In particular, the life of Julius Caesar. I’m in the middle of his Gallic Commentaries, decided to take a break to re-read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, thinking I might have a much greater appreciation for it now that I’m so familiar with the characters and events it describes. It also may help that I’m no longer in high school.

There is a soliloquy, when Marcus Antonius is left alone with Caesar’s body, which captured my imagination. It reads thus:

A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:
And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate’ by his side come hot from Hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

Obviously, Antony is speaking figuratively here, but there’s some god damned delightful images.

“A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;“
Those most loyal to Caesar are transformed. Their fingers fall away and their arms sharpen like blades. Their feet become cloven, and their legs bent. They cannot stop running, and they lust for the blood of vengeance.

“Domestic fury and fierce civil strife Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;”
The land becomes a man-made hellscape of endless war.

“Blood and destruction shall be so in use, And dreadful objects so familiar,”
No one is an innocent. Women, children, the infirm, none leave their house without a sword in hand. It is uncommon to go a week without needing–or choosing–to kill.

“That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war;”
Damn.

“And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate’ by his side come hot from Hell,”
Caesar’s spirit, given new physical form, walks the land aimlessly with Ate the Greek spirit of ruin dancing around him. He seems removed, as though he does not see, hear, or feel anything. If he desires to take a step, 100 men could not stop him. He would crash through a marble wall if he needed to.

The only time he seems to be aware of his environment at all is when someone is within reach of his sword or spear. Without hesitation he will kill them, no matter the love he might have shown to them in life. He is no longer a man, but a force of nature.

“the dogs of war,”
Dogs, as large as horses, roam Italy. They are fierce beasts. They will attack any man they see, and have been known to slay entire cohorts.

Anyone within a 6 mile radius of these dogs becomes immediately aggressive and violent, lashing out at whoever they can until they pass from the dog’s presence.

“With carrion men, groaning for burial,”
The dead, though they lay unmoving, shriek and howl with still lips, cursing the living.

LS and the Fuzz Covered Vessel

You know how any time there’s a new phenomenon popular with children, there’s always some group of nutjob adults who make a scene about how it’s corrupting the youth? They’re always kinda funny when they go on TV and rant about how “pokemon” is jap-talk for pocket monsters, and monsters are like demons, ergo the pokemons are subtle attempts by the devil to get into the pockets of our children. It’s less funny when you’re a child and those nutjobs are your parents.

A lot of stuff was verboten for me as a kid, ostensibly because of demonic influence. Sometimes I cared enough to subvert those bans, as I did when I started playing D&D in secret. But other times I didn’t want to risk it. And that’s how I made it to the venerable age of 26 without exploring a single piece of Harry Potter media. It’s really too bad, actually, since I was 11 years old when the first book was released in the U.S. Same age as the series’ eponymous protagonist.

Over the years I’ve seen enough parodies of it that I became thoroughly familiar with the source material, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I decided to sit down and marathon the films and see what I’d been missing. I’ll spare you any review, since I’m pretty sure I was the last person on earth who hadn’t seen them. I will say, though, that I was surprised that they actually lived up to the hype. After a lifetime of hearing about how great this story was, I honestly did not expect to like it very much. But 2 minutes into the movie I felt like a kid again. It was like watching Star Wars for the first time. I was captivated, and plowed my way through the first 3 films in a single day, and all 7 by the end of the week. I got my hands on the books 3 days ago, and I’m halfway through the second one already.

And because I’m me, discovering such an interesting world naturally led to thoughts of what a marvelous tabletop game it would make.

Hogwarts is basically a dungeon-hub. It’s a huge, intelligent castle with countless secrets to explore. In the Philosopher’s stone the children must sneak past a three headed dog, escape from a large entangling plant, find a door key in a room filled with hundreds of flying keys, play a deadly game of life-sized chess, solve a riddle to discover which potions will protect them and which will kill them, and finally confront an evil wizard, all in pursuit of a magical treasure. That sounds a lot like D&D to me. It’s the same in the second book, where the children must find a well-hidden secret passage, leading into a complex of caves, where they eventually encounter and fight a basilisk.

It doesn’t take much imagination to extrapolate from these starting points. If there is one chamber of secrets, why not twenty? Hogwarts is a megadungeon, and you need to escape from its depths by the end of every session, because otherwise you’ll miss class.

Here’s what I would propose. Players start as first year students. Every student is a magic user of course, but some class-like distinction could be made by allowing the players to sort themselves into one of the school’s four houses. A player in Gryffindor, for example, might have bonuses against fear effects. Whilst a kid in Ravenclaw might be allowed a bardic-lore style check for knowing any random piece of information the party needs. Perhaps further class distinctions could be gained by the choices the player makes in which classes they will take. At the start of the year they choose the classes they’ll attend between dungeon-delving sessions, and at the end of the year they’ve gained some bonus or ability from that course.

Magic would be particularly fun, since magic words are such a large part of the source material. Spells could be divided into “spell levels,” representing the years in which they would be taught to students. There is no limit on the number of spells which can be cast per day, or how many times a spell could be cast. HOWEVER, in order to cast a spell, the player must be able to recite the proper magic words. No magic notes would be allowed at the table, forcing the player to actually keep the spells in their head. (Functionally, a no-notes rule would be impossible to enforce. But in the spirit of fun, I think most players would acquiesce).

Rather than progressing according to experience, players would progress by years of education. In lieu of gold, magic items and “house points” would be awarded for successful adventures.

I can’t be the first person who thought of this, right?

Using an Open-World Video Game as a Campaign Setting

I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind for awhile now. It’s stupidly simple, but it’s one that I want to share, and get some feedback on. Often when I don’t have any strong ideas about what I’d like to write, I think I’ll just write about this. But I can never quite figure out how I want to express the idea, and so I just come up with something else instead. That’s been going on for almost a year, and it’s about time I got this down on digital paper, so it can stop rattling around in my brain. Forgive me if this isn’t my most elegant or interesting post. More than anything, it just needs to be out of my brain.

As you no doubt have gleaned from my frequent mentions of it, I used to play World of Warcraft. When I type ‘/played’ on my main character, the accumulated time I’ve spent in that game comes to about half of a year of my life. I loved, and still do love that game. I noticed yesterday when I was spending time with a friend that despite the fact that neither of us have played the game seriously in years, we still start arguing about patch notes and design philosophies for WoW anytime we spend more than a few hours together. And every few months, I spend a few weeks listening to the game’s numerous soundtracks, reliving the emotional highs and lows.

For a long while, I’ve wondered if I could run a game in the world of Azeroth, relying on my memory alone to recreate the setting as a persistent world. There’s no reason this idea needs to be limited to Azeroth, mind you. The worlds of the Elder Scrolls games would work as well, as would perhaps another world like those featured in the Fable or Fallout games. I think the only real criterion would be that the world needs to be large enough and have enough going on in it that you could drop a party of adventurers into it and let them run wild without needing to add additional content. For example, the world of Hyrule from the Zelda series wouldn’t work, because it’s extremely small, and there’s really only one thing that ever needs to be done in that world: defeat the arch-villain.

Open world video games seem to be unique in this possible application. With a movie or a book, you may get a very good sense of what the setting is. With a particularly long series of books, you could even start to develop a complete picture of how a world worked and what it looked like. But if you wanted to turn it into a campaign setting, there would still be a lot of work to do. A traditional story is told with a focus on the various characters. The narrative is about them, and their problems, rather than what is going on in the world itself. Whereas an open-world video game attempts to create an entire setting which functions without characters, but is none the less geared towards a player’s involvement. For example, in a book you might read about the far-off threat of an encroaching empire, but if that empire is not central to the plot beyond explaining food shortages, you’ll never learn anything more about it. Whereas in an open world game, there’s almost never any place or group of people which you can’t eventually interact with.

Having spent so much time in World of Warcraft, I have a mental map of thousands of acres of landscape. I know the names of towns and important NPCs. I know that Fargodeep mine has been infested by Kobolds. I know that the town of Lakeshire is trying to fend of Gnoll bandits in the hills, and Orc invaders from Blackrock mountain. I know that Ogres have established a stronghold in the high elven ruins of Dire Maul, and I know that the Grimtotem tribe hold many of the plateaus in 1000 Needles. I have an entire world nearly memorized inside of my head*, and at present I’m not doing anything with that knowledge. So why couldn’t I run Azeroth as a campaign setting?

The best part about the idea is that it would fulfill a long time fantasy of mine. Any time I fall in love with a world, I never really want to leave it. I want to stay there and continue having adventures. Many of my early projects when I first tried working on tabletop games were clumsy attempts to find a way to return to a fictional setting that I didn’t want to leave. The LOZAS system which I’ve been working on is an (I hope) more sophisticated attempt to do the same thing.

Returning to those fictional world in tabletop a game has another marvelous benefit as well. The players can change it in any way they want. WoW is understandably static in many ways–the quest needs to be there for the next character to complete. But in a tabletop game, you can see the world grow and evolve based on player input in a way which isn’t possible when you’re sharing that world with 11 million other people. You can solve problems in more interesting ways as well, using your wits to develop new tactics which simply woulnd’t possible in a video game. Perhaps in the tabletop version, players could recruit the noble red dragonflight to render aide in the battle against Nalfarion. Or maybe A noble Orc could lead a successful charge against Stormwind, capturing the city and reducing the belligerent humans to a species of refugees, begging for scraps from their allies.

That would really be the extent of the idea. As GM, I would ask the players to choose their races and their starting city, and I’d start them off as level 1 characters in Vanilla WoW at the start of the game’s story. Through their play they might develop the story along a similar path, or they might change everything completely. Though certain events, such as the opening of the dark portal or the scourge invasion would probably be far outside of the player’s control. Doubtless a few details would change based on the holes in my memory, but it shouldn’t be difficult to improvise based on what I do remember.

I know a lot of tabletop players have some inexplicable animosity towards WoW, but what do you think of this idea? Would you be willing to play in a game world like this one?

*Except for Stonetalon Mountains. Don’t ask me why. I’ve got several loremaster achievements, but in all of my years playing, I never once spent more than a few minutes in Stonetalon Mountains. Maybe the fucking drop rate on Basilisk Brains the first time I went there left a bad taste in my mouth. (I don’t care what anybody else says, that drop rate was below 5%).

Playing The Other Side: Mindless Undead

Anyone who plays tabletop RPGs eventually starts coming up with ways to pervert the concept. A group will only play good and neutral heroes for so long before they start to consider playing evil characters. They’ll only play as humans, elves, and dwarves for so long before they start to wonder what it would be like to play as an orc or a goblin. It’s only natural for a person to look for unusual and flavorful experiences, particularly in a game which is already about exploring the fantastical. Even Gygax would purportedly send his D&D players into Western or Science Fiction scenarios–still wielding sword and spell. Deviations like these can be great fun. and it was while entertaining these perversions that I struck upon the idea of having my players take the reigns of mindless undead creatures.

I would start with a dungeon, probably on the smallish side. Perhaps only a single level. It would be filled with everything you would expect to find in a dungeon: interesting rooms, treasure, traps, and so forth. It would even have adventurers. The only thing it wouldn’t have is monsters, because that’s where the players come in. Each player would take command of a single skeleton or zombie with a very simple task: prevent adventurers from defeating the necromancer who was kind enough to animate them. They would be given a map of the dungeon, as well as guidance from their master’s divinations about the location of the invading adventuring party. They would be free to use any tactics they wished to defeat the adventurers. I, in turn, would move the adventurers through the dungeon, rolling for damage when they passed a trap and buffing them up a bit each time they encountered treasure.

I would do my best to defeat the zombies, but until the adventurers slay the necromancer, a new zombie or skeleton will always join its fellows within 1d6 rounds of its predecessors death. So no matter how many the adventurers kill, they’re fighting an uphill battle through the dungeon. Any time an adventurer is slain, one of the undead may spend a full round eating its corpse to regain all of their health. Any time the undead succeed in causing a TPK, all of the individual undead involved gain 1HD, and are allowed to add +1 to their damage rolls henceforth.

The cool thing about the idea is that player death really doesn’t matter all that much. When a player has invested a lot of time into creating, or playing a character, it can be a sobering experience for that character to die. It’s one of the big weaknesses of Pathfinder’s involved character building process. But when all of a character’s abilities and statistics are found under “S” and “Z” in the Bestiary, there’s no character creation process to go through. And since the new character appears a mere 1d6 rounds later, I imagine it won’t take long for players to start wantonly sacrificing themselves to create barriers, or to lure adventurers into deathtraps. And while a character who has leveled up might be a little too valuable to just throw away, I doubt any player would grow so attached to a few more HP and a +1 to damage that they’d feel at all sad to lose the character.

The way I imagine it, this would be a pretty fun evening of gaming to run. A brief deviation from the norm to cleanse everyone’s adventuring palette. Little will the players realize the insidious information they’re inadvertently providing to their GM: tactics. It’s just a side benefit really, but I know I’ll be watching my group carefully to see what they come up with. And I’ll be sure to use something similar against them next time they’re unfortunate enough to be level one adventurers taking their first wary steps into a dungeon.

In truth, this is closer to a board game than it is to an RPG. The only reason I wouldn’t call it a board game flat-out is because of tactical infinity. There are no limits to what the players can do to defeat the adventurers, so long as they can convince the GM that the idea is plausible.

Creating an Evil Campaign Featuring the Undead

tom kidd 90968, 2/27/04, 11:49 AM, 8C, 3750×5000 (0+0), 62%, bent 6 stops, 1/30 s, R41.2, G31.5, B69.8

Note: This Friday’s Magical Marvels is written and ready to go up. However, my ladyfriend is busy with coursework, and has not been able to create the art for it. Both of us have really enjoyed what her art has added to this series of posts, so I’ll be holding off on posting it until sometime Sunday, after she completes the image. Thanks for your patience!

A month or two back, I typed a bunch of tabletop RPG keywords into twitter, found some random accounts, and followed them. I’m quite active on twitter, but most of my twitter friends are not tabletop role players, so I was hoping to expand my circle of friends a little more. By and large the endeavor has been a failure. Most of the accounts I followed have since been unfollowed either for being inactive, or being boring. Recently, though, one of those accounts posted this:

Tips on an evil campaign? Why, Evil is my middle name! It’s also my first and last name. Legally, I am Evil E. Eviltan. The original family name is actually “Evilsatan,” but it got anglicized when my grandparents arrived on Ellis island. Anyway, I quickly sent DMfemme a response.

A few days went by, and I forgot about the message. Twitter is more of a chat room than a message board. If it takes someone more than 15 minutes to respond, odds are they aren’t going to. But lo and behold, a few days later:

Undead you say!? Why, I would say that undead was my middle name had I not already established that all of my names are permutations of ‘evil!’ That was, perhaps, shortsighted writing on my part. None the less, undead are my specialty. I don’t think I’ve ever run a campaign which didn’t include undead as a major element. Ever since my first game ham-fistedly throwing a mummy at my player, to my most recent cloak & dagger style game about the Cult of Vecna. When it comes to monsters, if it’s decomposing and likes the taste of sweet sweet manflesh, I like to include it in my games.

The first thing you should do, if you’re willing and able to spend a little money, is pick up a copy of Libris Mortis. It’s a 3.5 supplement, so if you’re running D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder the book is a must-have. But even if you’re using another system, there’s a lot of good fluff in here. More than I can cover in a single post, and it includes some of my favorite undead monsters. For this post, I’ll focus on things I’ve learned through my own gaming experience, which are not found in Libris Mortis.

I can think of a few ways an evil campaign can be undead based. The players can control undead, the players can work with undead, the players can work for undead, or the players can be undead. And, of course, you can mix and match. All of these are fun, and all come with their specific quirks.

Players Control Undead
If the players control undead, then they are likely of the Wizardly or Clerical persuasion, or some type of magic user at least. Though there’s no need to discount other possibilities. Perhaps the players find powerful artifacts early in the game which allow them to control undead–artifacts which grown in power as the characters level up. Or the characters could take the batman super villain route and fall into an open vat of negative energy, only to come out of it with the ability to control undead to some extent.

The thing about players who control undead, though, is that they become powerful quickly. Why explore a dungeon when you can simply send hoards of zombies into the dungeon as meat-shields. They’ll set off any traps and defeat or weaken any monsters within. Once they’ve done the grunt work, the players can move in and gather up the treasure. Even if they go into the dungeon themselves, encounters need to be buffed up significantly to make up for all the extra attacks players get (“my character attacks, then Zombies 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 attack”).

Still, one can’t deny the feeling of power that controlling an undead hoard gives to players. It’s an exhilarating feeling, and the GM should let them enjoy that. But that doesn’t mean the GM should never take it away. Undead-controlling villains can come up against paladins or clerics, able to cause their undead to flee in terror. Or they might find themselves forced to fight on consecrated ground where their undead cannot tread. Worst of all, they might eventually face a more capable necromancer, able to steal their control of their undead away from them! (You could call him “LS,” mwuahaha)!

Players Work With Undead
Lets say, for example, that rather than being necromancers, the players work for a necromancer. This gives the players a bit more freedom, since the GM doesn’t need to shoe-horn the players into the position of controlling some undead. More freedom means the players have more control, and the players having more control means the players have Player Agency, and player agency is a good thing to foster in your games. This option also gives the players less power over how the undead interact with the game, since they don’t control them directly. And as a third boon, this option gives the GM a convenient “quest giver” in the form of the player’s necromatic master.

Consider, for example, a scenario where the players are in the service of the great Necromancer Alicia. Alicia wants the players to subdue a tribe of goblins living not far from her tower of Brooding Darkness. Perhaps she provides them with amulets to help them direct the undead, but she could just as easily send an NPC along to control the undead, or even just control the undead herself from the aforementioned tower. Or perhaps Alicia doesn’t want the goblins killed, but just needs the players to throw some undead-powder into the goblin’s bonfire, causing them all to choke on the fire’s smoke and become zombies themselves.

Players Work For Undead
The players working for an undead has a lot of potential to play out exactly the same way that the players working for a necromancer does. After all, necromancers don’t die, they just become liches. (…which, I guess, requires dying at some point, but you take my meaning.) However, there are a variety of intelligent undead with the potential to keep the players as their minions.

Vampires are a favorite of mine. I’ve always felt they’re underused in the role of “overlord” style villain. Player quests could include finding humans for the vampire to feed on, help bring about eternal night, or even just work on traditional goals like conquering the world. Just because you don’t have a pulse or show up in mirrors doesn’t mean you don’t still lust for power. Ghosts are another great example. Being incorporeal, ghosts are much less likely to pursue worldly goals, but they could easily have plots of their own. Perhaps they want to return to a corporeal body, or they want the players to enact a ritual which will allow them to pass on to a more pleasant afterlife than the one for which they are destined.

Players Are Undead
Players as undead offers some of the most interesting possibilities. There are plenty of undead types for players to pick from. The party’s wizard could be a lich, the rogue could be a ghost, the fighter a vampire, and the cleric a mummy. Even normally unintelligent undead such as ghasts, ghouls, wights, etc can be “awakened,” allowing them to have an Intelligence score. Players will be happy because their undead have fantastic special abilities. All of them will be immune to crits, most of them will gain special attacks, and massive bonuses to their stats.

The players will likely be so distracted by all their special bonuses that they’ll completely forget all the power they’re handing over to their game master. Yes, the vampire fighter now has +6 natural armor, but they also cannot enter private residences without first being invited in, nor can they go outside during the day. And don’t forget that all undead can potentially be turned, or worse, dominated by a powerful necromancer. Which isn’t to say that you should punish your players for being undead–simply that you should make use of their weaknesses. That’s part of the fun of undead!

Other
There are a few other things I’d like to mention about running an undead-heavy campaign before ending this post.

Origin Many types of undead come with origin stories attached. Some are created when innocents are buried in a mass grave, others are spawned of unrepentant murderers, or children killed by their own family members. (The slaymate is one of my all time favorite undead.) Be aware of these origins, and if a type of undead doesn’t have them, think about creating your own. The origin of an undead can give you a good baseline for that undead’s personality. Or, if the players are out to create a specific type of undead, it can provide them with a gruesomely evil task.

Cliches Aren’t Scary If you’re running an undead-heavy campaign because you like the creepiness of undead, remember that something stops being creepy once you get used to it. If you’ve only got a few adjectives to describe a zombie–rotting, shambling, grotesque–then your players are going to get bored of them really quick. Be creative, pull out a thesaurus, and make sure you keep giving your players new types of undead to encounter. Your zombies should dribble black gore onto the ground as they shamble, your lich should have half of a nose and a jaw attached to his skull by a wire, and your skeletons should still have bits of shriveled organs piled at the bottom of their rib cage.

Don’t Forget the Classics Often times, game masters get caught up in the big fancy undead, and forget about the little guys. Skeletons and Zombies can be incredibly creepy and threatening at any level. Don’t forget that humans aren’t the only ones who can be corpse-ified! One of my favorite monsters is the skeletal hill giant. And the dragon whose zombie-wings are too rotted to fly on any longer can be a terrifying foe. Even without using a high-CR foe as the base creature, these types of undead can be formidable. I recently threw my players up against a large number of skeletons which had Magic Missile inscribed on their index fingers. My players found it quite challenging to run back and forth across the battlefield taking out the skeletons one by one, getting hit by 1d4 + 1 unblockable damage from each skeleton each round.

And never forget: If you’re running a game with undead, use a Corpse-Sewn Hekatonkheires at some point. It’s just the right thing to do!

Star Wars: Movie Hooks

Well, that little break lasted longer than expected. That’s how my self discipline works I suppose. If I give up an inch of my ironclad mental schedule, then my tendency towards laziness will take a mile. Fortunately, my self loathing was really on top of things this time. By the end of my little “vacation” (which caused me to miss all of two posts) I was so frustrated with myself that getting back on top of writing became my only escape from a constant barrage of self recriminations. Go self loathing! About time you started pulling your weight.

As a change of pace, I thought I would end 2011/start 2012 with a week dedicated to my beloved Star Wars D6 RPG by West End Games. As a geek, Star Wars is my specialty, and I have a soft spot for the simple and elegant system designed by West End Games. I’ve been writing about Pathfinder nonstop for months now, but I’ve always imagined this project as one which can be more diverse. Pathfinder is my focus, certainly, but there are so many systems and possibilities out there. It would be a shame not to give them some of my attention.

Today it’s plot hooks! Every adventure needs a starting point. Something to get the players excited about the game they’re playing, and what they’re doing in it. It’s a springboard for the GM to get the action going. You never have more of the player’s attention than you do in the first minute or so of the game, so you’ve got to make it count. With a Star Wars game, GMs have a unique opportunity to hook their players into a game by intersecting that game with one of the three good films. Unless you’ve got a game group full of avid Star Wars fans (in which case, I hate you) it’s likely that your players are somewhat wary of playing in the Star Wars universe. By giving them a touchstone to something they’re familiar with–the films–you help make everyone a little more comfortable and familiar with their surroundings.

Ultimately, how you intersect the films is up to you, but I’ve arranged these according to the methodology which I feel is most appropriate. The idea is for the players to fit into the background of the films. Perhaps someone with a moment of screentime, or someone who was standing just off camera during a specific scene. These characters can then go on to change the course of the entire saga if they want to, but starting your players out as Obi-Wan Kenobi’s ‘other jedi apprentices’ simply strikes me as awkward and masturbatory. Like bad self-insertion fan fiction.

A New Hope

Death Star Plans: Imperial Players who would like to explore the sophistication and grandeur of Palpatine’s New Order can start the game with orders to recover the Death Star plans. Eventually this would intersect with the opening scene of A New Hope, where the Star Destroyer Devestator is giving chase to (and eventually capturing) the rebel blockade runner Tantive IV. When the plans are not found (having been hidden with R2-D2) the Imperial players can continue down to the planet, and continue following the plan’s trail. Particularly successful players may be able to capture the plans before they eventually reach the rebels, stopping the destruction of the Death Star. The rebellion would be a great deal weaker after losing the Battle of Yavin, but that wouldn’t mean they couldn’t still pose a threat for your players to fight against!

If you were so inclined, you could start the quest even earlier, with the players on the planet Danuta following Kyle Katarn’s theft of the plans–a classic moment in the Star Wars continuity, and more well known than many other stories from the Expanded Universe (EU).

Death Star Plans: Alliance If your group prefers the more traditional route of playing as rebels, the Death Star plans can still provide impetus for gameplay. In the film, when Darth Vader and the Devestator capture princess Leia and the Tantive IV, the rebellion’s leadership has every reason to suspect that they’ve been compromised. Not only have the Death Star plans been (supposedly) recovered, but an important leader has been identified and captured by the enemy. As much respect as anyone might have for Leia, can they really trust that she wont betray the Yavin IV base when subjected to torture?

So the rebel leadership is faced with two problems. First, they must find a way to counter the Death Star. Such a weapon is too devastating to be ignored, even in the face of massive setbacks. Likely this would mean formulating a new plan to re-acquire the schematics for the station. But after the destruction of Alderaan, they may feel that it is worth the risk to attempt smuggling operatives onto the Death Star itself to destroy it from within. Secondly, the rebellion needs to find a new base, which I’ll discuss more below.

New Base: Alliance Regardless of how events transpire, it is highly likely that the Rebellion’s Yavin IV base is compromised. Whether it’s simply assumed due to Princess Leia’s capture, or whether the Empire follows the tracking device planted on the Millennium Falcon, one way or another, the rebels need a new home. Eventually this new home will be Hoth, as seen in Empire Strikes Back. However, GMs could run some very interesting exploration games where the players are rebel scouts, looking for suitable planets for the rebellion to hide on. Hoth is remote, and has the benefit of per-existing structures for the rebels to use, but if players find something better, that could change the course of the saga.

There’s a lot of benefit to this hook. First, it presents an opportunity for the players to make a significant contribution to the story immediately. That ability to have a real impact on events is rarely so clearly spelled out, and players like to feel as though the outcome changes based on their actions. That’s what we call Player Agency. Second, the possibilities are wide open for the type of adventure you could run. First players need to figure out where to go, which allows them to pick from a number of options. Then the players need to get there, which provides an opportunity for space-based adventure. Once the players arrive, they’ll need to scout the area, giving the GM plenty of opportunity to create all manner of conflict. Since the players will want to find a planet with existing facilities for the rebellion to use, you could even use that as an opportunity to include a dungeon delving-esque adventure.

Bounty on Solo: Bounty Hunters Rebels and Imperials are not the only types of characters players enjoy. Thanks to the popularity of characters like Boba Fett, some people view playing as a bounty hunter is the best part of the Star Wars universe. Considering the sizable bounty placed on Han Solo’s head by Jabba the Hutt, players may be very interested to hear (or better yet: witness) Solo’s cold blooded murder of Greedo in a little tapcaf on Tatoine.

Sand Crawler: Droids I don’t have many ideas regarding this, but if you’re GMing for a party of droid characters, they could all meet up on the Sand Barge where R2-D2 and C-3PO are reunited.You might even bend the plot of the story a bit by having R2 entrust one of your players with the Death Star plans, and the task of taking them to Obi-Wan Kenobi

The Empire Strikes Back

Hoth Escape: Alliance After the battle of Hoth the rebellion is completely routed. The surprise attack on their hidden base left them scrambling to escape, taking massive losses during one of the most exciting and memorable battles in any of the films. There’s a reason this encounter has been repeated ad-nausea in almost every Star Wars video game ever released, and it’s a perfect place to jump into the game as Alliance players.

Right off the bat, players are faced with the deadly battle against the invading imperial force. The group could start the game in the trenches, then fall back as the Stormtroopers press further into the base. Or if the players prefer, they could be pilots, zipping about in agile air speeders, trying desperately to figure out how to take down the towering imperial AT-ATs. But Hoth is a losing battle, and any combat is merely to provide cover to allow time for other rebel personnel to load transports and begin the escape. The players who survive (which, given the fatality rates in the Star Wars game, probably won’t be all of them) must then escape from the planet themselves. If they’re pilots, this can be even more exciting than the battle below. If they’re not, then they’ll be huddled in the belly of a rebel transport, hoping they don’t get blown out of the sky.

Vader’s Task: Bounty Hunters A short, but memorable scene in Empire Strikes Back is shortly after the battle of Hoth, when Darth Vader meets with a group of bounty hunters and tasks them with finding the Millennium Falcon. The scene introduces Boba Fett, and includes the now infamous “No disintegration” line. There was actually a whole book about it called “Tales of the Bounty Hunters,” which was remarkably good. But I digress. The major problem with this hook, of course, is that most players will already know that Han Solo is on his way to cloud city. None the less, there’s some opportunity for a good game here.

Occupy Cloud City: Any During Empire Strikes Back, Cloud City is occupied by the Empire. This becomes particularly problematic at the end of the film when the Empire’s occupation becomes permanent. Cloud City is a mining outpost, but it’s also a haven for smugglers, gamblers, and manner of riff raff. There are doubtless even some rebels amongst the populace. The frantic escape from Cloud City doesn’t give the game much direction, but it’s a fun and interesting way to tie your game into the film.

Return of the Jedi

Free At Last: Any Jabba the Hutt was a powerful crime lord. Head of the powerful Desilijic crime family of Hutts, his underworld power was matched only by Prince Xizor of Black Sun. In his Tatooine palace, he had any number of droids, slaves, mercenaries, bounty hunters, and other hangers-on around him at all times. His death would have caused a frantic scramble either to escape from the fallout of a collapsing criminal empire, or to try and claim a piece of that empire.

Players who don’t mind playing as villains may even be interested in starting the game earlier, and having an opportunity to prevent Han from being rescued by his friends. Or, if the players wish to start out as slaves, perhaps they help the heroes escape Jabba’s sail barge, and follow them to join the rebellion.

Assault on the Death Star: Rebels The most impressive space battle in the entire trilogy, in my most humble opinion, is the fight to destroy the second Death Star at the end of Return of the Jedi. After the fleet jumps in-system, players will need to fight tooth and nail just to survive while the shield remains staunchly in place. And once the shield is down, small craft can dive into the structure of the massive space station, and perhaps join Tycho Celchu on his ‘merry chase through the Death Star.‘

Assault on the Shield Generator: Rebels If players aren’t particularly interested in space combat (and in fairness, it can be tricky to pull off well) then the action on the ground of Endor is another great place to start. Particularly if one of your players wants to be an Ewok. The conflict on the ground is long, and comes in multiple phases, which provides good structure to the adventure. First the characters must use stealth as they avoid Imperial scouts as they make their way to the generator, then they must fight to get in. Once in, it’s revealed that the whole thing was a trap, and they must fight against insurmountable odds to accomplish their mission. If the players in the game manage to be more skilled than the characters in the film, then the destruction of the Death Star may even go a great deal more smoothly, perhaps leading to promotions for the PCs, and more dangerous missions in the future!