So, since it's coming up on Halloween, I figured I'd take a little bit and produce an adventure across the next few days for fans of the horror/conspiracy sci-fi game Eclipse Phase that people can enjoy. As a synopsis, the players are awakened to find themselves aboard a derelict spacecraft in Earth orbit, with the air on the thin and stale side but breathable and the temperature hovering on the cold side of survivable. None of them know why they're here; there's a significant chunk of continuity lost for each of them. They need to get out somehow, of course, and find their way to safety - but can they do it before something goes wrong, or before whoever - or whatever - put them here comes looking for them?
---
The derelict in question is the Evening Star, a former cargo hauler that went missing during the events of the Fall; it was on record as accepting a sizable number of fully instantiated refugees from the space elevators before going completely silent and vanishing. The ship's life support system was designed to support a maximum of one hundred people, so it was assumed that the crowding from the refugees overwhelmed the ship's ability to cope and everyone aboard died of anoxia.
So when the players awaken in the ship's on-board backup facility with the lights on and the air cold but breathable, those aware of the circumstances of the ship's disappearance might be justifiably concerned. Also of concern is that the players' muses will report that, according to the still-functional shipboard mesh, they're missing about six months of personal time. Oh, and they're all sleeved in naked morphs they're unfamiliar with - a mix of splicers and furies, with nothing particularly exotic about them.
Checking the ship's mesh will show that public access allows for checking the time, sending and receiving messages, and access to video from the hallways and cargo holds. At the time of waking, nothing shows on any of the video feeds, and each player has one or more messages waiting for them with no subject or sender information available. There's no gravity, leaving the resleeving room full of floating bubbles of nutrient gel as players emerge from the storage tubes.
The primary goal of the adventure is for the players to find a way to escape the ship and make their way back to some hub of civilization; anything they can salvage to bring back as proof of where they were will be of immense value in the old-style economy of cislunar space. Of course, salvaging things from a derelict vessel in cislunar space has risks in and of itself.
The messages for the players depend on the skills of their characters.
Anyone with skills relevant to the TITANs, AI research, or the Singularity has this message waiting for them, apparently an random excerpt from a longer message: "ry has the chips; meet her in forward hold C at the midpoint to make the swap. Be careful, she might be packing an organic-hunting decon swarm and be aiming to scrub you to get the box and keep the chips. Don't let her know about Mic"
Attached to this message is an XP file; if the player accesses it, they need to make a Will x3 check to avoid taking 1d10/2 Stress as they experience roughly 30 seconds of intensely burning pain and the sound of speaker-distorted screaming.
Those with skills relevant to biotech, genetics, or medical skills past first aid have another message waiting: "Something's gotten in the nutrient system for the morph storage. Not sure what, but the system's filtration is barely keeping up with cleaning it up. Next layover, I recommend we do a full purge on the system. Even if it's harmless, who wants to instantiate in a tub full of blood-colored goo?" Attached is what appears to be an image file, but it's heavily distorted and filled with pixel noise. Running it through image-processing software will clean it up, and will a MoS of 10 or better wil any relevant skills; either reveals it to be a snap of the medical bay the group is in, with half a dozen ragged corpses floating in null-G and surrounded by floating globules of blood. Failing a Will x3 check causes 1d10/2 Stress and the realization that all the nutrient gel globs look bloody.
Anyone with hardware skills has a message that reads "Can whoever has the next rotation check the after solars? The system's bugging out pretty bad and keeps insisting they're oriented at a weird angle to incoming, even after I punch in corrections. They're either at 65 or 190 to the solar instead of the 90." Attached is a short video from an external camera, which shows an extension with solar panels along it quiver slowly for nearly a minute before it suddenly and impossibly curls toward the camera and the feed goes dark. Witnessing this is enough to prompt a Will x3 check, with failure causing 1d10/5 Stress.
Those with conspiracy theory or topics related to the Fall as interests have the following "lling you, something;s shadowing the ship. I know the radar and lidar haven't returned anything, but I keep seeing stars get eclipsed by whatever it is. Probably some milspec stealth thing, but what do they want with us? Look, I'm sending the vid with highlights on when the stars get eclipsed. Whatever it is, it's huge." Attached is the described video; it seems to suggest a large object at some distance from the hull camera following the same trajectory as the ship. Viewing it causes no Stress.
Media skills and journalism/investigation skills results in the following message: "ow what the hell Burns thinks she's doing but there's no way we can send that footage to the rest of the system, they'll think we're insane conspiracy theorists cooking up faked XPs. I don't care what she and Mort have recorded, if we have to we'll blow the fuses on the comm mast and tell them their bug must've done it. No reason to panic anyone off-ship if it's something we picked up on the last run. Tell her that sh" Attached is a short XP clip from a person in a somewhat clumsy vacsuit working their way along the hull of the ship, stopping every few meters to take samples of something that resembles a metallic mold on the ship's hull. The clip cuts out when the person gets to the airlock. Have those who watch it roll Will x3; no Stress results from viewing the XP, but failing the Will check has repercussions elsewhere.
Piloting, astrophysics, and alien technology skills get a message that simply contain a video clip of a panicky-looking splicer with a weird blue mottling across her face. She seems to be hiding in a closet somewhere, and she's whispering to the camera. "My name is Mari Burns. I don't know if this will ever get out, but I have to try. The ship is infected with some kind of nanite plague, I've got no idea where it came from. The metal's infested, we're bleeding air, most of the rest of the crew is either dead, insane, or turned into something not even close to human. I'm pretty sure I'm infected - I keep hallucinating sights and sounds. Please, if you see this, stay off the Evening Star. Burn us with plasma if you can. We're a plague ship and for the sake of transhumanity we can't let this land anywhere." Her eyes unfocus at this point, and those watching get treated to several seconds of her screaming hysterically before the video cuts out. Viewing it calls for a Will x3 check, with 1 point of Stress lost if successful and 1d10/2 lost if unsuccessful, plus later repercussions.
Next time when I come back to this, I'll see about digging up a map of the ship and explaining some of what's aboard. (Yes, it involves exsurgents.)
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
On Trial
There are times when one player is going to hog most of a session, simply because they're the 'face' character who talks and negotiates with others. Most GMs try to hurry through these to keep the other players from getting bored and wandering off, either in-game or out-of-game, but there's another way to go about it. Today, we'll look at turning the players into the minds behind some of your NPCs for a session.
You know the character type already; the smooth-talking elven bard, the charming fixer on the streets of cyberpunk Seattle, the queen of a fledgling nation addressing a council. They're the charismatic deal-makers who want nothing quite so much as the chance to show off their gift with language and their ability to charm and dazzle others. The problem, usually, is that the other players are terrified the person will say something to traumatically disrupt the game, and so the chance is often stifled. The GM can't exactly build a scene with a dozen NPCs simply to let the character monologue, because that kind of scene can take hours while the other players have to either sit by quietly or disrupt the negotiation with their own adventuring. (The latter can make a wonderfully intense game if the talkative character is trying to keep those they're talking to occupied while the others accomplish some goal unnoticed, however.)
So what's a GM to do to keep the others interested? Simple: make them part of the scene. Rather than their usual characters, who are busy elsewhere, give them character sheets for the session for one of the NPCs the face character is dealing with. Let them pick the one they find the most interesting, and have a small packet of information for the player to peruse during the session that tell them the goals and desires of that NPC, to help them get into the character's head.
Make all the NPCs have a reason to get involved in the conversation, so that there's a chance that the players will get a conversation going where the GM only needs to occasionally interject as the other NPCs present, or to describe the events of the world around them. All the players are likely going to want the face to succeed, but most won't want to simply handwave through the scenario; some things may emerge from it that you, as the GM, never considered, giving you extra fodder for building out the rest of the game.
Make the session a mix of roleplaying and dice-rolling; let the players face off in contested rolls, with bonuses and penalties based on their arguments. If possible, have there be a small crowd of observers to be swayed by the rhetoric of those speaking, and let the player currently doing the best get cheers and whistles from that group. By making it a competition without the players themselves being involved, you can inspire borderline roleplayers to give it a stronger showing, and push the already extravagant to new levels of characterization.
Wind the session down as if closing out an actual meeting of the type; if it's something official, having someone with a gavel or similar tool banging on the table can signal the end of things for the time being, and the players can get a bit to switch to their original characters and find out in-character how things went from the face. Finally, tell them what they've won (or lost) from the exchange, as if finishing up a regular session where combat or exploration went on, and go through your usual post-game routine. (And yes, expect this kind of session to eat up the entire game session, once people get going.)
Gie it a try; you might be surprised by the results!
You know the character type already; the smooth-talking elven bard, the charming fixer on the streets of cyberpunk Seattle, the queen of a fledgling nation addressing a council. They're the charismatic deal-makers who want nothing quite so much as the chance to show off their gift with language and their ability to charm and dazzle others. The problem, usually, is that the other players are terrified the person will say something to traumatically disrupt the game, and so the chance is often stifled. The GM can't exactly build a scene with a dozen NPCs simply to let the character monologue, because that kind of scene can take hours while the other players have to either sit by quietly or disrupt the negotiation with their own adventuring. (The latter can make a wonderfully intense game if the talkative character is trying to keep those they're talking to occupied while the others accomplish some goal unnoticed, however.)
So what's a GM to do to keep the others interested? Simple: make them part of the scene. Rather than their usual characters, who are busy elsewhere, give them character sheets for the session for one of the NPCs the face character is dealing with. Let them pick the one they find the most interesting, and have a small packet of information for the player to peruse during the session that tell them the goals and desires of that NPC, to help them get into the character's head.
Make all the NPCs have a reason to get involved in the conversation, so that there's a chance that the players will get a conversation going where the GM only needs to occasionally interject as the other NPCs present, or to describe the events of the world around them. All the players are likely going to want the face to succeed, but most won't want to simply handwave through the scenario; some things may emerge from it that you, as the GM, never considered, giving you extra fodder for building out the rest of the game.
Make the session a mix of roleplaying and dice-rolling; let the players face off in contested rolls, with bonuses and penalties based on their arguments. If possible, have there be a small crowd of observers to be swayed by the rhetoric of those speaking, and let the player currently doing the best get cheers and whistles from that group. By making it a competition without the players themselves being involved, you can inspire borderline roleplayers to give it a stronger showing, and push the already extravagant to new levels of characterization.
Wind the session down as if closing out an actual meeting of the type; if it's something official, having someone with a gavel or similar tool banging on the table can signal the end of things for the time being, and the players can get a bit to switch to their original characters and find out in-character how things went from the face. Finally, tell them what they've won (or lost) from the exchange, as if finishing up a regular session where combat or exploration went on, and go through your usual post-game routine. (And yes, expect this kind of session to eat up the entire game session, once people get going.)
Gie it a try; you might be surprised by the results!
Monday, October 26, 2015
Eclipse Phase: Before The Fall Setup, Part 7 - The United Nations
Continuing with the Eclipse Phase setup for the mini-campaign set before the events of the Fall, we'll be looking at the United Nations and why they went from a largely toothless legislative body to an organization with a paramilitary force like the Peacekeepers.
---
In the years between the present day and the time just before the Fall, the global political environment shifted significantly, with the least developed nations slowly collapsing into war-torn tribal states, with refugees streaming away from climate disasters and would-be warlords fighting over the limited resources of these regions. The more developed nations attempted to help as much as possible, although the more militaristic and insular societies resented even the handful of refugees they deigned to accept.
The more observant megacorps and the first hypercorps, augmented with the latest smart systems to analyze events, foresaw the collapse of even the most developed nations from the destabilized regions if nothing was done to prevent it. As a result, they began a number of initiatives to stabilize the least-perturbed regions, purchasing ravaged stretches of land and using nanotech to swiftly assemble entire buildings dedicated to producing cheap supplies and housing in a seemingly selfless humanitarian effort.
In practice, it gave the corps an in-road to build defensive installations, which they quietly used to pacify the more violent warlord with assaults by autonomous squads of war machines, resulting in several carefully concealed atrocities. They followed this up with establishing refugee cities outfitted with swiftly manufactured basic amenities, carefully spread over the endangered areas and linked into increasingly powerful mesh networks. The corps, once a solid cordon was established with their work, contacted the UN and, as a gestalt bargaining force, offered the UN a deal: they would support the creation of an international paramilitary force under UN control in each country they were based in. They'd even supply this new force with military-grade armament.
In exchange, the UN would recognize each involved corp as an independent sovereign nation with a seat and a vote, a move that would render the organization almost half actual countries and half corporate structures. Refuse, the the corps would consolidate their own council and take the matter of dealing with the destabilized areas into their own hands. The UN, aware that a few atrocities that hadn't been covered up thoroughly enough, agreed to the offer.
Backlash was swift; several prominent nations - the United States being the loudest but far from the only - withdrew from the UN in protest of such an international force existing. The end of the backlash was almost as swift, as the corps refused to sell their goods to the countries that protested, causing them all to back down and rejoin the UN by the end of the second month.
The formation of the actual Peacekeeper force took almost a year, as candidates from sources all over the globe were either invited to take the tests or applied on their own initiative, hoping to do some good or at least prevent the Peacekeepers from becoming the strong arm of a totalitarian regime. Some post-Fall scholars point to this as the moment where the military forces of countries like the US began work on the projects that ultimately led to the TITANs, in a fearful attempt to stay a step ahead of the Peacekeepers.
At the time of the game start, the Peacekeepers have been in operation for well over a decade, working hard to bring peace to the more violent areas of the globe, taking out warlords and deliering shipments of humanitarian aid to those driven from their homes. Overall, the force has been a success, with no known repeats of the atrocities that preceded it at the hands of the corps who now outnumber the actual nations at a 2:3 ratio.
---
In the years between the present day and the time just before the Fall, the global political environment shifted significantly, with the least developed nations slowly collapsing into war-torn tribal states, with refugees streaming away from climate disasters and would-be warlords fighting over the limited resources of these regions. The more developed nations attempted to help as much as possible, although the more militaristic and insular societies resented even the handful of refugees they deigned to accept.
The more observant megacorps and the first hypercorps, augmented with the latest smart systems to analyze events, foresaw the collapse of even the most developed nations from the destabilized regions if nothing was done to prevent it. As a result, they began a number of initiatives to stabilize the least-perturbed regions, purchasing ravaged stretches of land and using nanotech to swiftly assemble entire buildings dedicated to producing cheap supplies and housing in a seemingly selfless humanitarian effort.
In practice, it gave the corps an in-road to build defensive installations, which they quietly used to pacify the more violent warlord with assaults by autonomous squads of war machines, resulting in several carefully concealed atrocities. They followed this up with establishing refugee cities outfitted with swiftly manufactured basic amenities, carefully spread over the endangered areas and linked into increasingly powerful mesh networks. The corps, once a solid cordon was established with their work, contacted the UN and, as a gestalt bargaining force, offered the UN a deal: they would support the creation of an international paramilitary force under UN control in each country they were based in. They'd even supply this new force with military-grade armament.
In exchange, the UN would recognize each involved corp as an independent sovereign nation with a seat and a vote, a move that would render the organization almost half actual countries and half corporate structures. Refuse, the the corps would consolidate their own council and take the matter of dealing with the destabilized areas into their own hands. The UN, aware that a few atrocities that hadn't been covered up thoroughly enough, agreed to the offer.
Backlash was swift; several prominent nations - the United States being the loudest but far from the only - withdrew from the UN in protest of such an international force existing. The end of the backlash was almost as swift, as the corps refused to sell their goods to the countries that protested, causing them all to back down and rejoin the UN by the end of the second month.
The formation of the actual Peacekeeper force took almost a year, as candidates from sources all over the globe were either invited to take the tests or applied on their own initiative, hoping to do some good or at least prevent the Peacekeepers from becoming the strong arm of a totalitarian regime. Some post-Fall scholars point to this as the moment where the military forces of countries like the US began work on the projects that ultimately led to the TITANs, in a fearful attempt to stay a step ahead of the Peacekeepers.
At the time of the game start, the Peacekeepers have been in operation for well over a decade, working hard to bring peace to the more violent areas of the globe, taking out warlords and deliering shipments of humanitarian aid to those driven from their homes. Overall, the force has been a success, with no known repeats of the atrocities that preceded it at the hands of the corps who now outnumber the actual nations at a 2:3 ratio.
Friday, October 23, 2015
Homebrew: The Playable Races of Kuramen
Given the original basis of the world of Kuramen in the D20 system, it should come as no surprise that there are multiple intelligent species co-inhabiting this world. I kept a few of the standard races, but there are others that I've added on; each of the races was originally crafted by the gods to fill a role. Some have kept to their purposes better than others, and some have split into multiple races by the events of history.
First came the dwarves, forged from the literal bones of the world immediately after the gap to the Void was plugged. Short and stocky, they exude durability and strength in a way no other race can. Made to be the front-line warriors and guardians of the world, the first line of defense against the Void if it tried to leak through into the world, they survive mostly unchanged from the earliest days of their people - save for when the Shadow corrupted those set to guard it and corrupted them into the duergar. They stand between the Void and the World, and between the Hunger in the heart of the world and the surface, tireless and determined to uphold the vows of their ancestors.
The elves were made second, crafted to watch the heavens and stalk the surface of the world, their senses drawn out to detect the corruption of the Void and of undeath. First to be taught the secrets of magic, they were chosen along with the dwarves to guard the prison-crypt of the Shadow, and from those elves came the drow. Having been given long lives but low reproductive rates to try to keep corruption from spreading, elves are somewhat rare, and half-elves are far more common as the elvish folk interbreed with humans to try to ensure that their traditions and culture will live on. Half-elven children are often treated warmly by elves, even those not related to them, as the race sees their future in the hands of these half-breed children.
Gnomes were crafted to be stewards of the natural world, born of the woods and grasslands. They make their lives as woodsfolk tending the forests, farmers who keep the land fertile, and herders who keep their beasts from browsing the land barren. Touched with a bit of strange magic during the birth of their race, the ample spare time they tend to have has resulted in a race of people who love song and story, with most being capable entertainers in addition to their chosen craft. Few like the cities or crowded places, suffering claustrophobia that worsens the longer they're away from the wide open places they prefer to call home.
Halflings were born specifically of the god of comfort and home, children created to tend to hospitality and the care of others. During the reign of the last empire, they were the invisible backbone of the empire, serving as civil servants and ensuring that everything ran smoothly. Today, they tend to gravitate to similar roles; the best kitchens are run by halfling chefs, and no guild or bank is considered trustworthy without halflings on the administrative payroll. Those few who feel a desire for a more adventurous life often take up scholarly professions, maximizing the reward for their effort by bending the world to their will.
Kobolds are defined by their agoraphobia and nimbleness; while barbaric tribes still exist and plague the civilized lands, quite a few kobolds dwell in the mines and cities of settled lands, their nimble fingers, quick wits, and small size suiting them for any number of tasks that the larger races find difficult. Most public buildings in the larger cities have crawlspaces where a few kobolds live, giving up part of their pay for room and board in the narrow spaces between the walls and floors, minding the maintenance of the buildings with a skill that draws approval even from the dwarven people. Notably, few kobolds - even barbaric ones - have ever been corrupted by the Void.
Gnolls were born to be the aggressive front-line warriors to the defensive bastion of the dwarves in the battle against the void, powerfully built and cunning. The hyena-folk once served as the chief military might of the Empire, entire legions marching behind a skirmish line of heavy dwarven armor to wreak havoc on less powerful and nimble foes. They've retained their matriarchal and militaristic ways, filling out the bulk of the combat roles in the civilized lands. Soldiers, guards, and mercenaries are all likely to be roles filled by gnollish women, while gnollish men tend to logistics and sometimes operate trade caravans, almost certainly protected by groups of gnollish warriors.
Half-orcs are descended from the hardy orcish barbarians from beyond the Empire's old borders; they tend to be hardier and stronger than their human relatives, with a reputation for some barbaric behaviors, but no one disputes the courage, loyalty, or tenacity of a half-orc. Scholarly half-orcs tend to draw surprised reactions from those who learn of their career, as most tend to have jobs that benefit from their endurance and strength, but the great libraries often find themselves grateful to have the sturdy folk on hand. While they tend to be regarded as barbaric and uncouth, they're still a common sight in much of the region and well-accepted for their contributions.
Half-elves generally have a childhood filled with loving care from at least one parent; their elven parent almost always seeks their birth deliberately, to ensure the continuity of elven culture. With the amount of knowledge and wisdom available from their long-lived lineage, many half-elves tend to gravitate toward scholarly pursuits, but they often pick a single profession and strive to master it, dabbling in others to improve their ability in their primary profession.
First came the dwarves, forged from the literal bones of the world immediately after the gap to the Void was plugged. Short and stocky, they exude durability and strength in a way no other race can. Made to be the front-line warriors and guardians of the world, the first line of defense against the Void if it tried to leak through into the world, they survive mostly unchanged from the earliest days of their people - save for when the Shadow corrupted those set to guard it and corrupted them into the duergar. They stand between the Void and the World, and between the Hunger in the heart of the world and the surface, tireless and determined to uphold the vows of their ancestors.
The elves were made second, crafted to watch the heavens and stalk the surface of the world, their senses drawn out to detect the corruption of the Void and of undeath. First to be taught the secrets of magic, they were chosen along with the dwarves to guard the prison-crypt of the Shadow, and from those elves came the drow. Having been given long lives but low reproductive rates to try to keep corruption from spreading, elves are somewhat rare, and half-elves are far more common as the elvish folk interbreed with humans to try to ensure that their traditions and culture will live on. Half-elven children are often treated warmly by elves, even those not related to them, as the race sees their future in the hands of these half-breed children.
Gnomes were crafted to be stewards of the natural world, born of the woods and grasslands. They make their lives as woodsfolk tending the forests, farmers who keep the land fertile, and herders who keep their beasts from browsing the land barren. Touched with a bit of strange magic during the birth of their race, the ample spare time they tend to have has resulted in a race of people who love song and story, with most being capable entertainers in addition to their chosen craft. Few like the cities or crowded places, suffering claustrophobia that worsens the longer they're away from the wide open places they prefer to call home.
Halflings were born specifically of the god of comfort and home, children created to tend to hospitality and the care of others. During the reign of the last empire, they were the invisible backbone of the empire, serving as civil servants and ensuring that everything ran smoothly. Today, they tend to gravitate to similar roles; the best kitchens are run by halfling chefs, and no guild or bank is considered trustworthy without halflings on the administrative payroll. Those few who feel a desire for a more adventurous life often take up scholarly professions, maximizing the reward for their effort by bending the world to their will.
Kobolds are defined by their agoraphobia and nimbleness; while barbaric tribes still exist and plague the civilized lands, quite a few kobolds dwell in the mines and cities of settled lands, their nimble fingers, quick wits, and small size suiting them for any number of tasks that the larger races find difficult. Most public buildings in the larger cities have crawlspaces where a few kobolds live, giving up part of their pay for room and board in the narrow spaces between the walls and floors, minding the maintenance of the buildings with a skill that draws approval even from the dwarven people. Notably, few kobolds - even barbaric ones - have ever been corrupted by the Void.
Gnolls were born to be the aggressive front-line warriors to the defensive bastion of the dwarves in the battle against the void, powerfully built and cunning. The hyena-folk once served as the chief military might of the Empire, entire legions marching behind a skirmish line of heavy dwarven armor to wreak havoc on less powerful and nimble foes. They've retained their matriarchal and militaristic ways, filling out the bulk of the combat roles in the civilized lands. Soldiers, guards, and mercenaries are all likely to be roles filled by gnollish women, while gnollish men tend to logistics and sometimes operate trade caravans, almost certainly protected by groups of gnollish warriors.
Half-orcs are descended from the hardy orcish barbarians from beyond the Empire's old borders; they tend to be hardier and stronger than their human relatives, with a reputation for some barbaric behaviors, but no one disputes the courage, loyalty, or tenacity of a half-orc. Scholarly half-orcs tend to draw surprised reactions from those who learn of their career, as most tend to have jobs that benefit from their endurance and strength, but the great libraries often find themselves grateful to have the sturdy folk on hand. While they tend to be regarded as barbaric and uncouth, they're still a common sight in much of the region and well-accepted for their contributions.
Half-elves generally have a childhood filled with loving care from at least one parent; their elven parent almost always seeks their birth deliberately, to ensure the continuity of elven culture. With the amount of knowledge and wisdom available from their long-lived lineage, many half-elves tend to gravitate toward scholarly pursuits, but they often pick a single profession and strive to master it, dabbling in others to improve their ability in their primary profession.
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Bounty Hunter Campaigns
It's Bounty Hunter Week over on SWTOR again, the MMOG that my wife and I have been playing to scratch our itch for Star Wars in the months leading up to the new movie coming out. As a result, today we're going to look at the idea of a campaign where the players all have characters that are a crew of bounty hunters.
At first glance, it might not seem like that great of an idea - there's no immediate clear story or plot to the idea of being a gang of bounty hunters, and the only thing that seems to hold them together at first glance is the love of money. That said, there are plenty of ways to tie a group together and give them a plot to chase.
First and foremost, a crew of bounty hunters should all share some common goal, decided upon by the group as a whole before you start the campaign. Perhaps they're noble-minded and only take bounties in the name of justice. Maybe there's a notorious criminal that they all have it in for, and that criminal's resources make them too hard to go after alone. Maybe bounty hunting is illegal, and they're criminals who stick together for safety in numbers.
After that, the seeds of a plot are easy; every bounty captured or killed leaves behind people who will want vengeance. Every person who puts out a bounty has their reasons, and a plot can emerge from those reasons - if the group didn't have a single foe they want to take down, the GM can easily provide them with one as more and more bounties taken in turn out to be part of an organization that works for a single figure or council.
Bounty hunters have excuses to be odd and eclectic, giving players more freedom than usual in what they might want to play; being constantly thrust into life-threatening dangers with people can form a bond strong enough to deal with the fact that one characters is a jerk who hates the culture that another one hails from, as long as he does his part of the job. Bickering and tense moments are both common for this kind of game, and it'll work best for players mature enough to distinguish between in-game tension and out-of-game tension (a tall order sometimes, I know.)
Most bounty hunts will likely take 2-3 sessions, depending on how RP-heavy your group prefers to be; the first segment will generally consist of getting the bounty contract, researching the mark, leaning on informants and greasing contacts, and getting together any special equipment the characters think they might need. In groups willing to have people run multiple characters, each player may have 2-3 characters, each one a specialist in a particular role, rotating them in based on the bounty in question.
The second segment consists of the actual action - the players close in on the mark, have to get through whatever defenses and allies they have, and then have to take them down; bounties where the mark is wanted alive are harder (and should pay better) than ones where the goal is to simply kill the mark and bring proof back. The lead-up to the fight should be tense, with attempts to circumvent security and pull Mission Impossible tasks interspersed with high-action moments as the characters are forced to blaze through defenders weapons-first, hoping their mark doesn't catch on and flee. Most marks will fight back to the best of their ability, with an eye toward trying to escape and flee. Some may surrender after a brief fight (perhaps ones where the bounty says, in no uncertain terms, that the objective is to kill them, putting the players in an uncomfortable situation).
Some might simply surrender at the start, with a smug attitude as if they know that they'll be free again soon enough. These, of course, should be ones with ties to any overarching nemesis organizations; the second time players run into one of them, there should be a moment of shocked recognition and demands to know why this person is on the loose and recovered so fast, leading to hints of the background group.
The last section of a hunt is the wind-down - the mark is captured or killed, the players have brought the captive or evidence back, and now they get to actually get their prize. Most contractors will simply pay up, understanding that angering a group of well-armed individuals with a penchant for planning and violence isn't the best plan for a long and fulfilling life. Occasionally some will try to renege, though, which leads to the question of how players handle it. Dealing with a low-life who thinks they can simply refuse to pay will turn out quite differently from a high-ranking judge or a politician's aide who refuse to turn over payment, and may lead to further hooks. After all, when someone offers them a bounty that hurts the person who stiffed them, the PCs might find a reason to say "This one's on the house."
Lastly, if the group is in a grey area of the law or operating illegally, there comes the sections in parts two and three where they have to handle legal intervention. Rarely is shooting it out with law enforcement going to be a good plan, and sometimes the marks they take alive or the heirs of the ones they kill may come after them with lawyers or their own bounty hunters seeking to take the group down; these other bounty hunters may be one-off, or they may be recurrent adversaries, perhaps angling for the same bounties as the PCs and occasionally interfering with their plans while executing an attack.
So there, then, are some reasons and ideas for a bounty hunter campaign; give it a thought, and if it seems interesting try sounding out your player group to see if it appeals to them.
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Homebrew: Introduction to Kuramen
For a time, I've tinkered off and on with ideas for a game setting of my own, as most long-term GMs tend to do. I'm going to start recording it here for people to look over and consider, and perhaps offer their own thoughts on. This might be a once-a-week thing, or more frequent if it draws interest or I don't have much else to discuss on a given week.
The overview, then - this is a world that is quite literally built from the corpse of a god; all the major celestial bodies are the incarnations of gods, most of them quite alive and whole. The world itself died when curiosity tore the veil between the side of life and the non-place where the things that never were are, for lack of a better phrase, contained. The first thing through the gap was the incarnate form of unlife, which slew the world and sank into it to feast on the divine spark within it; the other gods quickly shoved the corpse of their slain sibling into the gap and set to work turning the corpse into a plug, half in the living realm and half in the Void.
From there, the mortal races were born, grew, some became corrupted by the Void and some by the Hunger, the world slowly hollowed out until there's an entire inner world lit by the feeble light of the Hunger-enshrouded divine spark of the world's spirit, and entire empires rose and fell. The most recent of these fell after unleashing a disaster known as the Manafall, leaving a glass waste and haunted ruins across the world. Now, kingdoms begin to explore the world anew, seeking an understanding of what has come before.
Into this will come the PCs, purely mortal heroes and villains who have the chance to shape the future of the world - and the dark mirror of it on the far side of the veil, where the world has become a twisted echo of itself. The things that never were inhabit this other world, creating a nightmare mockery of the living world as they do so. Beneath the surface, empires of deep-dwellers - drow, duergar, and stranger - survive from before the time of the Manafall, while below them lie kingdoms of aberrant horrors and tribal survivors who populate the inside of the world.
The sins of those who came before lies across the world; the active gods have gone missing or dormant, demigods are unheard of, and all over the world are the remnants of the Heroic Age that the last empire presided over. Powerful relics forged for exemplars lie forgotten in ruins, enchantments that have decayed with time leave entire areas saturated with unstable magic, and the line between treasure to harvest and trap waiting to be sprung is uncomfortably thin.
This is Kuramen; a world whose last Heroic Age devastated the world above, leaving the wreckage for the champions of a new era to find. A world whose depths contain the restless spirit of undeath and empires founded on forbidden secrets, biding their time against the surface.
Let's explore it together, shall we?
The overview, then - this is a world that is quite literally built from the corpse of a god; all the major celestial bodies are the incarnations of gods, most of them quite alive and whole. The world itself died when curiosity tore the veil between the side of life and the non-place where the things that never were are, for lack of a better phrase, contained. The first thing through the gap was the incarnate form of unlife, which slew the world and sank into it to feast on the divine spark within it; the other gods quickly shoved the corpse of their slain sibling into the gap and set to work turning the corpse into a plug, half in the living realm and half in the Void.
From there, the mortal races were born, grew, some became corrupted by the Void and some by the Hunger, the world slowly hollowed out until there's an entire inner world lit by the feeble light of the Hunger-enshrouded divine spark of the world's spirit, and entire empires rose and fell. The most recent of these fell after unleashing a disaster known as the Manafall, leaving a glass waste and haunted ruins across the world. Now, kingdoms begin to explore the world anew, seeking an understanding of what has come before.
Into this will come the PCs, purely mortal heroes and villains who have the chance to shape the future of the world - and the dark mirror of it on the far side of the veil, where the world has become a twisted echo of itself. The things that never were inhabit this other world, creating a nightmare mockery of the living world as they do so. Beneath the surface, empires of deep-dwellers - drow, duergar, and stranger - survive from before the time of the Manafall, while below them lie kingdoms of aberrant horrors and tribal survivors who populate the inside of the world.
The sins of those who came before lies across the world; the active gods have gone missing or dormant, demigods are unheard of, and all over the world are the remnants of the Heroic Age that the last empire presided over. Powerful relics forged for exemplars lie forgotten in ruins, enchantments that have decayed with time leave entire areas saturated with unstable magic, and the line between treasure to harvest and trap waiting to be sprung is uncomfortably thin.
This is Kuramen; a world whose last Heroic Age devastated the world above, leaving the wreckage for the champions of a new era to find. A world whose depths contain the restless spirit of undeath and empires founded on forbidden secrets, biding their time against the surface.
Let's explore it together, shall we?
Monday, October 19, 2015
The Strange: Recursive Recursion
In addition to the big three of the worlds available in The Strange for players to explore, there are also numerous smaller and less developed recursions. Some were made deliberately, through the use of reality seeds and the efforts of dedicated recursors aiming to have a hidden home away from home, while others exist as the result of fictional leakage from Earth proper. Each of them is a two-edged sword - each is linked to the Earth in some fashion, and so potentially exists as a road to the real world for the creatures below, but each also forms part of the Earth's defensive screen.
The best part of this is that you have every excuse you could possibly need to finally drop ridiculous pop culture references into your game. Is everyone a Doctor Who fan? Drop your favorite episode in as a recursion that loops; perhaps the Doctor has the spark, and has become a full-fledged recursor in his own right. If you're Star Trek or Star Wars fans, drop your favorite bits into the Strange as self-contained recursions. King's Landing and the Wall probably exist, as do multiple iterations of zombie-overrun cities.
With that in mind, let's look at some of the premade recursions in the Strange.
First up, for all those who are fans of anime, is the recursion of Atom Nocturne, a recursion that creatively hybridizes psychic powers, superheroic/sentai antics, battle tournaments between members of the populace showcasing their psychic Talents, and so on. Everyone is young and attractive, talented and successful, and occasionally their Talents go awry and produce villains of incredible power.
One of the greatest appeals of this recursion to outsiders is that if you can compete in the most impressive of the battle tournaments under the Splendor Dome and gain enough approval and enthusiasm from spectators, you can get a custom-crafted artifact. Of course, the more powerful and impressive the Talent, the more likely that person is to either crumble under it to become Fallen or to be asked in if-you-want-to-keep-competing-do-this terms to fight the latest Fallen to emerge.
If you like anime, you can easily fit your favorite tropes into Atom Nocturne's framework in almost all cases. If not, well, you can spin off a side recursion where your preferred tropes override those of Atom Nocturne, allowing you to create a constellation of anime-inspired worlds as a part of the Shoals; many will likely, in the nature of anime itself, have interlinked translation gates connecting them. Genre hop at your own leisure and discretion!
The recursion of Crow Hollow at first seems almost Disney-like, as it's a recursion inhabited by avian humanoids called Kro, full of glittering shops built amid the branches of a colossal tree. In practice, it's something of an inter-recursion bazaar and black market that trades in trinkets, cyphers, and artifacts from recursions and the Strange itself. Deals are often made in crow coin, which is a manifestation of a creature's vital essence.
The odds are that if you want something, you can find it in Crow Hollow - but so can people you're opposed to, and the Kro are nothing if not wily about making deals and setting up bidding wars. It doesn't help that the Beak Mafia exists, and that they'll happily enforce the rule of Don Wyclef; people trying to buy or sell cyphers and artifacts without the Don's permission may find themselves facing a gang of kro thugs looking to extract the 'merchant agreement' from them in kro coin, whether or not they're willing.
Crow Hollow is a good place to look for leads on MacGuffins and the like, including terrifyingly powerful artifacts like reality-altering 'seeds' that can manipulate even the physical world by drawing on the nearly infinite computational power of the dark energy network. Rumors and information also get sold here, making Crow Hollow an ideal place for players with no idea how to proceed on whatever tasks they have in front of them.
Gloaming is a recursion where the night is ruled by supernatural forces; vampires, werewolves, and worse come out after sunset, split into factions dedicated to Law and Chaos. It's a recursion built around the core concepts of urban fantasy, with magic and myth hiding behind a daytime facade of mundane nature, only to emerge at night in a battle betwen the rigid control of the Code and the anarchic abandon of the Conclave.
During the day, the recursion could be any fair-sized city on modern Earth; people go about their business, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, children play in parks and go to school, people go to work and come home each evening. In this guise, recursors new to the idea might not even be fully aware that they've left Earth, other than the instinctive knowledge that translating gives them - chiefly that the night is dangerous, even if no one can quite articulate why.
At night, the recursion becomes the playground of the supernatural as mortals hide in their homes. Werewolves, vampires, and those mages sworn to either Law or Chaos struggles with one another in a shadow war thanks to the Gloaming Pact. Recursors who come here can find some surprisingly useful resources and fonts of information, as more than a few inhabitants have the spark and some are even quickened themselves. Of course, to do so the players will have to navigate the intricate politics of the supernatural world while remaining off the radar of the daytime authorities.
There are also other recursions, mostly getting a paragraph or so in the main book; each of them has grown up around a seed idea, although some have evolved in baffling ways.
Goodland is a recursion grown up around the never-was black-and-white world of 1950s and 1960s television, where everything is perfect and happy as long as no one gets out of line. On the surface, it's the kind of happy and harmonious place that some people on Earth speak of when they talk about the Good Old Days, with no signs of discontent or discord. Of course, those who step out of line are likely to find themselves experiencing the dark side of that dream - the citizens of the recursion may well pay a visit to those who don't toe the line in the form of a midnight lynching by the 'good folk' hidden behind faceless hoods and masks.
Singularitan is a recursion built up around dystopian dreams of an AI revolting against those who made it, creating a recursion where the AI itself is the only mind, with instances of it running on robotic bodies and the leftover inhabitants. Going there can be dangerous, as the AI is well aware of the Strange, and those who leave likely do so infected with a copy of the AI instance. Going to Earth rapidly degrades these instances, but they survive quite well out in the Strange.
Old Mars is a recursion grown up around the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with an inhabitable Mars dotted by the ruins of a fallen civilization and barbaric descendants of what once was. Recursors who come here can find all manner of strange and enigmatic cyphers and artifacts, detritus of the recursion's theoretical past, all guarded by savage barbarians and hungry beasts.
Innsmouth is just one recursion seeded from the creepy vision of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, containing the town of Innsmouth itself and a stretch of shoreline and ocean inhabited by the Deep Ones of his stories. One major risks of the Lovecraftian constellation of recursions is that something squamous and horrid might develop the spark if interacted with, with the frightening prospect of the Elder and Outer Gods being unleashed upon the world if they become quickened.
These are just the tip of the iceberg as far as recursions go; several others sit in the main book, others have been developed in additional sourcebooks by Monte Cook Games, and still more can be found at the Recursion Codex!
I certainly encourage people to give it a try; the game can scratch most any genre mashup itch.
The best part of this is that you have every excuse you could possibly need to finally drop ridiculous pop culture references into your game. Is everyone a Doctor Who fan? Drop your favorite episode in as a recursion that loops; perhaps the Doctor has the spark, and has become a full-fledged recursor in his own right. If you're Star Trek or Star Wars fans, drop your favorite bits into the Strange as self-contained recursions. King's Landing and the Wall probably exist, as do multiple iterations of zombie-overrun cities.
With that in mind, let's look at some of the premade recursions in the Strange.
First up, for all those who are fans of anime, is the recursion of Atom Nocturne, a recursion that creatively hybridizes psychic powers, superheroic/sentai antics, battle tournaments between members of the populace showcasing their psychic Talents, and so on. Everyone is young and attractive, talented and successful, and occasionally their Talents go awry and produce villains of incredible power.
One of the greatest appeals of this recursion to outsiders is that if you can compete in the most impressive of the battle tournaments under the Splendor Dome and gain enough approval and enthusiasm from spectators, you can get a custom-crafted artifact. Of course, the more powerful and impressive the Talent, the more likely that person is to either crumble under it to become Fallen or to be asked in if-you-want-to-keep-competing-do-this terms to fight the latest Fallen to emerge.
If you like anime, you can easily fit your favorite tropes into Atom Nocturne's framework in almost all cases. If not, well, you can spin off a side recursion where your preferred tropes override those of Atom Nocturne, allowing you to create a constellation of anime-inspired worlds as a part of the Shoals; many will likely, in the nature of anime itself, have interlinked translation gates connecting them. Genre hop at your own leisure and discretion!
The recursion of Crow Hollow at first seems almost Disney-like, as it's a recursion inhabited by avian humanoids called Kro, full of glittering shops built amid the branches of a colossal tree. In practice, it's something of an inter-recursion bazaar and black market that trades in trinkets, cyphers, and artifacts from recursions and the Strange itself. Deals are often made in crow coin, which is a manifestation of a creature's vital essence.
The odds are that if you want something, you can find it in Crow Hollow - but so can people you're opposed to, and the Kro are nothing if not wily about making deals and setting up bidding wars. It doesn't help that the Beak Mafia exists, and that they'll happily enforce the rule of Don Wyclef; people trying to buy or sell cyphers and artifacts without the Don's permission may find themselves facing a gang of kro thugs looking to extract the 'merchant agreement' from them in kro coin, whether or not they're willing.
Crow Hollow is a good place to look for leads on MacGuffins and the like, including terrifyingly powerful artifacts like reality-altering 'seeds' that can manipulate even the physical world by drawing on the nearly infinite computational power of the dark energy network. Rumors and information also get sold here, making Crow Hollow an ideal place for players with no idea how to proceed on whatever tasks they have in front of them.
Gloaming is a recursion where the night is ruled by supernatural forces; vampires, werewolves, and worse come out after sunset, split into factions dedicated to Law and Chaos. It's a recursion built around the core concepts of urban fantasy, with magic and myth hiding behind a daytime facade of mundane nature, only to emerge at night in a battle betwen the rigid control of the Code and the anarchic abandon of the Conclave.
During the day, the recursion could be any fair-sized city on modern Earth; people go about their business, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, children play in parks and go to school, people go to work and come home each evening. In this guise, recursors new to the idea might not even be fully aware that they've left Earth, other than the instinctive knowledge that translating gives them - chiefly that the night is dangerous, even if no one can quite articulate why.
At night, the recursion becomes the playground of the supernatural as mortals hide in their homes. Werewolves, vampires, and those mages sworn to either Law or Chaos struggles with one another in a shadow war thanks to the Gloaming Pact. Recursors who come here can find some surprisingly useful resources and fonts of information, as more than a few inhabitants have the spark and some are even quickened themselves. Of course, to do so the players will have to navigate the intricate politics of the supernatural world while remaining off the radar of the daytime authorities.
There are also other recursions, mostly getting a paragraph or so in the main book; each of them has grown up around a seed idea, although some have evolved in baffling ways.
Goodland is a recursion grown up around the never-was black-and-white world of 1950s and 1960s television, where everything is perfect and happy as long as no one gets out of line. On the surface, it's the kind of happy and harmonious place that some people on Earth speak of when they talk about the Good Old Days, with no signs of discontent or discord. Of course, those who step out of line are likely to find themselves experiencing the dark side of that dream - the citizens of the recursion may well pay a visit to those who don't toe the line in the form of a midnight lynching by the 'good folk' hidden behind faceless hoods and masks.
Singularitan is a recursion built up around dystopian dreams of an AI revolting against those who made it, creating a recursion where the AI itself is the only mind, with instances of it running on robotic bodies and the leftover inhabitants. Going there can be dangerous, as the AI is well aware of the Strange, and those who leave likely do so infected with a copy of the AI instance. Going to Earth rapidly degrades these instances, but they survive quite well out in the Strange.
Old Mars is a recursion grown up around the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with an inhabitable Mars dotted by the ruins of a fallen civilization and barbaric descendants of what once was. Recursors who come here can find all manner of strange and enigmatic cyphers and artifacts, detritus of the recursion's theoretical past, all guarded by savage barbarians and hungry beasts.
Innsmouth is just one recursion seeded from the creepy vision of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, containing the town of Innsmouth itself and a stretch of shoreline and ocean inhabited by the Deep Ones of his stories. One major risks of the Lovecraftian constellation of recursions is that something squamous and horrid might develop the spark if interacted with, with the frightening prospect of the Elder and Outer Gods being unleashed upon the world if they become quickened.
These are just the tip of the iceberg as far as recursions go; several others sit in the main book, others have been developed in additional sourcebooks by Monte Cook Games, and still more can be found at the Recursion Codex!
I certainly encourage people to give it a try; the game can scratch most any genre mashup itch.
Friday, October 16, 2015
The Strange: The Big Three
Yesterday we looked at the general reasons why you might want to give The Strange a look if you're in the market for a new RPG. Today, we'll look at the three most well-detailed of the worlds available - Ardeyn, the land of high fantasy; Ruk, a world of mad science; and Earth, our familiar old home. We'll be looking at how you might be able to use each of these in your recursion-spanning adentures.
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Ardeyn started off as a bunch of code and design assets for a MMORPG; the design team who made it were also involved as part of a group working with the first quantum computer design, and this put them in a somewhat unique situation. Quantum-level computing is one of the things that can establish a direct connection between the Strange and the regular universe, and so when the system was first switched on and used for a virtual reality simulation it pinged the dark energy network.
Which naturally drew the attention of planetovores that happened to be in the area, drawing them to the connection that would let them bypass the Shoals entirely and head straight for Earth. In an action of remarkably quick thinking, the lead designer threw the code for the game into the quantum computer and had it load directly into the Strange, effectively plugging the link as the world of Ardeyn went from code and dreams to a physical world acting as a bulwark for Earth.
Ardeyn's a high fantasy world, but it isn't European high fantasy; it has more in common with a Sumerian kind of mythos than the more usual type, and that gives it a certain unique flavor that serves the Strange well. People can be either humans or a kind of mortal-descended race of former divine servitors, the qephilim, who have jackal heads and affinities to their ancestral god. The world's gods are pretty much dead or otherwise missing, other than the former god of war who became the Betrayer.
Ardeyn is a fantastic resource if you want your game to dip into mythological themes, high fantasy settings, or have a bit of a 'modern yokel cast into fantastic history' vibe. The lattermost is honestly the best way to use it, if you don't go with the idea of the PCs starting as members of the Estate; having ordinary people from Earth all stumble through a translation gate into Ardeyn can introduce them to the wonders of the Strange quickly and with a definite vibe of high adventure.
Plus, well, there are demons and worse to fight, and who hasn't wanted the chance to be a bit of a hero?
---
Ruk is the most developed of the Mad Science recursions, and with good reason - it isn't native to the Shoals of Earth, but was instead a world-ship built by the original inhabitants long ago to escape the destruction of their own world by a planetovore. Originally a self-contained recursion that could roam freely across the Strange, it ran aground long before humans were a major concern on Earth proper, and they've been interfering with history ever since.
Ruk is a place where biology is as easily manipulated as mechanical technology, with the line between living and unliving blurred much more than in a world with Standard Physics. Ages ago, the inhabitants of Ruk were forced to patch the function of their worldship after some unknown and catastrophic loss, giving rise to the competition of the True Code and the All-Song, which are manifestations of the original design and the patch, respectively.
There are those in Ruk who would like to help Earth prosper, perhaps to eventually achieve what their people never could and take the fight to the planetovores, while others want to simply hide out and avoid the notice of those dangerous beasts - and at least one faction wants to destroy the Earth itself, to free Ruk from the Shoals. So far, none of these factions have attained dominance over the others in their ongoing shadow war - something with ample opportunities for players to get involved with.
It's a world of shifting conspiracies, secrets hidden in plain sight, alien lifeforms strolling casually down the street, and all the other tropes of mad science, extreme sci-fi, and H.R. Giger that you could possibly ask for. Ruk is a wonderful place to drop your players when they need to science the hell out of something, or when they need someone wiser in the ways of the Strange than they are. One potential alternate patron for a player group, the Quiet Cabal, is based in Ruk. They're an excellent way to introduce lost neophyte recursors to the Strange, particularly since they're one of the groups of good guys that aren't interested in the Earth ceasing to exist.
Rukians also make excellent villains - they've had quite a lot longer than humanity to come to understand the Strange and hone their knowledge, and their position as literal dimension-hopping aliens lends them a certain monstrous potential that others might lack; you could easily play them up as being like the Mi-Go, inscrutable and monstrous as they casually harvest specific ndividuals from the earth, with no one willing to believe reports of people disappearing into shadows with kidnap victims, never to be seen again.
---
Lastly, there's Earth. Good old Mother Earth, where almost everyone is ignorant of the fact that just under the skein of conventional reality are swarms of dream worlds and nightmare world-eating monstrosities looking for a way up. The secrets behind reaching the Strange are a carefully kept secret among the factions in the know, because the last thing anyone wants is for some curious, well-meaning person to open the door for a planetovore to come climbing up.
Well, mostly. Some keep it a secret because they don't want any established planetovores to beat them to it, intending to become one of the godlike beings in their own right. Others want to make sure that the planetovore (nascent or actual) that they personally serve will be the first one up the eventual pipe, and they're in fierce competition to make sure their god is ascendant.
The Estate is the default organization, the one the PCs are assumed to be part of. They operate as an extra-governmental organization, aware of the various other factions and striving against them to try to keep the Earth safe until humanity stands a chance against the inhabitants of the Strange. They have on-again off-again relations with groups like the Quiet Cabal and the Office of Strategic Recursion, the latter being a militaristic organization looking for ways to turn the very concept of recursions into a military asset.
This is, of course, the absolute best place to start off with any new campaign. Have your players make clueless natives of Earth, unaware of the seething cauldron of chaos under the skin of reality, only to have them stumble through a recursion gate into another world or trip over some creature that made it to earth without being translated for Standard Physics. Before long, they'll be off to explore the worlds of their favorite video games and movies, rubbing shoulders with literary heroes, and taking on the job of keeping the Earth from being eaten whole.
---
That covers the Big Three of the Earth's recursions; for more, check out the Recursion Codex! The folks at Monte Cook Games made it specifically so that players can share their creations with the world; there are some real gems there, even as there are some absolute stinkers. (It's all subjective; things that repulse me may well appeal to you.)
Next week we'll take a look at some of the smaller recursions and some seeds for adventures in the Strange!
---
Ardeyn started off as a bunch of code and design assets for a MMORPG; the design team who made it were also involved as part of a group working with the first quantum computer design, and this put them in a somewhat unique situation. Quantum-level computing is one of the things that can establish a direct connection between the Strange and the regular universe, and so when the system was first switched on and used for a virtual reality simulation it pinged the dark energy network.
Which naturally drew the attention of planetovores that happened to be in the area, drawing them to the connection that would let them bypass the Shoals entirely and head straight for Earth. In an action of remarkably quick thinking, the lead designer threw the code for the game into the quantum computer and had it load directly into the Strange, effectively plugging the link as the world of Ardeyn went from code and dreams to a physical world acting as a bulwark for Earth.
Ardeyn's a high fantasy world, but it isn't European high fantasy; it has more in common with a Sumerian kind of mythos than the more usual type, and that gives it a certain unique flavor that serves the Strange well. People can be either humans or a kind of mortal-descended race of former divine servitors, the qephilim, who have jackal heads and affinities to their ancestral god. The world's gods are pretty much dead or otherwise missing, other than the former god of war who became the Betrayer.
Ardeyn is a fantastic resource if you want your game to dip into mythological themes, high fantasy settings, or have a bit of a 'modern yokel cast into fantastic history' vibe. The lattermost is honestly the best way to use it, if you don't go with the idea of the PCs starting as members of the Estate; having ordinary people from Earth all stumble through a translation gate into Ardeyn can introduce them to the wonders of the Strange quickly and with a definite vibe of high adventure.
Plus, well, there are demons and worse to fight, and who hasn't wanted the chance to be a bit of a hero?
---
Ruk is the most developed of the Mad Science recursions, and with good reason - it isn't native to the Shoals of Earth, but was instead a world-ship built by the original inhabitants long ago to escape the destruction of their own world by a planetovore. Originally a self-contained recursion that could roam freely across the Strange, it ran aground long before humans were a major concern on Earth proper, and they've been interfering with history ever since.
Ruk is a place where biology is as easily manipulated as mechanical technology, with the line between living and unliving blurred much more than in a world with Standard Physics. Ages ago, the inhabitants of Ruk were forced to patch the function of their worldship after some unknown and catastrophic loss, giving rise to the competition of the True Code and the All-Song, which are manifestations of the original design and the patch, respectively.
There are those in Ruk who would like to help Earth prosper, perhaps to eventually achieve what their people never could and take the fight to the planetovores, while others want to simply hide out and avoid the notice of those dangerous beasts - and at least one faction wants to destroy the Earth itself, to free Ruk from the Shoals. So far, none of these factions have attained dominance over the others in their ongoing shadow war - something with ample opportunities for players to get involved with.
It's a world of shifting conspiracies, secrets hidden in plain sight, alien lifeforms strolling casually down the street, and all the other tropes of mad science, extreme sci-fi, and H.R. Giger that you could possibly ask for. Ruk is a wonderful place to drop your players when they need to science the hell out of something, or when they need someone wiser in the ways of the Strange than they are. One potential alternate patron for a player group, the Quiet Cabal, is based in Ruk. They're an excellent way to introduce lost neophyte recursors to the Strange, particularly since they're one of the groups of good guys that aren't interested in the Earth ceasing to exist.
Rukians also make excellent villains - they've had quite a lot longer than humanity to come to understand the Strange and hone their knowledge, and their position as literal dimension-hopping aliens lends them a certain monstrous potential that others might lack; you could easily play them up as being like the Mi-Go, inscrutable and monstrous as they casually harvest specific ndividuals from the earth, with no one willing to believe reports of people disappearing into shadows with kidnap victims, never to be seen again.
---
Lastly, there's Earth. Good old Mother Earth, where almost everyone is ignorant of the fact that just under the skein of conventional reality are swarms of dream worlds and nightmare world-eating monstrosities looking for a way up. The secrets behind reaching the Strange are a carefully kept secret among the factions in the know, because the last thing anyone wants is for some curious, well-meaning person to open the door for a planetovore to come climbing up.
Well, mostly. Some keep it a secret because they don't want any established planetovores to beat them to it, intending to become one of the godlike beings in their own right. Others want to make sure that the planetovore (nascent or actual) that they personally serve will be the first one up the eventual pipe, and they're in fierce competition to make sure their god is ascendant.
The Estate is the default organization, the one the PCs are assumed to be part of. They operate as an extra-governmental organization, aware of the various other factions and striving against them to try to keep the Earth safe until humanity stands a chance against the inhabitants of the Strange. They have on-again off-again relations with groups like the Quiet Cabal and the Office of Strategic Recursion, the latter being a militaristic organization looking for ways to turn the very concept of recursions into a military asset.
This is, of course, the absolute best place to start off with any new campaign. Have your players make clueless natives of Earth, unaware of the seething cauldron of chaos under the skin of reality, only to have them stumble through a recursion gate into another world or trip over some creature that made it to earth without being translated for Standard Physics. Before long, they'll be off to explore the worlds of their favorite video games and movies, rubbing shoulders with literary heroes, and taking on the job of keeping the Earth from being eaten whole.
---
That covers the Big Three of the Earth's recursions; for more, check out the Recursion Codex! The folks at Monte Cook Games made it specifically so that players can share their creations with the world; there are some real gems there, even as there are some absolute stinkers. (It's all subjective; things that repulse me may well appeal to you.)
Next week we'll take a look at some of the smaller recursions and some seeds for adventures in the Strange!
Thursday, October 15, 2015
The Strange: Why to Play
The last several posts were on Numenera, from Monte Cook Games; this time I'm going to do something similar about one of the other games they've created and published, The Strange. Today we'll look at reasons why you might want to consider picking it up to play, and why you might want to pitch it to your friends.
We'll start with the premise of the game, which is that in the earliest days of the universe there arose an alien civilization that quickly developed advanced technology, on the order of Kardashev IV or V - masters of the universe itself, who decided that the cosmos simply wasn't sufficient for their purposes. They altered reality itself, creating the foundation of what we know today as dark energy; they designed it as a universe-wide computational network, which they could use for nearly any purpose they felt like. They'd upload themselves into the network, transfer across it to whatever world they wanted to visit, and literally 'print' a new body on the other end of the trip.
Somewhere along the way in the billions of years since then, things have gone awry. This first civilization is gone entirely; perhaps ascending to a post-cosmological existence as a Type VI civilization, perhaps simply going extinct from boredom, perhaps destroyed by planetovores (we'll get back to that terrifying word soon), perhaps something else unimaginable. The dark energy network remains, however, and has grown along with the universe itself - with a distinctly odd quirk.
The network is so powerful a processing system that it can simulate microscopic segments of an actual universe, you see. Some worlds - those which have the good fortune to develop sapient life - are what get termed 'Prime' worlds - those whose collection of thinking, dreaming, creative minds seed the dark energy network with their creativity, giving birth to recursions - fictional worlds that generate from the ideas that take root in it. Most worlds only generate a few of these worlds from so-called fictional bleed, but Earth is special, with a vast number of fictive worlds in what gets called the Shoals of Earth. Why? You'll need to read the book for that; I'm personally going to discard that tidbit in my games.
This brings us to the core of what makes The Strange a unique game: by default, your character is a recursor, someone capable of translating from Earth to one of the recursions around it, and even out into the dark energy network - the Strange, or the chaosphere, as some refer to it. Over the course of a single game session, you can go from being an agent of the Estate on Earth, tracking down a group of smugglers who've been bringing items from the Strange to Earth for sale to the high fantasy world of Ardeyn where you're a traditional adventuring group to rubbing shoulders with Sherlock Holmes.
That's really the big draw of this - any world you can imagine can exist, including multiple iterations of the same basic world, each with a different twist on the storyline. The Holmes of Arthur Conan Doyle is there, as is the Holmes of the Sherlock TV show and the Mr. Holmes movie. Multiple versions of Alice in Wonderland exist, each one twisted in unique ways. In some cases, recursions have merged or been infected by external sources, creating versions unknown to the dreams of the people whose dreams and stories first spawned those world. There's a version of Camelot infected by a nanotech virus, and a version of Harry Potter where lightsabers have replaced wands and the Force is taught alongside magic.
You can make of this game any number of things; PCs can be agents of the Estate, as the default assumes, or they can work for a secretive government agency, alien groups that have chosen to hide from planetovores in the Shoals of Earth, or even unwitting independent recursors who have no idea of the conflicts going on around them.
And there most certainly are conflicts; the Estate is trying to prevent direct lines between Earth and the Strange out of fear, the Office of Strategic Recursion is trying to militarize the Strange, agents from the Weird Science recursion of Ruk are trying to destroy the Earth to free their recursion-faring world-ship from where it got stuck, and more. Creatures either native to the alien environment of the Strange or evolved from species that once populated a Prime world try to get access to Earth for any number of reasons, as well.
And that brings us to the planetovores - creatures of impossible power, which prey on Prime worlds to conquer and consume them. The events which led up to the creation of Ardeyn and the Estate were sparked by one such being attempting to gain access to the Earth to overwhelm and consume it. Some planetovores simple seek to become gods over a Prime World, ruling eternally over a world where their will controls all the recursions and the Prime world itself. Others seek to consume the vital essence of the world, predators escaped from a long-lost recursion and evolved to godlike power over the long ages.
Essentially, if you liked shows like The X-Files, Supernatural, Grimm, or Constantine, or similar types of books, the Strange is a game you'll want to give a look. In the course of a single session it lets you go from a cop on the streets of Earth to a heroic knight in a high fantasy kingdom to a deep-space explorer in a sci-fi recursion. You can borrow shamelessly from your favorite pop culture and literature, because the recursions around Earth are literally made of these things. And you can even delve into the swirling fractal chaos of the Strange itself, exploring the universe that underpins the universe - and perhaps even explore alien worlds in the 'real world' in the process.
So give it a look!
We'll start with the premise of the game, which is that in the earliest days of the universe there arose an alien civilization that quickly developed advanced technology, on the order of Kardashev IV or V - masters of the universe itself, who decided that the cosmos simply wasn't sufficient for their purposes. They altered reality itself, creating the foundation of what we know today as dark energy; they designed it as a universe-wide computational network, which they could use for nearly any purpose they felt like. They'd upload themselves into the network, transfer across it to whatever world they wanted to visit, and literally 'print' a new body on the other end of the trip.
Somewhere along the way in the billions of years since then, things have gone awry. This first civilization is gone entirely; perhaps ascending to a post-cosmological existence as a Type VI civilization, perhaps simply going extinct from boredom, perhaps destroyed by planetovores (we'll get back to that terrifying word soon), perhaps something else unimaginable. The dark energy network remains, however, and has grown along with the universe itself - with a distinctly odd quirk.
The network is so powerful a processing system that it can simulate microscopic segments of an actual universe, you see. Some worlds - those which have the good fortune to develop sapient life - are what get termed 'Prime' worlds - those whose collection of thinking, dreaming, creative minds seed the dark energy network with their creativity, giving birth to recursions - fictional worlds that generate from the ideas that take root in it. Most worlds only generate a few of these worlds from so-called fictional bleed, but Earth is special, with a vast number of fictive worlds in what gets called the Shoals of Earth. Why? You'll need to read the book for that; I'm personally going to discard that tidbit in my games.
This brings us to the core of what makes The Strange a unique game: by default, your character is a recursor, someone capable of translating from Earth to one of the recursions around it, and even out into the dark energy network - the Strange, or the chaosphere, as some refer to it. Over the course of a single game session, you can go from being an agent of the Estate on Earth, tracking down a group of smugglers who've been bringing items from the Strange to Earth for sale to the high fantasy world of Ardeyn where you're a traditional adventuring group to rubbing shoulders with Sherlock Holmes.
That's really the big draw of this - any world you can imagine can exist, including multiple iterations of the same basic world, each with a different twist on the storyline. The Holmes of Arthur Conan Doyle is there, as is the Holmes of the Sherlock TV show and the Mr. Holmes movie. Multiple versions of Alice in Wonderland exist, each one twisted in unique ways. In some cases, recursions have merged or been infected by external sources, creating versions unknown to the dreams of the people whose dreams and stories first spawned those world. There's a version of Camelot infected by a nanotech virus, and a version of Harry Potter where lightsabers have replaced wands and the Force is taught alongside magic.
You can make of this game any number of things; PCs can be agents of the Estate, as the default assumes, or they can work for a secretive government agency, alien groups that have chosen to hide from planetovores in the Shoals of Earth, or even unwitting independent recursors who have no idea of the conflicts going on around them.
And there most certainly are conflicts; the Estate is trying to prevent direct lines between Earth and the Strange out of fear, the Office of Strategic Recursion is trying to militarize the Strange, agents from the Weird Science recursion of Ruk are trying to destroy the Earth to free their recursion-faring world-ship from where it got stuck, and more. Creatures either native to the alien environment of the Strange or evolved from species that once populated a Prime world try to get access to Earth for any number of reasons, as well.
And that brings us to the planetovores - creatures of impossible power, which prey on Prime worlds to conquer and consume them. The events which led up to the creation of Ardeyn and the Estate were sparked by one such being attempting to gain access to the Earth to overwhelm and consume it. Some planetovores simple seek to become gods over a Prime World, ruling eternally over a world where their will controls all the recursions and the Prime world itself. Others seek to consume the vital essence of the world, predators escaped from a long-lost recursion and evolved to godlike power over the long ages.
Essentially, if you liked shows like The X-Files, Supernatural, Grimm, or Constantine, or similar types of books, the Strange is a game you'll want to give a look. In the course of a single session it lets you go from a cop on the streets of Earth to a heroic knight in a high fantasy kingdom to a deep-space explorer in a sci-fi recursion. You can borrow shamelessly from your favorite pop culture and literature, because the recursions around Earth are literally made of these things. And you can even delve into the swirling fractal chaos of the Strange itself, exploring the universe that underpins the universe - and perhaps even explore alien worlds in the 'real world' in the process.
So give it a look!
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Numenera: Cyphers, Artifacts, and Oddities
Today, we'll look at a selection of numenera devices and items that could show up in Pat's campaign; these are in addition to the randomly-rolled devices that might be found as treasure in the process of adventuring through the Ninth World.
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Oddities are strange things with no clear purpose, which may or may not be able to be adapted to some form of useful function. Often, they're used in the same way that curios and kitsch have been throughout human history - half trade object and half display piece. Here are some that can be found around the City of the Missing, in the shops, on shelves in homes, and on display in public spaces.
---
Next we have a sampling of the cyphers in the area; some are as-found widgets, while others are modified or augmented by the skills of those in the area.
Wind Capsule
Type: Usable (Anoetic)
Level: 1D6+2
Effect: These usually come in the form of small glassy bulbs filled with a silvery liquid that aren't quite as fragile as they look, but which will still break open when thrown. Each one contains a repair-function nanoswarm that lacks any direction, which will sample the environment and attempt to 'repair' it according to ages-obsolete programming. The result is essentially a short-lived Iron Wind that fills an area out to a short distance from the impact point that then drifts with the prevailing wind, constantly and rapidly rebuilding everything in the area of effect. Regardless of what results, any living creatures are effectively rendered part of the terrain in a horrific fashion.
Shinshot Node
Type: Wearable (Anoetic)
Level: 1D6
Effect: This set of stronglass bracelets are shot through with glistening metallic threads; when the activation button is pushed, the wearer feels a sharp tingling where the bracelets touch their skin, followed by a sharp awareness of all metallic objects in their vicinity. For the next 28 hours, they can project a powerful electromagnetic force at any object within a long range, with the effect of propelling the object with sufficient speed and force that it counts as a ranged weapon (up to 100 pounds per cypher level); items can only move in a straight line away from the bearer, however. Users may make a Speed check equal to the cypher's leel to attempt to use this force to launch themselves into and through the air, if they're light enough.
Purification Shot
Type: Anoetic (Injectable)
Level: 1D6+2
Effect: These ampules of bright green goo can be pressed against a creature's skin and injected, an action that most find only marginally preferable to the idea of dying. The injected goo neutralizes all poisons and diseases of equal or lower level than the cypher, while granting an additional Might check to overcome those of higher level. The reason users find the idea of letting their ailment have its way is that the goo causes the users to feel as if they're burning up from the inside, spending the next 28 hours with all actions save the additional Might check modified by two steps to their detriment.
Encryption Pod
Type: Occultic (Usable)
Level: 1D6+3
Effect: This is a matched set of dark spheres, each with an array of buttons and dials along one side, with an opening on the opposite side. Any information-containing object fed into the hole before activation will be rendered into a metallic cylinder engraved with a cipher containing the original information, the difficulty of the cipher being equal to the level of the Encryption Pod. Feeding the rod into the other device of the pair will cause it to reconstruct the original materials, the cipher cleanly removed. Convergence agents often carry one half of these pods to encrypt their findings to send to their superiors.
Hopper
Type Occultic (Wearable)
Level: 1D6+1
Effect: This hefty piece of machinery is surprisingly light and easy to move; fastened into a harness with backpack straps, it hardly impedes the wearer's movements even before activation. When used, it generates a field that modified the effects of inertia for the user, giving them two assets on all movement tasks and all attempts to avoid being moved against the user's will. When active, the user hears a high-pitched sizzling sound and can't smell anything but the scent of burnt sugar. The effects of the device last for four hours, after which it burns out.
Immunity Serum
Type: Occultic (Injectable)
Level: 1D6+2
Effect: This complex band can be activated by being pressed to exposed skin, an action that deals one point of Might damage as it samples flesh and blood before injecting the person with a serum that renders them immune to all forms of poison and disease for the next 28 hours; even ambient radiation damage is shrugged off by the user, as their genetic structure and immune system are massively bolstered. A side effect of the injection is that the user spends the next week with a craving for an alien flower that they've never seen before.
---
Artifacts are the powerhouse devices of Numenera, ways to add semi-permanent abilities to characters. Fairly rare and often fairly powerful, they're the truest treasures of the Ninth World. Here are a few that have been found around Guran.
Gravity Arc Projector
Level: 1D6+1
Effect: This staff has a silver-tinted translucent ball at one end with an intense point of light inside, suspended in a silver crescent with several thick cables coiling down the length of the staff; these connect to a softly humming ovoid at the other end. At base, it can be used as a light bludgeoning and slashing weapon that deals 4 damage rather than 2. Activating it has one of two effects, either of which trigger a depletion roll.
Gravity Pulse: A single target within a long range is subject to a Speed attack; if the attack hits, the creature is violently slammed into the ground, dealing 10 points of bludgeoning damage as the force of gravity magnifies immensely around it for a moment.
Anti-gravity: For ten minutes, the wielder of the staff is able to fly up to a long range each round, effectively freed from the hold of gravity.
Depletion: 1 in 50 (1-2 on a 1D100)
Sky Crane
Level: 1D6
Effect: Similar in design to the Gravity Arc Projector, this staff is capable of projecting a precise telekinetic effect that enables it to lift up to 500 pounds per level at up to a long range, moving it at about five miles per hour from one point to another. Each activation targets a single object and lasts up to one hour. It is possible to use this to enable an entire group to fly if the artifact is powerful enough, by lifting a platform under the group and moving it toward the desired location.
Depletion: 1 in 100
Mnemonic Puzzle Box
Level: 1D6+3
Effect: This intricately detailed cube is able to capture the mind of a living creature and run it as a virtual simulation, effectively allowing a creature to survive death if used within the first minute or so of death. The resulting mind is of a level equal to the level of the artifact in terms of how well it can think; while this will not allow a nonsapient beast to become sapient, it can enable those who use it to think more swiftly and clearly than they might have in life. A box can only capture one mind, thereafter serving to simulate it perfectly for as long as the box exists. Most human minds don't handle this well, as the box doesn't have sensory inputs by default, although it can be connected to external devices and even installed in synthetic bodies.
Depletion: --
Blessed Blade of Wonder
Level: 1D6+1
Effect: An elegant-looking sword-hilt that, when activated, creates a probability field that anything that touches the shimmering distortion projected from the blade will be violently harmed. This distortion deal damage equal to the artifact's level, which counts as a light weapon. The damage that results varies from moment to moment, with everything from simple crushing and tearing to outright manipulation of atomic matter, with severe radiation burns and transmutation of materials happening. One notable event involving the first Blessed Blade of Wonder remains enshrined in local lore: an abhuman was struck by the field and had the path of the blow transmute into diamond, the slab of which remains on display in the town hall of Guran to this day. Each activation of the distortion "blade" lasts for ten minutes.
Depletion: 1 in 20
---
Oddities are strange things with no clear purpose, which may or may not be able to be adapted to some form of useful function. Often, they're used in the same way that curios and kitsch have been throughout human history - half trade object and half display piece. Here are some that can be found around the City of the Missing, in the shops, on shelves in homes, and on display in public spaces.
- A small piece of apparently unbreakable glass that slowly ripples like the surface of a pond.
- A small cup that instantly cools anything placed in it to 40 F (4.4C), although the cup itself remains room temperature.
- A brass-colored disc that occasionally bounces up onto its edge and spins several times before falling over again.
- A small metallic shrub that produces several (1D6+1) pieces of brightly colored glass every week, which crumble away a day after being picked or falling off.
- A pair of metal sticks that can be used as hairsticks, which causes keratin in contact with it (hair and fingernails) to turn a vivid shade of blue.
- A bottle of bubbling translucent green liquid; it doesn't seem possible to open it.
- A dozen rings seamlessly joined together, each of which can be tapped to produce a musical tone.
- An egg that defies all efforts to crack it open.
- A particularly shiny red rock that constantly remains hot enough to be unpleasant to touch but never actually harmful.
- A small stronglass ball that tastes like sweet mint and leaves the tongue stained yellow if sucked on.
- A nearly-empty jar of purple gel that never quite can be scraped completely empty; the gel smells like roasting meat but tastes like motor oil.
- Two balls of red fur that will envelop whatever touches them until pulled free, providing a soft and warm slipper or mitten.
- A bottle that has a static charge around it, which contains an incredibly bright point of light inside.
- A metal cage with a miniature star inside, which produces startlingly complex music from time to time when storms rage across the surface.
- A spindle-shaped piece of blue stone with a golden rod stuck in it that occasionally vibrates and produces fragments of not-quite-human voices, none of which speak a familiar language.
- A glove sized for a creature half again as large as a human with seven fingers and two thumbs.
- A boot of incredibly durable and flexible synth shaped for a creature with velociraptor-like claws.
---
Next we have a sampling of the cyphers in the area; some are as-found widgets, while others are modified or augmented by the skills of those in the area.
Wind Capsule
Type: Usable (Anoetic)
Level: 1D6+2
Effect: These usually come in the form of small glassy bulbs filled with a silvery liquid that aren't quite as fragile as they look, but which will still break open when thrown. Each one contains a repair-function nanoswarm that lacks any direction, which will sample the environment and attempt to 'repair' it according to ages-obsolete programming. The result is essentially a short-lived Iron Wind that fills an area out to a short distance from the impact point that then drifts with the prevailing wind, constantly and rapidly rebuilding everything in the area of effect. Regardless of what results, any living creatures are effectively rendered part of the terrain in a horrific fashion.
Shinshot Node
Type: Wearable (Anoetic)
Level: 1D6
Effect: This set of stronglass bracelets are shot through with glistening metallic threads; when the activation button is pushed, the wearer feels a sharp tingling where the bracelets touch their skin, followed by a sharp awareness of all metallic objects in their vicinity. For the next 28 hours, they can project a powerful electromagnetic force at any object within a long range, with the effect of propelling the object with sufficient speed and force that it counts as a ranged weapon (up to 100 pounds per cypher level); items can only move in a straight line away from the bearer, however. Users may make a Speed check equal to the cypher's leel to attempt to use this force to launch themselves into and through the air, if they're light enough.
Purification Shot
Type: Anoetic (Injectable)
Level: 1D6+2
Effect: These ampules of bright green goo can be pressed against a creature's skin and injected, an action that most find only marginally preferable to the idea of dying. The injected goo neutralizes all poisons and diseases of equal or lower level than the cypher, while granting an additional Might check to overcome those of higher level. The reason users find the idea of letting their ailment have its way is that the goo causes the users to feel as if they're burning up from the inside, spending the next 28 hours with all actions save the additional Might check modified by two steps to their detriment.
Encryption Pod
Type: Occultic (Usable)
Level: 1D6+3
Effect: This is a matched set of dark spheres, each with an array of buttons and dials along one side, with an opening on the opposite side. Any information-containing object fed into the hole before activation will be rendered into a metallic cylinder engraved with a cipher containing the original information, the difficulty of the cipher being equal to the level of the Encryption Pod. Feeding the rod into the other device of the pair will cause it to reconstruct the original materials, the cipher cleanly removed. Convergence agents often carry one half of these pods to encrypt their findings to send to their superiors.
Hopper
Type Occultic (Wearable)
Level: 1D6+1
Effect: This hefty piece of machinery is surprisingly light and easy to move; fastened into a harness with backpack straps, it hardly impedes the wearer's movements even before activation. When used, it generates a field that modified the effects of inertia for the user, giving them two assets on all movement tasks and all attempts to avoid being moved against the user's will. When active, the user hears a high-pitched sizzling sound and can't smell anything but the scent of burnt sugar. The effects of the device last for four hours, after which it burns out.
Immunity Serum
Type: Occultic (Injectable)
Level: 1D6+2
Effect: This complex band can be activated by being pressed to exposed skin, an action that deals one point of Might damage as it samples flesh and blood before injecting the person with a serum that renders them immune to all forms of poison and disease for the next 28 hours; even ambient radiation damage is shrugged off by the user, as their genetic structure and immune system are massively bolstered. A side effect of the injection is that the user spends the next week with a craving for an alien flower that they've never seen before.
---
Artifacts are the powerhouse devices of Numenera, ways to add semi-permanent abilities to characters. Fairly rare and often fairly powerful, they're the truest treasures of the Ninth World. Here are a few that have been found around Guran.
Gravity Arc Projector
Level: 1D6+1
Effect: This staff has a silver-tinted translucent ball at one end with an intense point of light inside, suspended in a silver crescent with several thick cables coiling down the length of the staff; these connect to a softly humming ovoid at the other end. At base, it can be used as a light bludgeoning and slashing weapon that deals 4 damage rather than 2. Activating it has one of two effects, either of which trigger a depletion roll.
Gravity Pulse: A single target within a long range is subject to a Speed attack; if the attack hits, the creature is violently slammed into the ground, dealing 10 points of bludgeoning damage as the force of gravity magnifies immensely around it for a moment.
Anti-gravity: For ten minutes, the wielder of the staff is able to fly up to a long range each round, effectively freed from the hold of gravity.
Depletion: 1 in 50 (1-2 on a 1D100)
Sky Crane
Level: 1D6
Effect: Similar in design to the Gravity Arc Projector, this staff is capable of projecting a precise telekinetic effect that enables it to lift up to 500 pounds per level at up to a long range, moving it at about five miles per hour from one point to another. Each activation targets a single object and lasts up to one hour. It is possible to use this to enable an entire group to fly if the artifact is powerful enough, by lifting a platform under the group and moving it toward the desired location.
Depletion: 1 in 100
Mnemonic Puzzle Box
Level: 1D6+3
Effect: This intricately detailed cube is able to capture the mind of a living creature and run it as a virtual simulation, effectively allowing a creature to survive death if used within the first minute or so of death. The resulting mind is of a level equal to the level of the artifact in terms of how well it can think; while this will not allow a nonsapient beast to become sapient, it can enable those who use it to think more swiftly and clearly than they might have in life. A box can only capture one mind, thereafter serving to simulate it perfectly for as long as the box exists. Most human minds don't handle this well, as the box doesn't have sensory inputs by default, although it can be connected to external devices and even installed in synthetic bodies.
Depletion: --
Blessed Blade of Wonder
Level: 1D6+1
Effect: An elegant-looking sword-hilt that, when activated, creates a probability field that anything that touches the shimmering distortion projected from the blade will be violently harmed. This distortion deal damage equal to the artifact's level, which counts as a light weapon. The damage that results varies from moment to moment, with everything from simple crushing and tearing to outright manipulation of atomic matter, with severe radiation burns and transmutation of materials happening. One notable event involving the first Blessed Blade of Wonder remains enshrined in local lore: an abhuman was struck by the field and had the path of the blow transmute into diamond, the slab of which remains on display in the town hall of Guran to this day. Each activation of the distortion "blade" lasts for ten minutes.
Depletion: 1 in 20
Monday, October 12, 2015
Numenera: The Eye-Man and the Agent
Continuing with detailing things that might go into the theoretical Numenera campaign, we have today two potentially significant NPCs for the campaign - the girl turned nanotech nightmare known as the Eye Man and the agent of the Convergence, Iamol the Blessed.
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The Eye-Man
Level: 5
The Eye-Man, in its current state, is a swollen mass of vaguely humanoid flesh that slowly moves around the abandoned bauble mines, the creature's reddened skin interrupted by numerous eyes that blink and stare, none of them quite alike. Most appear human, although some have decidedly strange pupil shapes or iris colors. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to how the eyes are placed, but each of them has 1-3 holographic images flickering around it; some are recognizable, such as the occasional flash of the state called She or the terrain around the Amber Fort, while others are completely alien, with complex swirling fractal shapes abounding.
The Eye-Man poses no threat if not attacked or impeded, slowly continuing to wander the mines in search of something it can't seem to find, occasionally stopping in place and twitching as if several conflicting movement impulses are affecting it at once. At all times it keeps up a quiet muttering tone that seems to be a mixture of Truth and several other languages, some of which have the distorted sound of a human voicebox trying to produce decidedly alien phenomes.
Motive: To appease the Fort AI
Environment: Guran Bauble Mines
Health: 50
Damage Inflicted: Two attacks per round; one is a physical bashing attack that deals 5 Might damage, the other is a holographic storm that inflicts 2 Intellect damage to anyone within a short distance
Armor: 1, due to the confusing holographic flickering
Movement: Short
Modifications: Perception of threats as level 1 due to constant influx of data; makes Intellect attack as a level 7.
Combat: Attempting to fight the Eye-Man might well be an exercise in futility, as the creature is infected with nanites under the control of the Fort AI that continually attempt to modify and upgrade it toward a state that the original creature - a young woman named Lusil - simply can't be warped into. As such, Might and Speed damage dealt to the creature is repaired with alarming swiftness, letting it regenerate up to 5 health every round, as well as rendering it functionally immune to poisons and drugs.
The Eye-Man doesn't respond to threats or attacks until it gets hurt, at which point the muttering it continually emits rises into a shriek somewhere between that of a terrified young woman and a modem trying to connect to another system, swinging at aggressors with swollen fists until they retreat from view or the Eye-Man is slain. Each round, it also emits a massive pulse of swirling, confusing fractal patterns that strain the eyes and disrupt the thoughts of those who see it, dealing Intellect damage in the process.
The most effective method for defeating the Eye-Man is by dealing Intellect damage to it, which actually attacks the nanite infestation and, after 50 points of Intellect damage are dealt, releases the Fort AI's hold over the creature, allowing the stress-fractured personality of Lusil to re-emerge. At this point, regular healing efforts, particular those involving genetic therapy and tissue reconstruction, will be able to restore the young woman's form to wholeness, but she'll need healed of her mental damage to return to lucidity.
Interaction: At baseline, the Eye-Man is simply a puzzling entity that lives in the bauble mines, difficult to fight and almost impossible to kill. If freed from the nanite infestation and restored to health and lucidity, however, Lusil is a tremendous wellspring of information on the dangers and mysteries of the Amber Fort.
While still infested, players who listen to the muttering will hear the creature sliding in and out of Truth, with the understandable parts sounding like a mix of fearful pleading by someone and monotone status updates from a computer system attempting to reboot and continually failing.
Use: The first encounter with the Eye-Man should happen while the players are attempting to track the neurovorg in the bauble mines; the creature can often be found near the corpses of the other young women who went missing at the same time as Lusil, the holes bored into their now-empty skulls a testament to their ends at the hands of the neurovorg. Investigation by players skilled with the numenera should reveal the nanite infestation and the possibility of recovering the creature it was made from, once they hear the 'pleading' part of the muttering.
Once rescued and restored, Lusil allows players to make knowledge and lore checks about the Amber Fort as if specialized in all relevant skills as long as she's consulted about the topic.
Loot: If completely slain, players can harvest 1D6 disgustingly fleshy cyphers from the remains.
---
Iamol the Blessed
Level: 7
Iamol looks as if he's only in his late twenties, in the prime of his youth and health. In truth, the man is a deceptive and sly nano who is over a century in age, his youthful vitality maintained by his alliance with the neurovorg that typically dwells in his basement. He farms the local crossel berries, quietly augmenting them with his knowledge of the numenera to ensure that his crops turn out larger, more birghtly colored, and more powerful in terms of both flavor and stimulation than those of others in the town.
He maintains an act of being slightly slow and easily baffled by the world around him, insisting that his crossels must grow so well because the 'Gods of the Sphere' have blessed him. Those who happen across him when he's applying his chemical supplements to the plants join the wild animals he catches in feeding the neurovorg's appetite, adding to the mystery of things that go missing around Guran.
His primary reason for being in Guran is the discovery of the Amber Fort and the way into the depths of the structure, which he hopes will yield enough secrets of the numenera for his to surpass his superiors and become a Magus of the Convergence in his own right.
Motive: To amass knowledge of the numenera and power
Environment: Guran
Health: 70
Damage Inflicted: Melee attacks inflict 7 damage as he uses an incredibly sharp electrified blade artifact that causes all Speed actions to be modified by one level to the detriment of those struck; he also has an artifact that permits him to fire rays of crackling blue-black gravitational energy that deal 3 crushing damage to up to three targets at long range each round.
Armor: 3
Movement: Long, due to hidden internal augmentations
Combat: If forced into a fight, Iamol will attempt to cut down anyone near him as quickly as possible, reserving the gravity beams for those who try to flee in different directions. His internal augmentations allow him to move quickly from target to target, and he'll focus on whoever seems likely to harm him the most, until someone tries to flee, at which point he'll run the victim down. His primary motivation in combat is to silence anyone who might reveal him; if anyone gets away, his crossel fields will go up in flames, his house burn to ashes, and Iamol will soon become the boogeyman of the region, kidnapping travelers and stragglers to feed his neurovorg ally at hidden redoubts through the area around the Amber Fort.
Use: Iamol's primary use is to be a link to both the Amber Fort, the town's missing people, and the Converge itself. He should remain undiscovered until the players are around Tier 3-4, at which point they can pursue his defeat to end the threat of both him and the neurovorg once and for all.
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Next time, we'll look at some cyphers and artifacts specifically for this campaign.
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The Eye-Man
Level: 5
The Eye-Man, in its current state, is a swollen mass of vaguely humanoid flesh that slowly moves around the abandoned bauble mines, the creature's reddened skin interrupted by numerous eyes that blink and stare, none of them quite alike. Most appear human, although some have decidedly strange pupil shapes or iris colors. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to how the eyes are placed, but each of them has 1-3 holographic images flickering around it; some are recognizable, such as the occasional flash of the state called She or the terrain around the Amber Fort, while others are completely alien, with complex swirling fractal shapes abounding.
The Eye-Man poses no threat if not attacked or impeded, slowly continuing to wander the mines in search of something it can't seem to find, occasionally stopping in place and twitching as if several conflicting movement impulses are affecting it at once. At all times it keeps up a quiet muttering tone that seems to be a mixture of Truth and several other languages, some of which have the distorted sound of a human voicebox trying to produce decidedly alien phenomes.
Motive: To appease the Fort AI
Environment: Guran Bauble Mines
Health: 50
Damage Inflicted: Two attacks per round; one is a physical bashing attack that deals 5 Might damage, the other is a holographic storm that inflicts 2 Intellect damage to anyone within a short distance
Armor: 1, due to the confusing holographic flickering
Movement: Short
Modifications: Perception of threats as level 1 due to constant influx of data; makes Intellect attack as a level 7.
Combat: Attempting to fight the Eye-Man might well be an exercise in futility, as the creature is infected with nanites under the control of the Fort AI that continually attempt to modify and upgrade it toward a state that the original creature - a young woman named Lusil - simply can't be warped into. As such, Might and Speed damage dealt to the creature is repaired with alarming swiftness, letting it regenerate up to 5 health every round, as well as rendering it functionally immune to poisons and drugs.
The Eye-Man doesn't respond to threats or attacks until it gets hurt, at which point the muttering it continually emits rises into a shriek somewhere between that of a terrified young woman and a modem trying to connect to another system, swinging at aggressors with swollen fists until they retreat from view or the Eye-Man is slain. Each round, it also emits a massive pulse of swirling, confusing fractal patterns that strain the eyes and disrupt the thoughts of those who see it, dealing Intellect damage in the process.
The most effective method for defeating the Eye-Man is by dealing Intellect damage to it, which actually attacks the nanite infestation and, after 50 points of Intellect damage are dealt, releases the Fort AI's hold over the creature, allowing the stress-fractured personality of Lusil to re-emerge. At this point, regular healing efforts, particular those involving genetic therapy and tissue reconstruction, will be able to restore the young woman's form to wholeness, but she'll need healed of her mental damage to return to lucidity.
Interaction: At baseline, the Eye-Man is simply a puzzling entity that lives in the bauble mines, difficult to fight and almost impossible to kill. If freed from the nanite infestation and restored to health and lucidity, however, Lusil is a tremendous wellspring of information on the dangers and mysteries of the Amber Fort.
While still infested, players who listen to the muttering will hear the creature sliding in and out of Truth, with the understandable parts sounding like a mix of fearful pleading by someone and monotone status updates from a computer system attempting to reboot and continually failing.
Use: The first encounter with the Eye-Man should happen while the players are attempting to track the neurovorg in the bauble mines; the creature can often be found near the corpses of the other young women who went missing at the same time as Lusil, the holes bored into their now-empty skulls a testament to their ends at the hands of the neurovorg. Investigation by players skilled with the numenera should reveal the nanite infestation and the possibility of recovering the creature it was made from, once they hear the 'pleading' part of the muttering.
Once rescued and restored, Lusil allows players to make knowledge and lore checks about the Amber Fort as if specialized in all relevant skills as long as she's consulted about the topic.
Loot: If completely slain, players can harvest 1D6 disgustingly fleshy cyphers from the remains.
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Iamol the Blessed
Level: 7
Iamol looks as if he's only in his late twenties, in the prime of his youth and health. In truth, the man is a deceptive and sly nano who is over a century in age, his youthful vitality maintained by his alliance with the neurovorg that typically dwells in his basement. He farms the local crossel berries, quietly augmenting them with his knowledge of the numenera to ensure that his crops turn out larger, more birghtly colored, and more powerful in terms of both flavor and stimulation than those of others in the town.
He maintains an act of being slightly slow and easily baffled by the world around him, insisting that his crossels must grow so well because the 'Gods of the Sphere' have blessed him. Those who happen across him when he's applying his chemical supplements to the plants join the wild animals he catches in feeding the neurovorg's appetite, adding to the mystery of things that go missing around Guran.
His primary reason for being in Guran is the discovery of the Amber Fort and the way into the depths of the structure, which he hopes will yield enough secrets of the numenera for his to surpass his superiors and become a Magus of the Convergence in his own right.
Motive: To amass knowledge of the numenera and power
Environment: Guran
Health: 70
Damage Inflicted: Melee attacks inflict 7 damage as he uses an incredibly sharp electrified blade artifact that causes all Speed actions to be modified by one level to the detriment of those struck; he also has an artifact that permits him to fire rays of crackling blue-black gravitational energy that deal 3 crushing damage to up to three targets at long range each round.
Armor: 3
Movement: Long, due to hidden internal augmentations
Combat: If forced into a fight, Iamol will attempt to cut down anyone near him as quickly as possible, reserving the gravity beams for those who try to flee in different directions. His internal augmentations allow him to move quickly from target to target, and he'll focus on whoever seems likely to harm him the most, until someone tries to flee, at which point he'll run the victim down. His primary motivation in combat is to silence anyone who might reveal him; if anyone gets away, his crossel fields will go up in flames, his house burn to ashes, and Iamol will soon become the boogeyman of the region, kidnapping travelers and stragglers to feed his neurovorg ally at hidden redoubts through the area around the Amber Fort.
Use: Iamol's primary use is to be a link to both the Amber Fort, the town's missing people, and the Converge itself. He should remain undiscovered until the players are around Tier 3-4, at which point they can pursue his defeat to end the threat of both him and the neurovorg once and for all.
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Next time, we'll look at some cyphers and artifacts specifically for this campaign.
Friday, October 9, 2015
Numenera - Creatures of the Ninth World
Today, some creatures for Pat's first adventure, including the Neurovorg that I wrote up the first version of at my now-defunct blog Cyphers and Oddities.
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Neurovorg
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Neurovorg
Level: 4 (12)
At first glance, the neurovorg seems to be a wholly artificial construct, made of stained metal, synth, and glass in the form of a large hound or humanoid, depending on whether it chooses to be bipedal or quadrupedal at the time. The limbs are partly exposed, with pistons and thick metal cables visibly shifting as the creature moves, while the head of it is a disturbing mass of articulated digits wrapped around a few drills and other surgical equipment. A single optic system glows above the surgical gear like some kind of infernal eye.
A closer look reveals the real horror of the neurovorg; the translucent synth and glass houses gray and pink organic material, glistening wetly in available light. Much of the mass is arrayed in lumpy coils along the creature's armored neck, the repurposed mass of brain matter the neurovorg has forcibly extracted from victims as a combination of supplemental processing power and feedstock for the creature's chemosynthesis factories. Arrayed along the underside are a variety of needles, each one capable of producing a different chemical compound with a wide variety of effects.
Perhaps most disquieting of all is the fact that these brain-eaters speak, but in a distressing amalgam of voices, as if drawing individual words from the original owners of the brains that fill it.
Motive: Hungers for neural tissue
Environment: The fringes of any region populated by intelligent creatures
Health: 25
Damage Inflicted: 4 damage, plus possible drug injection
Armor: 2
Movement: Short when bipedal, long when quadrupedal
Modifications: Perception as a level 6; Stealth as level 2; all intellect-based tasks as level 8 when recently fed, or level 2 when hungry.
Combat: Neurovorgs have no concerns about whether or not their prey are aware of them when closing in; the stink of decaying tissue surrounds all neurovorgs, making it hard to avoid noticing their presence. The creatures prefer to strike fast and withdraw with a victim clutched to them rather than engaging in a drawn-out battle. If forced into an extended fight, the neurovorg is more than willing to switch stances to its advantage, as well as using the wide array of chemicals at its disposal.
Neurovorgs prefer to focus their attention on a single foe; if their victim fails a Speed Defense roll, they must make an additional Might Defense roll to avoid being caught in the manipulators on the creature's head. Victims who are captured by a neurovorg can make an additional Might Defense check each round to break free, but are subject to an Intellect attack each round the deals 3 Intellect damage as the creature drills into their head and begins harvesting fresh brain matter for its own use.
Bipedal neurovorgs are capable of bringing their injection manipulators to bear, stabbing opponents and delivering various chemicals with successful attacks. A bipedal neurovorg finds it difficult to capture a victim, and will typically switch to quadrupedal mode as an action once they have pacified an opponent with their drug cocktail.
Possible effects of the drug injections include:
Corrosive: The neurovorg injects a strong acid in its opponent, bypassing Armor and dealing 5 damage.
Hallucinogen: Victims of this injection must make a Might Defense check or spend the next fie rounds unable to tell friend, foe, or nonexistent terror apart.
Poison: Victims of this injection must make a Might Defense check each round until successful; each failure deals 3 Might damage.
Soporific: Victims of this injection must make a Might Defense check or have all their actions modified by one level to their detriment for ten minutes; additional injections of this drug extend the duration without adding to the effect.
Anesthetic: Victims of this injection must make a Might Defense check each round or drop whatever they happen to be holding; they also gain 1 point of Armor for ten minutes due to the numbness of their flesh failing to register damage dealt to it.
Paralytic: Victims of this injection need to make a Might Defense check each round or move one step down the damage track; if lowered to 'dead' by this drug, treat it as being paralyzed - alive but unable to interact physically with the world, although purely mental actions remain possible - although this will quickly change unless the neurovorg is driven off by the victim's companions.
Regenerative: Neurovorgs have no use for deceased neural tissue, and may inject a chemical cocktail that restores 3 to Might and Speed if their victim shows signs of being at risk of death prior to harvesting.
Antivenin: This functions as a level 5 cure for poisons, as well as a certain cure for the neurovorg's own poison, anesthetic, and hallucinogenic injections.
Interaction: Neurovorgs are intelligent and can be reasoned with, although their craving for brain tissue means that they will spend much of any social interaction attempting to bargain for brains. A neurovorg who is given a steady supply of brain matter can be convinced to provide usable doses of many chemical compounds, including the regenerative compound it sometimes uses to stabilize victims. Of course, to obtain such a supply, the characters have to be willing to regularly sacrifice other living, thinking beings to the neurovorg as feedstock.
Use: A series of disappearances in a major city and the sudden availability of a wondrous new healing compound is linked by rumors of some strange automaton lurking in a noble's menagerie.
The poor of a city have begun disappearing with alarming regularity, only to turn up some time later with a hole drilled in their heads and much of their brain missing from their skulls. Sooner or later a NPC important to the PCs goes missing, only to turn up on their doorstep with a hole in their head and clear signs of brain damage, ranting about the translucent brain-eater with the voice of the damned.
The PCs encounter an ancient neurovorg chained up in a ruin of a prior world; the creature is starving, barely above animal sapience, and will bargain desperately to either be freed or provided with brains, promising to provide drugs in exchange for either. If freed, it may attack the group out of desperate hunger - or it may attack a nearby town, leaving the settlement full of warm, vacant-eyed bodies when the PCs arrive, the neurovorg sitting in the middle of the town as it processes the freshly acquired neural tissue into the promised drugs.
The group comes across a town that seems overly welcoming to unknown outsiders, happily pressing gifts and trinkets on them. The truth comes out when the party is ambushed in the inn the next night, with the villagers intent on subduing them to be fed to their local god - a neurovore that dispenses hallucinogenic drugs and regeneratives in return for a steady supply of neural tissue.
A butcher has surprisingly few staff tending to the slaughter of the animals that come in; investigation when a worker (or the butcher herself) goes missing reveals the presence of a captive neurovorg being fed the brains of the animals in exchange for powerful preservative compounds.
Loot: A neurovorg's body can be salvaged to produce 1d6+1 chemical cyphers and possibly a single cybernetic artifact.
GM Intrusions: The neurovorg shifts stances from biped to quadruped unusually quickly, taking a PC by surprise; unless the character makes a Speed Defense roll at a two step detriment, they find themselves caught in the creature's grip, the main drill whirring up to speed only an inch or two from their forehead.
The neurovorg sprays an anesthetic mist from an injector, causing everyone in immediate range to make a Might Defense check or drop whatever they're holding as their flesh goes numb for a few seconds.
The neurovorg, recently fed, has prepared the area with sharp objects coated in soporific chemicals. The PC steps the wrong way and is cut by one, taking one point of damage and having to make a Might Defense roll or suffer the effects of the soporific injection.
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Mange-Cat
Level: 2 (6)
These predatory creatures resemble leopards at first glance, until the six eyes on the head and the two extra pairs of legs become evident; their paws are outfitted with gripping digits that enable them to climb nearly sheer surfaces with phenomenal speed. In addition to the claws on each of their feet, they have sharp teeth and a set of fangs capable of injecting venom through a bite. Mange-cats are somewhere between pack predators and scavengers in the southern foothills of the Black Riage, they remain a persistent nuisance in the settlements of the area.
Some attempts at domesticating the creatures as guard animals have been made, but they do poorly without the social environment of a pack, and any attempt to confine them results in the creatures frantically trying to find a way out to run and hide. Their keen hearing enables them to live in abandoned structures as well as above ground, using their ears as sonar to let them track potential prey, leading to occasional infestations in abandoned mines.
Motive: Hungers for flesh
Environment: The foothills and caves of the foothills of the southern Black Riage.
Health: 10
Damage Inflicted: Claws deal 4 damage, while the bite deals 2 plus a Might poison that inflicts 2 per turn until two successful defense checks are made against it.
Armor: 0
Movement: Long when running; short when climbing
Modifications: Running, climbing, and leaping as level 4; auditory and visual perception as level 5; resistance to fear and intimidation as level 1
Combat: Mange-cats prefer to attack as a pack from ambush, leaping from trees, cave walls, and ledges in groups of three to six, attempting to target a single large creature as prey; one will typically try to bite the target while the others dash around it and claw, trying to weaken and cripple it. If they successfully down their prey, the one trying to bite will try to start dragging the victim off, with the others acting as a defensive screen or acting to help carry the weight. Given their tightly-knit pack mentality, successfully scaring one off or killing it will usually break the morale of the entire pack and send the rest scattering.
Interaction: Mange-cats are opportunistic vermin, lurking out of sight until the players let their guard down (taking a ten-minute or hour-long recovery break, for example) before springing an ambus on the most-injured or weakest-looking character. Clever players may be able to scare or trick them into charging into another threat, if they want.
Use: Mange-cats are little more than annoying nuisances, but their ambushes can be a surprising thing the first time, and a reminder that the Ninth World is full of life later on.
Loot: Mange-cat lairs typically hold 2D6 shins in shiny bits of metal and glass, and occasionally have a cypher buried in the midst of the refuse of former victims.
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Hopefully these two creatures give you a taste of what kind of weird and unsettling creatures the Ninth World can hold; next time, we'll look at the Eye Man and the Convergence agent.
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Numenera - Anatomy of Adventure
Last time, we saw a group building their characters; today, we'll look behind the GM's screen at how a Numenera adventure can be built, and how it differs from the more usual tabletop adventure design.
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In most games, where XP is awarded based on defeating opponents in combat and a sizable chunk of the game book is deoted to the mechanics of combat, adventures tend to focus on the size and difficulty of the fights that will be encountered. Some do better at making things more complex than this, providing suggestions of how to bypass combat via social skills or providing the difficulty of various hazards like traps and environmental threats, but the rules for dealing with these alternate scenarios tend to be thin compared to the robustness of how to have a combat.
Numenera differs from this in that every encounter is effectiely broken down the same way; the GM assigns a level to the challenge, the level determines the target difficulty, and the players are free to try anything they want to achieve their goal. If they encounter a sentry robot in their way that's stood in place for hundreds of thousands of years, they can attempt to see if they know anything about it, if there's a known way past it, if it speaks a language they know, and even attempt to negotiate with it via pantomime. They can try sneaking by it, fighting it, recruiting it as an ally, tricking it into letting them by, or whateer other scheme they can devise.
Any of these could be worth XP in two different forms - the GM Intrusion, where the GM complicates the life of the players and awards the victim an XP to keep and an XP to share with another players, and the reward for discovery. Finding the robot sentry and determining that it's active, then finding a way past without destroying the robot is very definitely worth XP for the party, with perhaps an extra point tossed in for the PC who came up with the successful idea or whose idea made the GM laugh the hardest.
As a result, when Pat looks over the list of characters and goals the players have, the first things that stand out are Susan's drive for vengeance, Allie's desire to explore the world and naive lack of understanding of the dangers around her, and the desire Chris has for new devices to study and understand. As such, a few things about Guran are instant hooks - it's a town with mysteries about things that are missing, and a surplus of numenera oddities in the form of the blue baubles that crashed the town's economy.
Pat sketches out the presence of a Convergence member in the town - not the person that Susan is hunting, but someone downstream from them, reporting to them through a few layers of control. This operative is in the town looking for the secrets of the past, starting with the strange headless statue known as She and the supply of blue baubles that litter the street. In Pat's version of the game, She will be the currently-nonfunctional reader and projector for the data stores in the baubles - nearly indesctructible archives from a forgotten civilization, containing the entire store of their knowledge, if only the correct baubles can be located and fed to She for reproduction - and if She can be repaired and reactivated.
Allie's desire to explore ties in with the Convergence agent needing more baubles and buried parts hidden in the bauble mines; exploring the mines and the dangers they pose will play a significant part in the campaign itself. The agent - a young-looking man secretly nearly a century old, his cover being making a living as a crossel berry farmer - will directly tie into the first few adventures, as he keeps a nightmarish creature he terms a neurovorg in his basement and sends it to store or retrieve supplies from the mines. Susan will be familiar with the terrible beasts, giving her a clear sign that the Convergence is active in the town.
Inside the mines are ancient machines, mostly buried in the mountainside, mostly unoperative; most can be salvaged for a cypher or two, in capable hands, but the real treasure is at the back of the mine, where a wall of indestructible amber-like material has been uncovered. In truth, this is the lower reaches of the Amber Fort, a 'haunted' ruin in the mountains north of Guran, a location that was once like the Amber Monolith that helped forged the Order of Truth, but the gravity-defying machinery failed it ages ago, leaving it fallen until it became entombed in the crust of the world. A thoroughly deranged AI dwells inside it, able to fitfully interact with She and the baubles.
PAt notes this all down, and marks that the very first event after the first bit of general faffing about the game will be Susan and Allie waking in the middle of the blue-tinged night to see the unsettling spider-hound shape of the neurovorg skittering out of the village, north toward the mines. Most of the adventure assumes they'll pursue, but Pat notes that if they try to backtrack it, they'll be able to identify the general area of town it came from - an area near the morgue where it apparently leapt off a roof. The neurovorg is a level 4 creature, but the darkness and often-stirred dust raise the difficulty two steps, making counter-tracking it a level 6 challenge.
Tracking it to the mines should be trivial, as Susan is trained in tracking things and the neurovorg wasn't trying to obscure itself. Simply getting inside is a problem, as the mines have been barricaded to keep people out; the creature is flexible, and squeezed through a space hardly large enough for a human child, but for the players the barrier is a level 5 challenge to get through. Bypassing this will get them into the maze-like network of the mines, where tracking the neurovorg becomes significantly more difficult. Defunct machinery emerges from the walls, giving the nanos a chance to scavenge cyphers if they feel the need to do so.
There'll be four primary challenges inside the mines; trying to find the neurovorg is a level 8 tasks, so the group isn't likely to have much luck, but if they do they can confront and defeat the creature, robbing the agent of his best tool early in the camapign. They'll encounter a still-powered doorway, locked against intrusion, which can be defeated with a level 4 Intellect test to defeat the locking mechanisms; the door can be salvaged for a few cyphers, if anyone wants to try, but that's a level 6 tasks that risks dealing 6 Might damage if it fails. They can find multiple fragments of an etched map - the rough exploration of the Amber Fort's upper leels, essentially backed up here by the agent in case his primary map goes awry; deciphering the map and figuring out what it's a map of is a series of level 4 Intellect checks.
The last of the mine's challenges is encountered on the way out - one of the people who've gone missing in recent months is a young woman who went exploring in the mines with her friends; they ran afoul of the neurovorg, with the creature neatly disabling the other two with drug injections, but the girl escaped only to stumble into a pool of nanites that tried to 'repair' her to interface with the deranged Fort AI. Now, she's a vaguely humanoid creature surrounded by flickering holographic images with dozens of staring, bloodshot eyes all over her body, staggering through the mines and trying to process the orders being fed to her by the AI. The neurovorg avoids her, having learned the hard way that she's become immune to the drugs it uses thanks to the nanites. The 'Eye Man' is a level 5 encounter that can go any number of ways; while she can certainly be fought and killed to free her of her burden, the Ninth World is a vast place with seeming miracles. If the nanites can be purged from her system and her body regenerated, they can restore the girl to herself and gain an ally with extensive knowledge of the Fort's dangers buried in the depths of her mind.
Also in the mine are a few explorer's packs and a rolled-up bundle of notes in a level 10 cipher that are coded communications between the agent and his direct superior; later events will let the notes be more easily read, but for now they're a tantalizing mystery for the players. Upon return to the town, the group can make plans to hunt for the neurovorg, if they never found it or it escaped, explore more of the town, investigate She, and/or plan their first excursion to the Amber Fort, an event that will draw the attention of the agent to them.
Pat notes that everyone should get 4 XP for completing the adventure, plus whatever they acquired from GM Intrusions, and that killing the Eye Man will make future adventures notably harder, then closes the prep notebook.
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And there's the outline of a full adventure; next time we'll go over a few possible creatures that might be encountered during the adventure, including the neurovorg and the agent!
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In most games, where XP is awarded based on defeating opponents in combat and a sizable chunk of the game book is deoted to the mechanics of combat, adventures tend to focus on the size and difficulty of the fights that will be encountered. Some do better at making things more complex than this, providing suggestions of how to bypass combat via social skills or providing the difficulty of various hazards like traps and environmental threats, but the rules for dealing with these alternate scenarios tend to be thin compared to the robustness of how to have a combat.
Numenera differs from this in that every encounter is effectiely broken down the same way; the GM assigns a level to the challenge, the level determines the target difficulty, and the players are free to try anything they want to achieve their goal. If they encounter a sentry robot in their way that's stood in place for hundreds of thousands of years, they can attempt to see if they know anything about it, if there's a known way past it, if it speaks a language they know, and even attempt to negotiate with it via pantomime. They can try sneaking by it, fighting it, recruiting it as an ally, tricking it into letting them by, or whateer other scheme they can devise.
Any of these could be worth XP in two different forms - the GM Intrusion, where the GM complicates the life of the players and awards the victim an XP to keep and an XP to share with another players, and the reward for discovery. Finding the robot sentry and determining that it's active, then finding a way past without destroying the robot is very definitely worth XP for the party, with perhaps an extra point tossed in for the PC who came up with the successful idea or whose idea made the GM laugh the hardest.
As a result, when Pat looks over the list of characters and goals the players have, the first things that stand out are Susan's drive for vengeance, Allie's desire to explore the world and naive lack of understanding of the dangers around her, and the desire Chris has for new devices to study and understand. As such, a few things about Guran are instant hooks - it's a town with mysteries about things that are missing, and a surplus of numenera oddities in the form of the blue baubles that crashed the town's economy.
Pat sketches out the presence of a Convergence member in the town - not the person that Susan is hunting, but someone downstream from them, reporting to them through a few layers of control. This operative is in the town looking for the secrets of the past, starting with the strange headless statue known as She and the supply of blue baubles that litter the street. In Pat's version of the game, She will be the currently-nonfunctional reader and projector for the data stores in the baubles - nearly indesctructible archives from a forgotten civilization, containing the entire store of their knowledge, if only the correct baubles can be located and fed to She for reproduction - and if She can be repaired and reactivated.
Allie's desire to explore ties in with the Convergence agent needing more baubles and buried parts hidden in the bauble mines; exploring the mines and the dangers they pose will play a significant part in the campaign itself. The agent - a young-looking man secretly nearly a century old, his cover being making a living as a crossel berry farmer - will directly tie into the first few adventures, as he keeps a nightmarish creature he terms a neurovorg in his basement and sends it to store or retrieve supplies from the mines. Susan will be familiar with the terrible beasts, giving her a clear sign that the Convergence is active in the town.
Inside the mines are ancient machines, mostly buried in the mountainside, mostly unoperative; most can be salvaged for a cypher or two, in capable hands, but the real treasure is at the back of the mine, where a wall of indestructible amber-like material has been uncovered. In truth, this is the lower reaches of the Amber Fort, a 'haunted' ruin in the mountains north of Guran, a location that was once like the Amber Monolith that helped forged the Order of Truth, but the gravity-defying machinery failed it ages ago, leaving it fallen until it became entombed in the crust of the world. A thoroughly deranged AI dwells inside it, able to fitfully interact with She and the baubles.
PAt notes this all down, and marks that the very first event after the first bit of general faffing about the game will be Susan and Allie waking in the middle of the blue-tinged night to see the unsettling spider-hound shape of the neurovorg skittering out of the village, north toward the mines. Most of the adventure assumes they'll pursue, but Pat notes that if they try to backtrack it, they'll be able to identify the general area of town it came from - an area near the morgue where it apparently leapt off a roof. The neurovorg is a level 4 creature, but the darkness and often-stirred dust raise the difficulty two steps, making counter-tracking it a level 6 challenge.
Tracking it to the mines should be trivial, as Susan is trained in tracking things and the neurovorg wasn't trying to obscure itself. Simply getting inside is a problem, as the mines have been barricaded to keep people out; the creature is flexible, and squeezed through a space hardly large enough for a human child, but for the players the barrier is a level 5 challenge to get through. Bypassing this will get them into the maze-like network of the mines, where tracking the neurovorg becomes significantly more difficult. Defunct machinery emerges from the walls, giving the nanos a chance to scavenge cyphers if they feel the need to do so.
There'll be four primary challenges inside the mines; trying to find the neurovorg is a level 8 tasks, so the group isn't likely to have much luck, but if they do they can confront and defeat the creature, robbing the agent of his best tool early in the camapign. They'll encounter a still-powered doorway, locked against intrusion, which can be defeated with a level 4 Intellect test to defeat the locking mechanisms; the door can be salvaged for a few cyphers, if anyone wants to try, but that's a level 6 tasks that risks dealing 6 Might damage if it fails. They can find multiple fragments of an etched map - the rough exploration of the Amber Fort's upper leels, essentially backed up here by the agent in case his primary map goes awry; deciphering the map and figuring out what it's a map of is a series of level 4 Intellect checks.
The last of the mine's challenges is encountered on the way out - one of the people who've gone missing in recent months is a young woman who went exploring in the mines with her friends; they ran afoul of the neurovorg, with the creature neatly disabling the other two with drug injections, but the girl escaped only to stumble into a pool of nanites that tried to 'repair' her to interface with the deranged Fort AI. Now, she's a vaguely humanoid creature surrounded by flickering holographic images with dozens of staring, bloodshot eyes all over her body, staggering through the mines and trying to process the orders being fed to her by the AI. The neurovorg avoids her, having learned the hard way that she's become immune to the drugs it uses thanks to the nanites. The 'Eye Man' is a level 5 encounter that can go any number of ways; while she can certainly be fought and killed to free her of her burden, the Ninth World is a vast place with seeming miracles. If the nanites can be purged from her system and her body regenerated, they can restore the girl to herself and gain an ally with extensive knowledge of the Fort's dangers buried in the depths of her mind.
Also in the mine are a few explorer's packs and a rolled-up bundle of notes in a level 10 cipher that are coded communications between the agent and his direct superior; later events will let the notes be more easily read, but for now they're a tantalizing mystery for the players. Upon return to the town, the group can make plans to hunt for the neurovorg, if they never found it or it escaped, explore more of the town, investigate She, and/or plan their first excursion to the Amber Fort, an event that will draw the attention of the agent to them.
Pat notes that everyone should get 4 XP for completing the adventure, plus whatever they acquired from GM Intrusions, and that killing the Eye Man will make future adventures notably harder, then closes the prep notebook.
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And there's the outline of a full adventure; next time we'll go over a few possible creatures that might be encountered during the adventure, including the neurovorg and the agent!
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