Unpacking Numenera's Cypher Economy

Two of my players have created characters, I’m waiting on two more, and then it’s nailing down a time and place for play (which will absolutely be after WorldCon sometime; just how long will depend on my recovery time).  As I work on a first adventure (because the four in the book are real stinkers) I’m going over the rules bit-by-bit in more depth.  One thing that stands out is how stats work.

Your character has three stats: Might, Speed, and Intellect.  Unlike most beat-the-number mechanics, your stats, by themselves, don’t modify your rolls.  They do create pools of points you can burn to modify your rolls, however.  So if you have an Intellect of 16 and you’re attempting to break a really difficult code (Target Numbers are three times Difficulty, so a Difficulty of 5 means you need to roll a 15 or better on a d20), you can choose to burn 3 points of Intellect to lower the Difficulty by one (and thus the Target Number by 3; from 15 to 12 in our example).  This lowers an Intellect pool of 16 to 13.

So far, so good.  Having high stats means you can put forth more effort (ie burn points from your pools) to make tasks easier.  (Having the right skills, tools, situation, or help can also make tasks easier.)  Things get exciting when fights and traps and such kick in because these pools are also your hit points.  Get chewed on by a Broken Hound and you’ll lose 4 points from your Might pool.  Once your Might pool drops to zero, you start losing points from your Speed pool.  Lose all the points in all three pools and you’re dead.

But wait, there’s more!  Each time a pool goes to zero, things get worse in other ways as well.  Not only do you not have any points to use from that pool to make tasks (like avoiding getting bit) easier, you also endure additional penalties.  A character with one pool at zero is impaired.  It now costs four points from a pool to lower a Difficulty by one.  They also don’t get special bennies from rolling high.  A character with two pools at zero can do nothing but move, unless one of the pools at zero is Speed, in which case they can’t even do that.

Put it all together, and you’ve got one nasty death spiral. 

Death spirals are generally decried as a blemish on the face of RPGs. Sure, they make sense from a simulationist point of view, but they are generally not much fun at all. They drag out combat even as they make the final result more and more a foregone conclusion. So why did Mr. Cook include such a nasty one in Numenera?

While Mr. Cook and I appear to have diametrically opposed ideas as to what makes a good adventure, I have to give the man props for his rules-design skills. Numenera has some really slick design work in it and the interaction of the death spiral and the core themes is probably the crown jewel of the book.

First, the death spiral works in steps. Yes, every time you get hurt or burn points from a stat pool, you do have fewer to work with. However, as any veteran Magic or D&D player will tell you, the only hit point that really counts is the last one. Just so in Numenera; so long as you have enough stat points to apply effort or activate a power, it doesn't appear to matter whether or not this is the last time you can do it or the first of many times.

(This assumes that powers don't stack in synergistic ways. That is, if activating your Vapor Cloud power made using your Lightning Bolt power more effective, then it might begin to matter how deep your pool was. My brief glance through the powers didn't reveal any like that, but folks who've actually played might tell a different story.)

Granted, reaching zero in a pool is a double-whammy with the damage track penalties on top of not having any more points to burn from that pool. However, it's more a stepped spiral than a sloped one; that is, until you pass over the edge of the step, things really aren't much worse from the beginning of the step to the end of the step. This gives you lots of time to see the train coming while you still have the resources to get off the tracks.

And when I say “resources” I don't just mean points in your pools. Mr. Cook is also a big fan of single-use get-out-of-jail-free cards. In Numenera, there are two kinds of such. The first is EXP. You can burn an EXP to reroll any single roll, even one you didn't roll yourself. And you can do this as often as you have EXP to burn. (Which goes very well with Numenera's the-players-roll-all-the-dice. And note that since the players roll all the dice, no dice are rolled behind the screen.)

However, the biggie is the cyphers. Cyphers are one-shot techno-magic devices that work very much like potions in D&D. However, unlike potions, cyphers are not bought or sold in shops, and they should be so ubiquitous in adventures that each player should always have a handful in their packs:

Cyphers are found with such regularity that the PCs can use them freely. There will always be more, and they’ll have different benefits. This means that in gameplay, cyphers are less like gear or treasure and more like character abilities that the players don’t choose. This leads to fun game moments where a player can say, “Well, I’ve got an X that might help in this situation,” and X is always different. X might be an explosive device, a short-range teleporter, or a force field. It might be a powerful magnet or an injection that will cure disease. It could be anything. Cyphers keep the game fresh and interesting.

And, in fact, the cyphers range from generic healing potions to devices that muck with time, or cause the PC to teleport around like a blink dog, or open up small black holes! They can give you temporary skills (“I know kung-fu!”), allow you to remotely control machines with your mind, record audio or video, or fix a nearly-unmoveable spike anywhere (even midair). And those are just the ones in the core rulebook.

The cyphers are the key to making the game work differently than other games. Numenera isn’t about playing for years before a character is allowed to teleport, travel to other dimensions, lay waste to a dozen enemies at once, or create a mechanical automaton to do his bidding. He can do it right out of the gate if he has the right cypher.

Where most RPGs are built around a leveling treadmill, Numenera is built around cypher-churn. The players should constantly have new cyphers (that is, new abilities) to play with and plan around. The game stays fresh, the players stay eager for that next cool thing, and they also stay focused on out-of-the-box thinking and going places to get more cool cyphers.

Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational Monte Cook:

• Stats as fuel for special abilities plus stats as hit points creates a potentially vicious (but stepped) death spiral. 
• Players, recognizing the dangers of the death spiral, look for ways to solve problems that avoid burning stats. Cyphers are the obvious go-to solution but... 
•  …each player can only carry so many cyphers before they start interacting in their packs in ways reminiscent of D&D's old potion miscibility table (only without any of the good options).
• Luckily, cyphers are plentiful for adventurous types who go places cyphers can be found.
 

Thus you get a benevolent feedback loop of using cyphers and hunting cyphers. Unlike old school D&D where players could wind up buried in mountains of gold, you never run out of uses for cyphers and, in fact, are encouraged to find novel uses for the things.

How does this all actually work in play? I'm anxious to find out.

For Numenera: the Nine Deadly Sins

Just a bit of background detail as I get ready to run a Numenera game. I have some players, a few PCs made up, and I'm working on our first adventure.

By the time Cilven was elevated to the office of the Amber Papacy, the Order of Truth was in crises. The Triangular Heresy was by this point deeply rooted in the foothills beneath Mencala Peak. The ever-escalating extravagant promises made to princes and patrons were beginning to take their toll on the Order's reputation. The resulting scandals, plus the continuing actions of Brechels and his acolytes, drove a wedge deeper and deeper between the Order and the Angulan Knights, which by this point were becoming an institution within the Steadfast.

No sooner had the mantle of papacy settled upon Cliven's shoulders than she immediately set to reforming the Order of Truth. Once again, all encyclicals were published in Truth and the library program was reinvigorated with additional funds and talent. For the first time, the Amber Papacy officially declared human breeding experiments to be anathema, a powerful first step in repairing the fraying alliance between the Order and the Angulan Knights.

Most importantly, Pope Cliven prescribed the until-now informal Nine Deadly Sins in her famous “On the Character and Future of the Order of Truth”:

Profligacy – In a world of limited resources, it is imperative that as many as possible be turned towards understanding the mechanics of the physical world and the numenera we have been blessed to study. Since the Princes and Peoples of the world will, as is their nature, waste so much on War, Pomp, and Comfort, it falls to the Aeon Priests to set the example by devoting as much time and treasure as they are able to study and research, setting aside the bare minimum required for health and well-being...

Suppression – Truth hidden is theft! It is an act of violence against your brothers and sisters, against the Order, against all of humanity, and against all rational and peace-loving beings of the Ninth World. To hide discovered knowledge for personal aggrandizement or out of perverted humility is to turn your back on truth and embrace falsehood. For indeed, a truth not put to the Test of Reproducibility is not a truth but merely a supposition...

Pride – Truth is greater than any one person, any clave, any priest or pope, even the entirety of the Order itself. When a supposition is put to the Tests, it is the supposition that is tested, not the one who has proposed it. Ego has no place in the Order and no place in a Test, either among the testers or the proposer...

Deceit – To falsify data is to murder knowledge, trust, wisdom, and peace!

Sloth – Failure to record even a single iota of data is worse than spending the whole day in bed. At least the sleeper does not waste the time of others, or threaten the veracity of investigation and experimentation...

Superstition – Only those things that can be measured can truly be known. To base one's propositions on hearsay, assumptions, hopes, or the actions of inscrutable beings of nebulous reality is to build one's house upon sand...

Carelessness – Never forget the Doom of Calleene! Never forget that you hold the lives of your brothers and sisters, your neighbors, perhaps even of the entire world in your frail hands! The search for Truth is never bloodless, but it is in your hands to hold back the toll of death and pain. It is your care, your precision, your cautious wisdom and safe habits which hold the Imp called Murrfee at bay...

Ignorance – We are all plagued by things we don't know. The world teases us with questions that assail and delight our minds. And yet we are also offered a banquet of knowledge and Truth upon which to feast. While none of us can know all that is offered, to choose ignorance when one could choose knowledge is worse than choosing death when one could choose life...

Hubris – While we are called to learn the entirety of Truth, we are not called to wield every power Truth puts in our hands. Understanding how something is done is not the same as understanding why, or even if, a thing should be done. We must honor the things that are, and understand why they are that way before charging headlong into “improvements.” First among these is the sanctity of the human form...

Armed with this list, and with the aid of the Angulan Knights, Pope Cliven set about purging the Order of Truth of its fascination with short-term goals and gains. Competition between priests for patrons and worldly prestige, while not eradicated, was at least held somewhat in check. Priests were given the opportunity to confess their wrongdoings and endure public scourging in order to prove their penitence. Those who refused were excommunicated. The Triangular Heresy was driven across the Black Riage and never heard from again. Brechels the Mad was devoured by a xi-drake and his principle lieutenants forced to endure public confessions and scourgings in the capitals of all the nations of the Steadfast.

- Excerpt from the Elder Debon's A History of the Amber Papacy

The Skeletal World of Numenera

Last week, JB asked, “However, I think I'm more interested in hearing how it PLAYS...is it a far-out acid trip? Or a rather banal space-superhero show?” Good question, and one I’m not quite ready to answer as I’m only just now beginning to organize a game. But as I prepare, I did want to address the world that’s present to us in the books.

First, there’s the map. Right off the bat, you can see some odd geography. I know the Clock of Kala leapt right out at me, and right after it, the Great Slab, the star-shaped Caecilian Jungle, the apparently drowned Fengali Forest and the Cloudcrystal Skyfields. I discovered more that my eyes had missed as I read through the book. The places are as blatantly unnatural as they appear to be, and while it’s not hard to turn up the weirdness a notch or two, each is suitably odd and a great leaping-off point for further imaginative oddness.

But if you go from the map to the Player’s Guide, it’d be understandable if you were a little confused, especially if you’re used to Raggi or Zak-level weirdness. There’s almost nothing that weird in character creation. Oh, there are some slightly odd mechanics, sure, but as I mentioned before, it’s a class + adjective + schtick system. The adjective’s chosen are mostly standard RPG fare (strong, learned, charming, etc.) but for “mystical/mechanical” which refers to having a way with the numenera. It might mean you’re a cyborg of some flavor, but doesn’t need to mean that, so exactly how weird that is really depends on where the player takes it.

The schticks, called foci, tend to be weirder, but don’t have to be. Foci such as “carries a quiver,” “leads,” or “works the back alleys” are largely mundane, and could easily fit characters in games without a hint of the supernatural. Some push the boundaries of the ludicrous (I can’t help but think of this guy when I read “Rides the Lightning”) but nothing really feels out- there weird to me. As a for-comparison, here’s the 5th Tier Nano power, Knowing the Unknown:

Tapping into the datasphere, you can ask the GM one question and get a general answer. The GM assigns a level to the question, so the more obscure the answer, the more difficult the task. Generally, knowledge that you could find by looking somewhere other than your current location is level 1, and obscure knowledge of the past is level 7. Gaining knowledge of the future is impossible.

Now, compare this to Raggi’s “Contact Outer Sphere” which includes a chance for the sorcerer to be “possessed by a psychic beast roaming the interstellar ether between the caster and the answering star” or Cook’s Expert Rules “Contact Outer Plane” that could result in weeks of madness for the caster. If that was the extent of your exposure to Numenera (and it very well might be for some players) you could be excused for thinking that you had a Masters of the Universe knock-off in your hands.

The deeper you go, the stranger things get, however. You get undersea cities, a town of cast-off and misanthropic robots digging through giant drifts of spare parts for repairs (which is in turn coveted by the still-living decapitated head that rules another town), towns built atop crashed starships, temples built to honor frog-gods, giant crabs that feast on the latent brain activity of its prey, and, of course, the now infamous Nibovian wives. There are alien cyborgs performing tactical maneuvers for a war in which both sides died off who-knows-how-many millenia ago. You have artifacts with randomly determined drawbacks (a la 1e artifacts) and ray guns that inflict ecstatic pleasures on the target.

The weird is there, but exactly who deep you and your group wallow in it is very much up to you.

For instance, there’s a guy who breeds flying insects specifically to carry coded messages. How are these messages transported? The book doesn’t say. Could be in tiny scrolls on their legs, but the implication is that it’s more biological than that. Perhaps it’s in the way they chirp. Or in the pattern of spots on their backs. Or maybe if you eat the bug you’ll fall into a hallucinogenic trance in which you’ll witness a series of scenes that make perfect sense to target of the message.

A lot of the setting material is like that. It’s vague glosses that give you more than enough room to make it what you want it to be. The undersea city, for instance is described in maybe two pages, a single illustration, and no map. In your campaign, it could look like this, or this, or even this! And the whole setting is very much like that: thin glosses full of imagination-fuel you can take as far (or not) as you wish.

And, just for an added twist, Mr. Cook isn’t above playing games with people’s expectations. For instance, in a game where exploring is the principle theme (“Discovery is the soul of Numenera.”), an organization all about the rational search for, discovery, and study of the ancient artifacts that litter the world in order to make the world a better place ought to be the good guys. An organization run by a guy who calls himself the Amber Pope, its leaders “priests,” and who presents themselves to the populace as a religion because they’ve discovered people are “more likely to respect, admire, and obey” a religion should be the villains. In Numenera, they’re the same organization. Calling for a crusade in order to channel the war-like tendencies of the “civilized” nations outward instead of towards each other nicely encapsulates the nature of the Order of Truth. That the book has nearly nothing to say about the target of this crusade (and even leaves it an open question as to whether or not they even exist) is pretty much of a piece with the rest. Mr. Cook does the same with the Angulan Knights, invoking Gamma World’s Knights of Genetic Purity on the one hand while on the other describing them also as being dedicated to justice, irrespective of rank, wealth, or authority. That they ride white psychic dragons is just the icing on the cake.

The Angulan Knights and the Order of Truth are set up as social linchpins for the Ninth World. Whether they are villains, heroes, or a (fairly realistic) mix of the two is entirely up to the GM. Whether the Gaians that are the focus of the crusade are unfortunate innocents (perhaps the targets of extreme militant atheists if you play the Order of Truth as described in the book), a true threat to the world, or as complete fabrications is, again, entirely up to the GM.

What you decide to do with them, then, will decide the flavor of your campaign. And what you do with the artifacts and cyphers and settings and monsters will also decide the flavor of the campaign.

So I think the answer to BJ’s question is, “How much do you want it to be?” There’s nothing that says it needs to be phantasmagorical, but you can absolutely get there from here.

I should have a game under my belt in the near future and will be able to report more then.

The Aesthetics of Numenera

I was a backer on the Numenera Kickstarter largely because it promised a game that combined “outside-of-the-box gameplay such as that found in Planescape, Dark Space, or Chaositech, the far-future stories of Gene Wolfe, Michael Moorcock, or Jack Vance, or mind-blowing visuals like those found in the work of French artist Moebius”. I'm a huge fan of that science-fantasy Heavy Metal thing, so this looked right up my alley.

Because this is Monte Cook, the core book clocks in at a hefty 400+ pages. These include all the rules, a bestiary, maps, and setting info, so I'm not going to ding him too hard for that. I've not finished reading through the book yet, so I'm a bit hesitant to start chewing on the rules or even the setting too much. What have I read, however, strongly feels like this, and this, and this with a bit of this thrown in for good measure. Which, quite frankly, makes me rather happy.

As an important for-instance, let's take a look at PCs. By now, you've probably heard about Numenera's Mad Lib's, fill-in-the-blank character creation that results in you being able to describe your PC as a blankety blank who blanks. The middle blank is your type (aka class) of which there are three: glaive (aka fighter), nano (aka magic-user) and jack (which is a mix of the other two and/or skill-hound). So far, pretty basic.

The first blankety is your descriptor and it's words like “stealthy” or “intelligent” or “rugged.” Unlike a game like Fudge where that would be left fairly vague and give you bonuses when what you're doing involves your adjective, Numenera spells out when and what sort of modifiers you get, plus additional bonuses like gear and contacts that come with it, as well as the occasional handicap.

When you get to the last blanks, your character's focus, you're suddenly in superhero and “Masters of the Universe” territory. Like the descriptor, you pick your focus from a list of firmly-defined options. These include “bears a halo of fire,” “controls gravity,” “murders,” and “wields two weapons at once.” It's your character's schtick and, like Beastman's ability to control animals or Shadowcat's ability to go immaterial (both of which have analogs in the list of foci), it's going to go far in defining what your character does and perhaps even who they are. Especially since you're only allowed each focus once per group.

With 29 foci and three types, you can create 87 different templates to build your character around (though, granted, not all foci and types are good matches). Toss in your descriptor and you've got a lot of room to play in and create unique characters with. But the art that begins the chapter on character creation feels kinda generic:

Don't get me wrong, technically it's quite competent. Each individual is, in fact, individual with the nice use of the metal circles to tie them all together, but they feel terribly much like stereotypes: the haughty star-jock warrior, the haughty can-kick-your-ass daredevil babe, and the haughty tosses-energy-blasts ascetic mystic. I know exactly what their voices sound like, what their catch-phrases are, and what they can do in a fight, which is good for potential PC art, but it's less the (considerable) skill of the artist as how much they lean on stereotypes.

Now, maybe it's because of I've been spoiled by James Edward Raggi IV (NSFW) and Zak Smith (also NSFW), but when you make a game about Earth a billion years in the future, I expect art that's compelling and strange. And yes, it's a terribly not-fair comparison, but this is strange and compelling. This feels very much been-there-done-that. (And anyone who thinks that having the guys showing more skin than the gals will give them a pass on art like this (NSFW) or the torture piece are deluding themselves.) You're about a quarter of the way through the book, on page 105, when you finally encounter Keith Thompson's delightfully macabre Scribe and finally find art that lives up to the promise of the setting.

Before that, it's a lot of rather uninspiring digital art with heavy brush strokes of the sort that rules Deviant Art right now. The tough, angry warrior woman whose arm has been replaced by a weapon, Witchblade-style. The moody landscapes with the giant rocks and things floating in the air above it. You've seen it before.

Granted, when your setting is this strange (and the strange is there, it just takes a while to get to it) you need to give the players something familiar to latch on to, to identify with. This familiarity makes it comfortable, and possibly inviting. It makes it easy to imagine what sorts of things you can expect to find in this very stranger world, and who your character is going to be. Numenera is very careful about easing you into the strange. Again, character creation is a good example of this. Hey, your character's a glaive, but that's just a fancy word for fighter. You know what a fighter is. Nothing odd here, right? He's also graceful. Good balance, great hand-eye coordination. So a fighter who's good at dodging and landing just the right blow. You've seen his type before. He's wiry and quick and...

Oh, did I mention he has the power to travel “a long distance from one location to another almost instantaneously, carried by a bolt of lightning”?

Wait, what?

So I absolutely understand, and can even commend, the desire to offer readers something comfortable and familiar with the art. I just wish more of it felt compelling. There's some neat stuff in the art, but nothing that quite rises to the level of the imagination seen in the ideas in the book. And when your setting is this strange, you really need the art to carry a lot of the communication load.

Don't get me wrong, there's some neat art in this. Keith Thompson provides some excellent strangeness, as has already been shown. And some of the artists, folks like Samuel Arya, Helge Balzer, Guido Kuip, Brynn Metheny (who does some great creature design), Kieran Yanner (who did the cover), Mark Tarrisse, Cory Trego-Erdner, and Adrian Wilkins, can (and many do here) produce some really great atmospheric and moody art. I just can't help but feel that, for much of the book, the art design was restrained to keep things from getting too weird.

This might be a matter of taste as well. For a project like this, I would have aimed more for mood and maybe a bit less towards the you-are-there style I normally enjoy so much. There's some great black-and-white work that really seems to capture the flavor of the text, women in tall headdresses riding vicious lizards and such. My hope is that, with such a great stable of artists already involved in the project, Mr. Cook will let them really spread their wings and give us the bizarre and intriguing setting his words describe in future products.

In the Grim Reality of Future Warrior, There are Only Choices to be Made

Over on his Art of the Genre blog, Mr. Taylor ponders crafting new mechanics vs. re-framing off-the-shelf solutions:

In today’s RPG marketplace, with the advent of OGL, wouldn’t it make more sense to simply use an existing engine from something like Pathfinder, Savage Worlds, or Fate? Wouldn’t a proven system with a nice track record, and designed by folks with vast amounts of gaming design experience, be a better way to go than trying to cobble your own mechanic together?

Rules and mechanics matter. What do you want your players (not the characters, the players) to do in your game? Spend lots of out-of-game time designing characters that they then unleash in a handful of set-piece battles per session? Then Pathfinder’s probably the way to go. If the players are going to be organizing raids in which their characters lead groups of NPCs in disparate (and possibly desperate) missions, Savage Worlds is clearly the way to go. On the third hand, Fate would be an excellent choice for a rules-light, fast paced game that rarely gets bogged down in either tactical or rules-interaction minutiae.

Designers need to keep in mind that rolling dice is not playing the game. Rolling dice is where the play stops and everyone waits to see how random chance will rearrange the situation, at which point the players can start making decisions again. It’s this deciding that is the real meat of playing the game. That’s where the fun comes from. So what sorts of decisions do you want your players to be making? Design your mechanics to support (but not supplant) those decisions and you’re off to the races.

Tentacle-monsters Beware! Free RPG Day is Nigh!

Don't forget that this Saturday is FREE RPG DAY!  Yaaaaaaaay! *does the Kermit flail*

Among the goodies on tap are a new LotFP adventure, a Swords & Wizardry adventure by Frog God Games, a Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure by Goodman Games, a Castle & Crusades adventure from Troll Lord and a Tunnels & Trolls adventure from Flying Buffalo.  Lots of yummy gaming goodness to go around.  Click here to find a store near you.

Jack Vance Has Passed Away

And I'm so out of it, I didn't notice until today.

We are, of course, speaking of the author who inspired the "Vancian magic" of D&D.  He's best known for his Dying Earth stories which took place in the latter years of Earth's existence, when the sun was red and swollen, a realm in which technology was so advanced, baroque, and strange that it really was indistinguishable from magic.

The Brits seem to have a gift for writing obituaries and the Guardian has a good one for Vance.

DIY Goes to the Cloud

On Saturday at Comicpalooza, Skirmisher Publishing had a panel in which they promised to announce the “biggest thing in gaming for 2013!”  So what did they announce?

Quite possibly the biggest thing of 2013.  And maybe the two years on either side of it, if they can iron out the rough spots.

Basically, Bookforge is a web page for selling gaming content in the smallest usable increments: classes, feats, skills, encounters, monsters, weapons, spells, rooms, etc. via micropayments (dimes, nickels, etc.).  Instead of buying an entire book for US $30+, you can buy the class and two feats you’ll actually use for US 75¢.  

What sort of content will be up there?  They’re starting with the entire OGL SRD (which will be available for free).  In addition to the OGL, you can also find content from Pathfinder’s SRD.  There are options to search under 4e, Labyrinth Lord and Mutant Future, but those don’t appear to turn up any content as of this writing.  They’re also planning on including 5e Next, Savage Worlds, Fudge, d6 and Fate.  And they’ll put up everything they’ve published and have the appropriate rights for.  The goal is to have 100 authors and a million pieces of content by the end of the year.  

The content will be sortable by type, author, keywords, theme words (the example they mentioned was “power attacks”), genre, rule system, and the book it was originally published in.  They thought the last was important because they didn’t want you to accidentally buy something you already had on a bookshelf.  

You’ll likely still want to spend the pennies on it since you’ll be able to export collections of content in pdf form as sourcebooks.  The idea is clearly that you’ll create a homemade sourcebook for your campaign based on the content you pick and send it to your players so they have it to create characters with.  They also made mention of a dungeon generator that would work based on the options you picked, and that they were contemplating a character builder as well, though no ETAs on either just yet.

When you buy this content, you’ll have the option to record your own notes on it.  Some will come with art, others might come with notes from the author as well.  They’re talking about adding some clip art as well that you can buy to add to your sourcebooks.  

They will be accepting additional content.  They won’t put anything up until they’ve edited it and I forgot to ask what sort of turnaround they expected on the editing process.  The author’s cut will be something in the neighborhood of 20%.  They’re also promising complete transparency on sales and searches with the authors.  

So that’s it in a nutshell.  Frankly, if 5e Next is as flexible and modular as they’ve been claiming, this may be the killer ap that pushes it over the top.  Imagine being able to cobble together your race-as-class from Basic, monsters from the 2e Monstrous Manual, spells from The Book of Vile Darkness, and your favorite house rules from around the web, all bolted to a framework that embraces all of them without choking on crazy variety.  If WotC delivers that framework, Bookforge is the perfect compliment to it.

As of this writing, the interface is a bit bare-bones and clunky.  A search for "spidergoat" didn’t turn up anything and a search for "class" turns up a lot of feats and skills.  Searching "sleep" pulls up a lot of OGL and Pathfinder content but nothing under Labyrinth Lord or 4e yet.  I’m not sure how much of the content is actually up and how much of the trouble is my inexperience with the system.  In any case, there’s a lot of promise there, and if you’re playing any 3.x game, it’s clearly a valuable resource already.

Bookforge is described as being still in beta.  A video was shot of the announcement, but I haven't seen it posted yet.  I'll link to it when it goes live.

Playing with Play-by-Post Mechanics

Oddysey and I were chatting last night about play-by-post gaming. Her recent adventures in learning to code has her intrigued by the idea of creating GM tools and that got me contemplating the potentials for PbP gaming.

The negatives of PbP gaming are fairly obvious, and largely revolve around time: it’s incredibly slow, and you often end up waiting on people to respond (sometimes people who won’t ever respond again, curse them). So, if you were crafting mechanics optimized for PbP, you’d want something that took this into account and minimized it as much as possible. This leads us to an intriguing conundrum.

To play a game is to make choices. And yet, it’s the points of decision, where you have to wait for someone’s response, that create all the delays and unpleasantness. Obviously you don’t want to remove all choice; do that and you don’t have a game anymore. And even removing some choice can be considered a bad thing.

After talking all around Robin Hood’s barn last night, Oddysey summed things up very succinctly: not all choice is created equal. What we really want is meaningful choice.

Lots of choices in gaming are less than meaningful, or are so basic that they’re not really any choice at all. So, obviously, any time we need to stop to ask what the players want to do, we want to make sure they’re making a meaningful choice.

 Oddysey then suggested that a stakes mechanic (something akin, I assume she was thinking, to Dogs in the Vineyard) might be a good way to achieve that. I’m thinking a handful of parallel stakes mechanics. Think M:tG, where you have a handful of resource pools (maybe blue mana and black mana) and then you have to decide which you want to deplete based on a whole range of potential outcomes. And give each pool a few different ways it can be used.

The thing I like about this most is that it can be used to optimize one of PbP’s strong points: complicated mechanics. Since you literally have hours (if not days) between moves, there’s no need to keep the mechanics simple and quick. Want a combat system that modifies damage based on the attacker’s weapon and stance, and the defender’s armour, astrological sign, and what they had for breakfast? PbP can do it!

Granted, you need to keep it at least somewhat reasonable, to the point where the players can make logical and reasonably accurate guesstimates about success when they’re setting their stakes. But the possibilities are still quite broad there.

 I’m curious if anyone’s seen any good PbP theory posts or commentary out there. Please point the way!

Art by Hippolyte Bellange.

Book Review: Tales of the Emerald Serpent

Scott Taylor openly acknowledges that, yes, Tales of the Emerald Serpent is a collection of short stories absolutely inspired by Robert Asprin’s Thieves World project. Like Asprin’s collections, the stories are sword-and-sorcery centered around a town of cut-throats, tricksters, callous oligarchs and the poor innocents trapped into living next door to them. Unlike the earlier Thieves World collections, this one is a lot tighter, with the stories referencing each other and, in some cases, woven together. Much of it feels like a fantasy version of 24, only with each story being that day from a different character’s perspective.

Also, unlike Thieves World’s Sanctuary, Tales of the Emerald Serpent’s city of Taux is much more of a character in and of itself. The ancient city, clearly inspired by Aztec and Mayan culture, is populated by ghosts, nearly every brick and stone inhabited by the specters of its previous citizens who were suddenly slain in a mysterious magical disaster. Many of the stories center around these ghosts or are influenced by the ever-present threat that the citizens of Taux are both blase about and constantly aware of.

The book includes nine stories, many by well-known authors. They range from the straight-up caper-style story (reminiscent of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser) Three Souls for Sale by Mike Tousignant to the family drama of Lynn Flewelling’s Namesake. Harry Connolly’s dark The One Thing You Can Never Trust is probably the most disturbing and Twilight Zone-ish of the stories. The artist Todd Lockwood gives us a rollicking and fun tale about a Corsair who meets an old flame and gets drawn into his schemes. Juliet E. McKenna’s Venture is a surprisingly sweet story threaded around the warp of racial tensions in a fantasy world.

Martha Wells’ Revnants feels exactly like the sort of story you’d expect from the author of City of Bones, mingling heroic fantasy with cultural archeology. It’s a good story, but the ending feels a touch abrupt, as does Rob Mancebo’s Footsteps of Blood, both leaving the door wide open for sequels or longer treatments.

And then there’s Scott Taylor’s Charlatan, which does a masterful job of weaving nearly all the stories together. Almost every other tale gets a passing nod in his story of a devious trickster challenged to a duel he cannot possibly win. It’s great fun, even if it’s a bit abrupt in the climax (though understandably so).

There’s not a bad story in the bunch and my favorite is Julie Czerneda’s Water Remembers, which gives us a glimpse at those who dwell among the wizards of the Star Tower as well as the ways in which the haunting of an entire city can lead to surprising transformations among what would otherwise be rather mundane trades crafts.

If you’re looking for some new good old sword-and-sorcery derring-do and skullduggery, Tales of the Emerald Serpent is absolutely worth your time and treasure. The characters are intriguing and unique, their adventures feel both fresh and familiar, and there’s a fun mix of danger, greed, heart, and humor. Here’s hoping we get additional glimpses into the days and nights of Taux soon.

"Being an author is all about having readership.”

There's been a lot of talk over the years about how RPG businesses are based around selling books, which is a decidedly different business than selling either gaming content or gaming experiences. In addition to the potential disconnect between what the companies are selling and what the players want to buy, there is also the current chaos that is the book publishing industry, madly in flux right now. Laura and Tracy Hickman (yes, those Hickmans) think they've figured out what works now, and what works is basically turning the old publishing model literally upside-down:

“It’s no longer about being published … it’s about being read,” Tracy told us. “It’s all about the audience today; acquiring direct contact with the reader, maintaining and growing that relationship. Anyone can get ‘published’ today. Being an author is all about having readership.”

The new model, disturbingly enough, appears to be based around loss-leaders, rather like what you see in the insurance business. Or, a perhaps better metaphor for gaming and fiction, the illicit narcotics business: "The first hit is free." This is great for readers and fans; we get a bit of fun free stuff, and then can decide which content is good enough to support with actual purchases after we've seen some of the content.

Interestingly, this is clearly the model WotC is following. With their huge, open playtest, they're not just getting feedback on the rules, but are also getting broad dissemination of the game. Lots of folks will see it, read it, and play it, and create buzz so that when the books finally appear on shelves, people will buy them instead of simply playing the free copies of the playtest docs that will almost certainly still be floating about the intrawebs. Also interestingly, I think this can work very well for the Kickstarter model as well. You give away the basic content, then based on reaction to that you can launch a Kickstarter to cash in on the interest and get the ball rolling for fancier, dead-tree books, boxed sets, whatever, with more bells and whistles like intro adventures and the like.

Review: Beneath the Sky

Right up front, yes, Dan Thompson is a friend of mine.  So it’s a relief to be able to recommend Beneath the Sky to others.

Normally this isn’t the sort of thing I read.  I prefer my sci-fi a bit more swashbucklery, and while Beneath the Sky isn’t exactly hard sci-fi, its focus on both the tragedies and rewards of a first-contact situation very much have the feel of a more cerebral read.  Which isn’t to say the book is utterly devoid of derring-do (we even get an attack by space pirates), but only that the perils and opportunities of the first-contact situation remain the principal focus.

Just over a millenium ago, a religious sect called the Masonites set out to found a colony in a distant solar system.  Travelling aboard a generational colony ship (that is, one in which the colonists live for multiple generations as they travel to their destination), they expect to reach their New Providence in another 600 years.  

Of course, things back on Earth haven’t exactly sat still in the meantime.  Humanity has mastered FTL travel and settled many worlds, including the one chosen by the Masonites to be their New Providence.  The colonists’ co-religionists were principal actors in dramatic historical events.  And neither the greater mass of humanity nor the Masonite colonists are aware of what’s been happening with the others during most of that time.  

The stage is set, then, for a series of dramatic events and accidents when a survey ship makes contact with the Masonite colonists.  What follows is both tragic and happy, and Thompson does a masterful job of weaving the two emotional reactions together, creating a surprising tapestry that is, in the end, both sad and satisfying.  He’s also an extremely efficient writer, almost too much so; while all the important threads are neatly finished, I wouldn’t have minded lingering a bit on a few of them at the end.  

If you enjoy Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta books, or Weber’s Honor Harrington universe (but wish they included a more “blue collar” point of view) you’ll like Beneath the Sky.  For myself, I certainly won’t wait so long before reading Dan’s next book.

Terraformed Mars

From The Atlantic (yeah, I know) a not-too-terribly scientific look at what a terraformed Mars might look like.  Great pics:

The article ends by noting, "Looks like home, maybe a bit, just with a foreign geography."  Except it doesn't, really.  A terraformed Mars is going to have one giant super-continent.  Even if you assume any bit of land that touches another bit of land constitute one continent (making North and South America a single continent, as well as Eurasia and Africa) Earth still has four distinct land masses.  It also appears that a watery Mars is closer to a 50/50 split of surface area being water or land, as opposed to Earth's 70/30 split. 

I can't imagine that doesn't result in some really odd weather.  I do think the artist got it right that one half of that continent is really green (perhaps even waterlogged, like the Amazon) and the other half is pretty dry and barren; a watery Mars isn't necessarily going to be a green Mars.  I could also see a wet Mars experiencing something like an epic version of our monsoon pattern weather. 

Hexographer Hex-a-fies Anything!

Those of you looking to convert the more modern, suitable-for-framing style artsy world maps into traditional, suitable-for-hex-crawlin' maps might want to give this new feature in Hexographer a look:

Hexographer just got a new feature: Converting a map (or really any PNG image) into a hex map! This is designed to make it a little easier to create a hex map based on another map you’ve created or scanned.

And now I'm intrigued by the possibilities of hex-a-fying things that were not intended to be maps originally.

Dead Iron Review: Werewolves of the Old (and Grim and Tight-lipped) West

Dead Iron was recommended to me by a friend who'd very much enjoyed this series and others by Devon Monk.  The book is workmanlike and entertaining, but hardly enthralling.

Our hero, Cedar Hunt, has been cursed with lycanthropy.  He's interesting enough, though his tortured mien slips into angsty every now and then, and is only saved from whiny by his tight-lipped, Old West tough-guy personae.  Mae Lindson bears the double-scarlet letters of being both a witch and the gringa half of a racially mixed marriage.  She's widowed pretty early on in the book (before the end of chapter 2), and spends most of the book wrapped in raging grief and the thirst for vengeance.  Her husband is slightly more approachable as a character in spite of being dead, in large part because he refuses to admit that "until death do us part" means your marriage ends when your heart stops beating.  Rose Small is an orphaned child with a mysterious past even she doesn't suspect, and which is little explored in this book.  Still, her determined optimism, open-mindedness, and innocence makes her the most empathetic and interesting or our main characters.  They are aided by a trio of subterranean "Welsh" miners and steam-punk tinkerers called the Madder brothers, who provide logistical support, firepower, and much-needed comic relief, though they themselves fall prey to the tight-and-stiff-lipped Old West tough-guy thing themselves. 

They are opposed by the excessively ostentatious Shard LeFel, royal exile of a magical world-next-door.  Under the guise of a railroad tycoon, LeFel has been working to build an enchanted door that will allow him to return home.  He just needs to murder three specific people in order to open that door. 

(As an interesting aside, LeFel is written more like a tragic hero than a villain, facing and overcoming obstacles and setbacks at every turn.  Except for his eagerness to murder and manipulate, he'd be easy to mistake for a hero whose goals just happen to oppose those of our main characters.) 

The action takes place in the small town of Hallelujah, populated by the most backwards, suspicious, small-minded sheeple-hicks you're likely to ever encounter this side of Hester Prynne's Boston.  I'm not shocking or spoiling anything for you when I mention that LeFel whips up the townsfolk into a torch-waving mob that marches on Mae Lindson's home, am I?  Didn't think so.

LeFel's minions are largely made up of the Strange, and they darn near make up for any shortcomings in the story.  Malevolent spirits driven by disturbing appetites, they seek easy entry into the American continent, and the dead iron rails of LeFel's transcontinental railroad are just the sort of gateway that they need.  In the meantime, they require the sorcerous-steampunk amalgamation bodies LeFel can provide in order to have any serious presence in the human world, and they use these bodies to further LeFel's interests, though not always eagerly. 

I haven't decided if I'm going to pick up the second book in this series.  I just don't feel the burning need to know what happens next, as I do with Kim Harrison's books, nor do I find the world quite as intriguing as I do Sarah Hoyt's current foray into multi-world steampunk-and-sorcery (though I'll readily admit Monk's work is far more steampunky, with it's steam-powered mecha and multi-utility brass-and-crystal shooting goggles.  Yes, Virginia, in Monk's work, the goggles, they do do something!).  That all said, the setting and the Strange are intriguing, and I'm curious to see what sort of trouble Rose finds for herself, so I imagine I'll pick up book two eventually. 

Stick a 4ork in It

Remember how I said earlier this week how WotC seems to have a little love for everyone?  Well, maybe not quite everyone, as it turns out...

One of my purchases at GenCon this past year was a new D&D book, Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue.  I got it because I'm a sucker for fantasy cities.  I've picked up two Pathfinder adventures just because one took place in a drow city and the other was set in the City of Brass (the latter being a bit of a disappointment; almost all of the adventure takes place in a single palace of the city).  I have that DRAGON magazine that features more detailed write-ups for Vault of the Drow's Erelhei-Cinlu.  So picking up a 4e book about Menzoberranzan wasn't much of a stretch for me.  I figured I'd mine it for ideas to use in my own campaigns.

Imagine my shock when I dug it out of my stack of GenCon stuff the other day to discover that it's not a 4e book. 

This is not an old book.  It's brand new: August 2012.  And, printed on the back, the last sentence of the cover blurb is: “This product is compatible with all editions of the Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game...”

Curious, I went back to see what's come out for 4e this last year.  The most recent book appears to be The Dungeon Survival Handbook published in May.  What's slated for 2013?  Well, clearly the 2e core books.  What else?

The first RPG publication for 2013 is a reprint of 1e's Unearthed Arcana .  After that comes hardbound collections of the S-series dungeons (Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth) followed by a hardbound collection of the A-series (the Slave Lord adventures) plus a new low-level adventure that, 'sets the stage for events that unfold throughout the remainder of the "A" series.'

And, as far as RPG products goes, that's it.  So the future of D&D, at least for the first half of 2013, is its past. 

A Little Love for Everyone

Moe Tousignant pointed out on G+ that there appear to be plans afoot to republish the 2e PHB.  2e doesn't get a lot of love on the intrawebs, but it's probably the system I had the most fun with.  (Ok, that's not entirely true.  My college games, and those that grew out of them, were driven by 2e PHBs and 1e's DMG, Manual of the Planes, a handful of D&D books, and, in later years, the Book of Vile Darkness.  But you get my point.)

2e got a lot wrong, including decoupling EXP from gp and a lot that can be traced to the ideas that resulted in James Ward's "Angry Mother Syndrome" editorial in DRAGON #154.  2e also got a lot right, however.  Among them were specialty priests and arranging clerical spells into spheres of influence (and, in general, I love what 2e did with clerics) and awesome settings like Dark Sun, Birthright, and Planescape. 

The best thing to come out of 2e, in my estimation, was the Monstrous Manual.  Ok, yes, the whole demons/devils/baatezu/whatever nonsense was lame, and some of the art was mediocre.  However, it had some of the best write-ups for monsters ever.  It's the one that gave us all the great "and the gizzard can be used in potions of pudding-breathing" type details that eventually inspired Noisms' excellent "Let's Read the 2nd Edition Monsterous Manual" thread on RPG.net, one of the most epic threads ever to grace that site.  The result was an amazing collection of campaign and adventure ideas for every single critter in the book!  (The link goes to his pdf collection of the ideas, not the thread at RPG.net.)

Luckily, it appears that the Monstrous Manual is also slated for re-release.  If you play any old-school game I heartily recommend you pick it up; other than possibly translating AC from descending to ascending, the only other thing you'd need to worry about is a mild case of hit point inflation.  And even if you don't use the stats, as Noisms showed, there's a wealth of inspirational material in that book.

If you haven't yet, I'd also heartily recommend picking up a copy of the 1e DMG.  Yes, it's chock-full of Gygaxianisms; yes, its poorly organized.  But it's also the best resource for running a fantasy RPG of any edition or rules I've ever read.  From lists of the magical properties of gems or the healing properties of herbs, to random tables for generating and stocking dungeons, to explanations of government types and noble titles, the book is just bursting with useful stuff I want when I'm designing campaigns, creating adventures, and running sessions.  But, as they used to say on Reading Rainbow, don't take my word for it.

Troll5myth Plays

The local RPGA bunch at Dragon's Lair decided to forgo their usual 4e shenanigans to try out some 5e, or “Next” as the kids are calling it these days.  I was lucky enough to score a seat at the table and got to play a pre-gen monk (and ex-sailor) whom I promptly dubbed Stalking Platypus.  We poked around in the goblin tunnels of the Caves of Chaos, killing nearly all of them and their ogre friend as well. 

As one player put it near the end of the day, if you've only known 4e, 5e feels like a completely new game.  Some of them said it felt a lot like 1e.  In my estimation, it feels more like 1e as recreated by big fans of 3.5 with a dash of 4.  On the one hand, it is a lot simpler to play and create a character than it was in 4e.  On the other, everyone has something on their character sheet to invoke every turn, whether it's special powers, spells, or specialties.  Some of these are governed by a fancy mechanic called expertise.  You get so many expertise dice (at first level, it's 1d4 for everyone, I think) and what you can do with them is dictated by your class.  My monk could launch a “flurry of blows” allowing an extra attack per expertise dice, and rolling those dice for damage instead of my normal open-handed attack (which was a d6+4).  I could also spend my expertise die on bonus movement instead of the extra attack, and if I'd had more than one die, I could have split between the two.  These abilities felt like the feats of 3e or the special maneuvers of 4e (though there were few crazy shift-around-the-map powers), but were presented in a way that was more akin to the old special abilities of 1e, like the paladin's warhorse or the dwarf's ability to detect sloping passages.

Otherwise, it feels a lot like WotC-era D&D: roll a d20 plus stat bonuses versus a target number as the core mechanic.  There are a lot fewer dissociated mechanics this time around; my monk could only use his ki ability once per day, but as ki is at least semi-magical, the once-per-day fits the fairy tale logic of such a thing so it didn't throw me off at all. 

It's still damned hard to kill a PC.  The dissociated healing surges have been replaced by a healer's kit, a 20-use item that can be bought at stores and allows characters to roll their hit dice to see how many hit points they regain.  When my monk was down to 1 hit point, a 10 minute rest and use of the healer's kit allowed me to roll his hit dice (a single d8 at first level) and restore 3 hit points, bringing him to 4.  Hitting 0 means you've been KOed and you must pass a CON check every turn thereafter or take another d6 damage from bleeding and shock.  If your negative hit points is greater than your CON score plus level, you die.  In spite of facing an ogre who easily dished out 8 points of damage in single blow, nobody was ever in serious danger of such a fate, and any magical healing brings you to at least 0 hit points.

In short, the wonky stuff of 4e has been dropped, some of the “kewl powerz” of 3e have been retained in an extremely streamlined fashion, and the resource management of 1e is back.  So far, I haven't seen anything to pull me away from Moldvay/Cook/Labyrinth Lord/LotFP, but on the other hand, if someone told me they were starting up a 5e campaign, I'd be far more interested in joining up than I would be for a 4e game. 

I Felt a Great Disturbance in the Force...

"... as if a million nerds suddenly cried out in terror..."

Lots and lots of angst out there about Lucas selling Star Wars to Disney.  For some (very blunt) perspective on all of this, you can't do worse than read the words of John Scalzi on the subject.  Frankly, I agree: this is what's best for everyone at this point.

As for those folks who worry about Disney filling Star Wars with Jar-jars, keep in mind that Disney isn't just Mickey Mouse.  I don't have an ear inside the Mouse House, but I strongly suspect Disney has a plan for Star Wars, and it's not primarily little kids.  Remember “Prince of Persia” and “John Carter?”  Both were from Disney and both were about replacing the highly lucrative, but increasingly tired, “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. 

Disney's looking for an action-adventure-romance series they can target to the young-adult and nerd audiences, which will have enough legs for at least a trilogy.  Can you think of a better property than Star Wars to fit that bill? 

This probably drives the last nail into any Barsoom series' coffin; why pour money into ur-Star Wars when you have actual Star Wars?  A 2015 release means they can pick up the epic baton just as “The Hobbit” is putting it down.  Expect to start hearing a lot about this somewhere around a year from now.

Dredd Review: Beauty and Brutality

In the '80s and '90s, I only had glancing familiarity with the British sci-fi/fantasy scene. I mostly knew it from the Fighting Fantasy books, the Fiend Folio, Warhammer, and the British adventures published by TSR. To my eye, there seemed to be a punk-infused, worn-down, decadent and tragic nihilism laced through it all. I saw it in spades when I finally got my hands on some of the stuff published in 2000 AD. I saw it in Slaine, I saw it in Halo Jones. But it was Judge Dredd that seemed to be its purest expression.

The Stallone flick was, alas, more silly than anything else, an attempt to cram Dredd into the action tropes of Hollywood at the time. And while I sometimes mourn the loss of some of those tropes, Dredd wasn't made to fit them. Luckily, the new movie doesn't try.

There's a lot to love about this flick. The atmosphere is perhaps a touch too present day (thanks primarily to the costuming of the average citizens and the vehicles on the streets) but that vanishes once the Judges get stuck in, deep in a 1 kilometer tall archology, laying waste to perps and assassins. And it's exactly what the trailers promise: two Judges, cut off and alone, versus an entire building of thugs and toughs with all manner of weaponry and sadistic creativity.

Make no mistake about it: this is one of the most brutal movies I've seen in a while that was neither horror nor directed by Tarantino. Innocent passers-by and perps are smashed by speeding vehicles (leaving a blood splatter on the spiderwebbed windshield where their skull struck), mowed down by massed rotary cannon fire, set aflame, or have their faces ripped apart by bullets (shown in intimate slow-motion).

 The slow-motion is a running theme in the movie. The bad guys are selling a new drug that makes time appear to move at 1% its normal speed and makes every surface shimmer and gleam where the light hits it. The moments where we see through the eyes of those using the drug are some of the most brutal and gorgeous captured on film. And absolutely lovely in 3D. Film makers are clearly starting to get a handle on the tech. This is the second film I've seen this year that makes good use of it. And honestly, I'm not sure 3D is fully up to the promise of this film; it's going to look amazing when remastered for a full-on holographic experience.

Karl Urban joins the justly-celebrated Hugo Weaving as an actor who's willing to do what it takes to bring a character to life. Just as Weaving did in “V for Vendetta,” Urban never once reveals his face in this movie. Dredd never takes off his helmet. His relationship with the cute blonde Judge trainee is purely platonic mentorship. In fact, she's one of only two judges who are seen without helmets on.

The soundtrack is pulsing, dark, and brooding, a sort of grungy techno-beat. Imagine if you took the better parts of the Green Lantern soundtrack and, well, grunged them. It fits extremely well for Judge Dredd.

The plot is simple, but slips in a few twists, playing with our expectations, and nicely ratcheting up the tension throughout. There's nothing fancy here; the movie is a straight-forward sci-fi action flick, and never tries to be anything else.

If you're looking for a bit of the ol' ultra-violence, I can heartily recommend this movie, and I further recommend you catch this one on the big screen and in 3D.