Matthew Tyler-Jones: Recent Episodes
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On Apple TV Plus, the series, Masters of the Air has just started. Produced by Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks, it’s widely considered to be part of a trilogy with Band of Brothers and Pacific two well received HBO dramas. So I foolishly set myself a challenge: if War Stories is inspired by Band of Brothers, and Dave’s Rendezvous with Destiny campaign broadly follows a similar post D-Day arc, and if the company is also working on a Pacific campaign, could I imagine how a Masters of the Air style campaign might work, using the same ruleset?
I say it was a foolish challenge because the potential problems might be might be all too readily apparent. The first of these is the problematic nature of the subject. Masters of the Air looks from the trailers to be telling two different stories – the tale of a bomber squadron based in East Anglia in the first half and the Tuskagee Red Tails flying out of Italy in the later on. At least one of our patrons, whose grandmother died in an air-raid, wasn’t sure “if the bombing crew on raids to German workers suburbs is making a good game.” And that is a very good point. The player characters in Rendevous with Destiny are professional (even if drafted) soldiers, aiming at (and killing) other soldiers. On the other hand, to quote from the memoir of a British bomb aimer: “Until recently, we were told, Dresden had been comparatively unimportant but since the recent advance of Russian troops the population of Dresden had been swollen by a million refugees. Conditions there were chaotic and ours was to be a panic raid adding confusion and disrupting communications.” So not soldiers, not a military target at all, not even a factory – but civilians, refugees. The author, Miles Tripp, describes “The quiver of outrage at the briefing … and dropping the bombs clear of the periphery in the hope they would fall harmlessly in the fields” as “a last gesture to an ideal of common humanity.”
Now many RPGs deal with the loss of humanity, not least Vampire: The Masquerade, but (for better or worse) they are generally more visceral, more intimate experience. In that game, you must role-play the hunt, overpower or seduce the victim before draining their blood. A bomber crew, who never get to look their victims in the eye at the moment of death might as well be taking a Bus to Clapham. Only once does Tripp seem to express a sense of achievement on a mission: on a daylight raid to destroy gun emplacements near West Kappelle on the Dutch Coast.
“For a moment I thought the dark cluster was going to fall short, and curl in to the sea, but the bombs cleared the water and seemed to race up the beach before exploding directly on the emplacements. This was the bomb-aimer’s ideal target; a military objective with no danger to civilians and everything staked on a direct hit because anything less would have been a complete waste of time and money. When the bombs exploded I felt the elation of a darts player who has scored a double top to win and the satisfaction of a craftsman who has done a good job well.”
Tripp, M. The Eighth Passenger London, 1969
But experiences like this are rare in the book and almost entirely obliterated by G H navigation technology, an early triangulation system where the bomb aimer is told to release the payload when the plane reaches a particular point. Not actually using the bomb sight at all.
So we come to the old problem of many a spaceship based RPG. There is very little for everyone to do in a ship combat. Often people say only the pilot gets to do fun stuff in a space ship combat. I would argue in a bomber, not ever the pilot gets to have fun. There go where the Navigator, Wireless Operator and then Bomb Aimer tell them. Only a few times in the book do they deviate from their course, few enough times for the author here to think is worth mentioning when it happens, for example weaving from side to side when a fighter is on their tail, or making a sudden correction when it seems they are about to fly straight into a bomb dropped by another crew. There is very little chance, even for the pilot, to react to the movements of the enemy.
There is a meme in RPG culture “Rocks fall, Everyone Dies” which is shorthand for the unfairness of a capricious GM killing the whole party because of some slight or other (or because they are running the old D&D module, Tomb of Horrors). But in fact it accurately describess the fate of most lost bomber crews. Tripp describes, on an early minion to Solingen, “the Lancasters were bunched so close that at least three were bombed out of the sky by their fellows flying directly above.” And he reports on “a Lancaster blown to bits by flak” another which “went down in a cartwheel of flame” and another, a crew he knew – Q-Queenie “blown up over the target. There was no hope of any survivors.”
There is little chance for personal action to save the day. Tripp recounts a daylight sortie on Gelsenkirchen where the plane is hit by flack which short circuits an early radar device called Fishpond. The panel burst into flame (which makes me think of the frequenty exploding bridge consoles in Star Trek). Every crewman is issued with a fire extinguisher. But every crewman apparently tucks it out of the way somewhere for the flight. In the acrid smoke, the wireless operator (who looks after Fishpond and GH) couldn’t find his. Neither could the flight engineer or the navigator. Eventually one was found and the fire put out. But that is the only incident in 40 missions (bar a couple of violent course corrections by the pilot) where the actions of the crew saved the plane.
So quite apart from the frightening prospect of flying in straight line while antiaircraft gunners and fighters try to kill you, there is also a challenge in making missions “playable.” (That’s assuming after you have heard this that you even want to try.) And I am going to suggest that you can’t – at least not in the same way that core War Stories makes ground combat a bit like a skirmish war-game. You will never create the fear that the crews experienced, while you sit safe round the table, and you won’t be satisfied with the routine nature of the missions.
If you want a game where you can take more personal action in a plane I point you towards Night Witches, where crews of two fly slow and fragile bi-planes towards the target. Even in that game, where the scale and the almost whites-of their-eyes intimacy of the sorties is naturally more playable, lot of the roleplaying in that game though happens on the ground, not in the air. And that is the secret to running an air war game in War Stories. Indeed, it’s an opportunity to expand War Stories into the arena of the “War at Home.” Miles Tripp writes frequently of his courting a WAAF meteorologist called Audrey. I knew Audrey as his wife when I was growing up, so that is really the story of his war. The sorties themselves should be like inconvenient punctuation points in a game set in one or more bases, the surrounding villages, and trips to experience London’s nightlife.
Indeed, you could punctuate a single session of play with two or more sorties, because they might simply involve every player rolling a particular skill once for the whole mission and then narrating the mission depending on the number successes and the FUBARs generated. So, the gunners would roll heavy weapons, the bomb aimer Operate, the Flight Engineer and Wireless operator Tech, the Navigator Survival and the pilot Command. Obviously, the crew would new specialisation (Air Gunner I and II; Pilot I and II etc to flavour the skills a bit more towards air crew. Thos specialisations are like to be simple poll modifiers though, not more more contextual mechanics, given the simple just roll once each mission resolution).
If anyone fails their roll, the mission is not a success, but they get home. If two rolls fail the crew might not get home, three or more means their plane was blown out of the sky. If everyone rolls a success, the crew get home, mission accomplished, though the number of FUBARs generated will add complications. It’s worth says that Lucky Strikes can be used and earned in the usual way. The complications might be as inconsequential as an argument over who has the task of emptying the pilot’s piss-pot to one or more of the crew getting injured or frostbitten. Indeed the complication might (or should?) extend into the roleplaying at home. I imagine a table of example complications, but the group might be more imaginative. The crew and GM together narrate what happened on the mission only after all the rolls are made and FUBARs counted.
But what form does the homebase role playing take? Well that depends on your group. Brilliant drama can come out of romance with locals (or WAAFs), rivalry with other squadrons or indeed other forces. Internal politics in the officers mess, sneaking off base without leave for all sorts of reasons, and even perceived unfairness in disciplinary proceedings. Tripp’s best friend in the crew Harry, the rear gunner and oldest crewmember (at 25) was Jamaican and he would stand up for West Indian ground crew who he perceived were being treated unfairly. The situation was complicated by his intuition. He always had a gut instinct about whether there would be a mission that day and often correctly guessed where it might be. He was right so often that some on the rest of the squadron feared he might be a spy of some sort. Somehow I feel it would be even easier to come up with entertaining homebase storylines in the relatively rich (if rationed) background of the UK, well away from the front lines than it was in Night Witches.
But if your group wants more procedural role-playing you could have a Nazi plot on home soil, for them to discover. Something like oh I don’t know … a group of Polish Paratroopers are not what they seem. In reality they are Germans, here to kill Churchill. (An Eagle just landed to give me that idea…) Or if the sortie rolls don’t go well you could have them downed behind enemy lines, working their way back to Blighty. Though that might actually work better as a solo game. . .
I should finish by saying that my research for this article, such as it was, was only re-reading my “Uncle” Miles Tripp’s book The Eighth Passenger as well as watching the first three episodes of Masters of the Air, and it worth noting that there are some differences between the USAAF and the RAF missions (though not, as is implied in Masters of the Air that the RAF exclusively flew night missions). Flying fortresses, for example, had ten crew compared to the Lancaster’s seven. The technologies of the two air forces were different. The advanced US bomb sight was as closely guarded a secret as the atom bomb. Some British bomber were equipped with them, but they would be carried to those places in a locked box before each mission and taken away afterwards. Bomb Aimers are called Bombardiers in the USAAF, and of course the ranks are different – most British aircrew were non-commisioned, made up to only to the rank of Sergeant if flying.
I am not sure, after writing this, if I even want a bomber supplement to exist for War Stories, but if it did there would be a wealth of material to work into it.
One of the things that I noticed when I first read Coriolis was the table that set out chances of success with different numbers of dice in your pool. According to the table, roll one die and you have 17% chance of success. (Let’s ignore for the moment the ridiculous concept of “partial” success, which appears only in only Coriolis – in my games one 6 is s success. That is all you need. With ten dice in your pool (lets imagine a 5 in your stat, 3 in your skill and a couple of business dice from your gear), the chance of success with your first roll is 84%. Which might not seem much, but according to the table if you push your roll you have 96% chance of success.
Yes, yes I have heard all the stories of people rolling and pushing 12 dice or more and not getting a single six, but that my friend, is a thing called probability.
Obviously these tables of probabiltity, which feature in all the books have limited value. The one in Coriolis for example takes no account of preparatory prayer, which grants an extra die or two on the pushed roll. Indeed, I think the table in Coriolis (at least in my early printing) is actually wrong – if I recall correctly this version of the table assumed that 1s would not be re-rolled, and so the chances of success on a pushed roll are slightly lower than they should be. Indeed turning to a more recent version of the year Zero Engine, Veasen, we can see that, though the probabilities for the first roll are the same, the chances of success on a pushed roll are much improved. In Coriolis the table states you have a 29% chance of a success on a single pushed die. Vaesen says it is 31%. And the chance of success on 10 pushed dice rises a point to 97%.
But recently, in Twilight 2000 and Bladerunner, Free League have moved away from d6 dice pool. Instead a player generally roles two dice – each one between varying between a d6 and a d12. The eight sided dice gives you a success of a six seven or eight. The d10 not only offer successes on everything abouve a six but roll a ten and you get two successes. The d12 offers two successes on 10, 11 and 12. How does all this change the odds?
When we are talking about basic chances of success, not much changes. Let’s look at the tables. Of course the odds on a single d6 remain the same, but what does 2d12 give you? Well that gives you 82% chance of success on single roll and 97% on a pushed roll. That pushed roll is the same as rolling 10d6, but the unpushed roll gives you a slightly lower probability of success.
That might sound ‘almost exactly the same but not quite as good as rolling 10d6’ but having played in games of Twilight2000 and Bladerunner, I think I have rolled 2d12 a lot more often (proportionately) than I have rolled 10d6. Think about it – even if you are rolling five dice for your attribute, you rarely roll five dice for skills – yes you might get one or two more for gear, but its a stretch to roll ten dice.
With the stepped dice system, it is possible to end up rolling just one dice – indeed its a lot more likely that with a d6 pool. Unless you are really wrecked in, say, Forbidden Lands you will be rolling 2d6 at least, because that’s the minimum attribute you can have. In the stepped die system, it is possible to have an attribute of just d6. But because one attribute dice could be a d12, you chances are not that bad – 17% as usual for a d6, but of course a d10 gets you a 50/50 chance, and a d12, 58%. And that’s before you push the roll. Then the chance of success on a single d12 goes up to 82%.
But there is another effect of the stepped die system. While you can end up rolling just one die – you can’t roll any more than 2d12. In the d6 dice pool version, even though the table only goes up to 10d6, a player can end up rolling more than 10. Not often as I have already said, though certain games, like Alien, make that a more likely possibility. If you modify your roll, for example, by getting help from fellow PCs, you might well add 3d6 to your roll. Add that to, say, five in an attribute, two in a skill, and another two from your tools, and you are rolling 12 dice. In the stepped dice system, let say the equivalent o that attribute is A, or a d12, and your midlevel skill is C, so a d8. Your equipment generally gets you +1 in the stepped die titles, and what that does is boost your d8 one step to a d10. Now your three friends offer to help, each helping PC gives you a +1, but that’s one step, not an extra die. You are already at d12 on one die and now at d10 on the other, so the only help you can take is one step putting the d10 put to a d12. In Twilight 2000 you can add ammo dice to shooting rolls, but other than that, 2d12 is as good as to gets.
I want to conclude this piece with what I think might be the one real disadvantage of the stepped die system, but before I do that I want to explore what the slightly reduced range of possibility (rather than probability) means for character skills. Around our table, I have not noticed very much skill inflation, people spend most of their XP on talents. But the most dice you can have in a skill is five. And the fewest is none at all. Overall there they’re a six ranks of skill. In the dice pool games there are only five. The four dice steps and of course none. The increased chance of success going up one rank from zero to one is the same in both systems. But what is the difference in going from 1 to 2?
Ignoring your attribute for a moment, and pushing, the two dice in the old system give you a 31% chance of success, but a d8 in the stepped system gives 38%. If you are a player, you might be going “woo hoo” but be warned – if you get your skill all the way up to grade A or d12, that only offers you 58% chance of success, while five dice get you 60% in the old system. On the other hand you do spend more XP getting there. On the other other hand (three hands? Are we playing Mutant Year Zero?) you do have that problem of bonuses from equipment and help being stymied, the more competent you are.
In Bladerunner you do also have an advantage/disadvantage mechanic, which I guess you could apply to a situation like two more PCs than you need offered help: but that opens up another can of worms.
That is about the consequences of pushed rolls. It doesn’t apply to every game, but a number have consequences based upon rolling ones, including the two stepped die games. If you are are only rolling two dice, then your chances of rolling a one, are much reduced. Given that rolling a one is generally a BAD THING, this might be a feature players like. But for game designers it takes away the potential for using those ones in interesting ways. Variety that makes a horror game like Alien feel very different from the gritty, detailed combat of Forbidden Lands. It steals a tool from the designer’s kit. And that’s the reason I don’t like the stepped die system as much as the original dice pool.
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https://youtu.be/zdDd3S7gQ7w On the Effekt podcast, we don’t do reviews. We tell you about the games we like, because we play those games. We occasionally tell you about what we don’t like about the games we play. But we tell you this things because we play the games. If we were a review podcast we’d have […]
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STOP PRESS! I just heard the first batch of the Starter PDF is coming though, so from now on, you will be able to read along with me 🙂 Continuing my “Where I read…” the starter PDF does not include full rules for character creation, but rather gives readers a guided tour of what makes […]
Today, pre-orders for Free League’s new Alien RPG go live. To inspire you to buy it, I will start a “Where I read…” going through the Starter PDF that will be free to everyone who pre-orders. (Yes, I know I haven’t finished the Where I Read … Liminal, but I will return to that when […]
This is a transcript of my piece in Episode 97 of our podcast, on The Emissaries. It reveals spoilers for the Mercy of the Icons campaign, if you are a player and don’t want to be spoiled, read no further. If you can level one criticism at the Core book in Coriolis, it’s that it […]
Update I published this early because of a discussion on Facebook, and to get it out quickly, I didn’t do my usual check through the “primary source” – the published books. Preparing this for recording, I have now added references in. Zeni is uncommon on Sadaal. The language is growing slowly on Bahram, but the […]
I am sorry, this read-through is taking longer than I expected. Now however, I am laid up with my foot elevated after a really bad ankle twisting, so I have no excuse not to get on with it. I am going to get tired of saying this, but chapter four begins with more gorgeous art: […]
Who are the Red Riders? Elves of course, I knew that. And I remembered, from my initial read through of the books, something about them protecting the ruby red crystals that were elf souls, denuded of flesh. But that’s all. So when our party were attacked by a corrupted, undead elf, and recovered her blackened […]
Continuing my read though of the Liminal PDF, I continue to be impressed by the art. Some of it is photographic, heavily digitally manipulated, but even that shows up the paucity of really great creativity in the third edition of Unknown Armies. While I love that game, and value the effort of crowdsource the art, […]
We are introduced to a crew with a group portrait. One of them is, I think, Ygraine from chapter one. There’s a tall lumberjack with glowing eyes who, I guess, will be a werewolf, and a wizard in training and a former police officer. I think we’ll meet all four in examples thoughout the book. […]
Some GMs may be wary of random encounter tables, worried that they will throw up something that makes no sense within the developing story. I hope this shared experience will convince you to try creating story entirely at random. It’s what I did last November. Which was an emergency situation: I had not been planning […]
It’s time for another “where I read…” series. I have a a number of books, games I am unlikely to find the opportunity to play anytime soon, that I need to discipline myself to read and absorb. In the coming months, look forward to read-throughs of Vampire V and Phoenix Dawn Command, among others. Right […]
Apropos of nothing in particular, definitely not thinking about a Year Zero hack 😉 I am looking at the slight differences between attributes and skills in the across the range of Year Zero games. There are few, but not insignificant changes in the Attributes. While you might expect differences across genres, I was at first […]
People listening to our most recent Coriolis Actual Play may have picked up on a few “references” – from a start, and a bad guy, inspired by the movie The Bad Batch, through scavengers modelled after Steptoe and Son (which our American listeners may know better as Sanford and Son) to a wrecked ship absolutely […]
A few weeks ago after episode 2.6 we ran a poll (or three) on whether we should play (and record) Coriolis or Forbidden Lands. We don’t play on line, and we don’t get together often, less than once a month, to play around a table. Given that we have traditionally taken turns GMing, it means […]
I got my copy of Emissary Lost, the first part of The Mercy of the Icons campaign today. And I am boyishly excited at seeing my name in print – not only as a KS backer, but (with my co-host Dave) on the main credits page. Find out why (at least why I think we’re […]
From today, Forbidden Lands can be ordered from Fria Ligan, Modiphius or DriveThru . I was a Kickstarter backer and so have had early drafts, completed PDF’s and now the physical product for a little while, so I think it is worth publishing a review for those considering purchasing it. This is based upon experience of playing, […]
No podcast this week as we are preparing for #DragonMeet ~PodcastZone tomorrow Saturday 1 December. But in the place of our dulcet tones, a quickly made video of my Forbidden Lands unboxing. There may be other boxing videos out there (I was one of the last of the Kickstarter backers to get their copy, earlier […]
Last episode, we speculated that the Draconites knew what dreadful racists the Zenithian Hegemony would become and set themselves up to defeat it. So I am going though the books looking for evidence of the nazi-punching heroes I hope the Draconites will turn out be. If we paint the Hegemonists as the dark uniformed Imperial […]
We had “the best three days of gaming” again last weekend. Not a convention, just four of us renting a cottage in the countryside and playing games, with the occasional break for a meal or a walk. It went well enough that we are already discussing which weekend we will be booking the same cottage […]
I am going to say it straight. The Zenithian Hegemony are the bad guys. The Syndicate are actual criminals of course, but the Hegemony are the evil empire. I put it to you, that this is the faction you should love to hate. The Zenithian Hegemony is Imperialism writ large. No, more than that. The […]
You have heard me grumble about the Reputation and Manipulation mechanics in Coriolis. My biggest gripe, as I explained in season 1 episode 17, is the potential for two starting characters to have a modifier of plus or minus six on manipulation rolls. A few weeks ago, I played the QuickStart for the new Expanse […]
The potential spoilers come think and fast in the last three chapters of the Gamemasters’ Guide. And so, we come to the last instalment of my “Where I Read…” There is hardly anything I can say about the artefacts chapter without spoiling anything. Eighteen artefacts are described, potential sites of discovery suggested in each description. […]
At the end of this chapter there are lists of normal animals, from Bear to Crocodile, and Dog to Scorpion. I am a bit disappointed that there are not more exotic mounts – the lists include only Horse and Warhorse as obvious mounts. I hope we might get some more when the cards are published. […]
This is a meaty chapter, but already I find it more accessible than the earlier history. Why? Because it’s about geography. It starts with a double page spread, showing a version of the map with labels indicating the distribution of kin. We learn that there is a notional division between East and West, with most […]
Are the gods of Forbidden Lands real within this world? Or are they just old stories, told and retold until they take of different meanings, different names even? We know the icons of the Third Horizon in Coriolis are real, because if you pray to them you are rewarded with an increased chance of success. […]
Up front, I have to admit, I hate chronologies. Despite working in heritage for … wow … for a long time, I am not a fan of “this happened and then this happened”. In fact, at school I much preferred Geography to History. And I’m remembering that I have already said pretty much is same […]
This has to be one of the best opening chapters to a GMs book (or nowadays, GMs section) that I have ever read. Let me tell you what I particularly like. First of all the authors take a leaf out of Powered by the Apocalypse games and set out the Principles of the Game, from […]
I am going come right out and say this. I love creating Forbidden Lands characters randomly. Before moving on to read the GMs’ Guide, I am reading the first half of the Legends and Adventurers booklet. Only the first half mind you, I will return to read about random legends and monster creation after I […]
I won’t have much to say on this final chapter in the Players Handbook, because it’s very few sentences and many tables. I do like the very simple availability rule. If something is uncommon, you need to get a four or above on a d6 to find it for sale. If it’s rare, you need […]
You might argue that a game that is all about hex-crawling doesn’t need to include rules about building a base. But if you live long enough, you may end up in a similar situation to many players of first edition AD&D: lots of gold, and nothing to spend it on. In AD&D the gap between […]
There was a moment of release, I think some time in 1980, when we were let out of the Dungeon. To be honest I can’t recall what system it was, it may have been Runequest, but it might just as well have been AD&D. I am sure the idea of open-world adventuring (the idea, not […]
Magic users, in any system, change reality by force of will. Philosophically then, I have a problem with any RPG magic system where failure = no effect. That is not a problem I have with Magic in Forbidden Lands. Magic user’s spells always succeed, the only question is, at what cost? There are two potential […]
Hoo boy, this took some time. Not just to read through and understand, but also to reflect on. The reflection has mostly been about genre, what games like this do to emulate genre, what the rules tell you about the sort of play experience you should expect, and the stories you will tell. What prompted […]
Dave’s kind words in our #RPGaDay podcast on the 22nd about the card based game I ran a few years ago, made me go to the the darkest depths of my hard drive to see if I could find the files. I’d remembered I had laid them out in Pages, back when it was good. […]
This post was delayed, not because the chapter is long, but because I am a busy man. Work and study and, yesterday, gaming took me away from the keyboard. We learned in chapter two that it costs fewer XP to buy or upgrade Talents than it does to buy or upgrade skills. I am down […]
The skills chapter also offers the meat of the rules, if only because characters using their skills is the meat of a game like this. Another adaptation of the Year Zero Engine, this returns to its roots, and in doing so reinforces the idea that it’s a post-fantasy-apocalyptic survival game. The push mechanic, like the […]
The first thing that strikes me on reading the chapter on character generation is a similarity with Symbaroum – humans are portrayed as the invaders. When I started playing these games, the fantasy trope was of humankind threatened by the “other” be it dark Lords, orcish hordes or whatever. There may be something clever to […]
I am going to try another “Where I read…”, to force myself to go through the two new PDFs I just got from Fria Ligan. As a Kickstarter backer I got earlier alpha PDFs, which I thought I’d read enough to try a game. That I was floundering during the session proves it’s different enough […]
For Icon worshipers across the horizon, including the Church of the Icons and the Order of the Pariah, it is traditional to cremate the dead, except those revered as saints. Their holy bodies are preserved so that their spirits may continue to find a way to the horizon and continue their good work. One of […]
I think there is only a full colour version of the official ship sheet out there, so I took it apart in Acrobat DC, removed the ink-sucking space background and drop shadows, replaced the Coriolis logo with a black version, and of course, made it form-fillable. I left the little crew icons in colour. Please […]
I am guilty of taking the Church of the Icons for granted. And I think that is because for most of us, our experience of churches is of something that has always been there, or at least been around for centuries. Whether for not you go to church, the building itself is a landmark in […]
If there is a problem with the rich background of Coriolis it is GM paralysis. Almost every paragraph is a really cool adventure seed, but we know that some paragraphs will be expanded upon in future publications. For example, take the Emissaries. If you only ever read the core book, the Emissaries could be a […]
When we went to Sweden to chat with the guys from Fria Ligan, they told us that they hadn’t always been as good at running Kickstarters as they are now. They mentioned that they had been a little too ambitious setting stretch-goals for the Swedish language edition of Coriolis. In particular they mentioned that they […]
A discussion in G+ prompted me to share this talent, which featured back in an early episode of The Coriolis Effect, but never saw publication on this blog. That is partly because it’s never been play-tested. I wrote it just in case a player might want to be an atheist. So far, no-one has. So […]
What do you think is the worst rule in Coriolis? It’s an elegant system, and frankly I don’t think there is much wrong with it. But I do have a problem with Reputation. And this bit in particular: Your Reputation score and that of your opponent will affect your MANIPULATION roll. If yours is higher, […]
My “where I read” Unknown Armies has taken a necessary hiatus while I ran a short campaign. It turns out that running UA takes a lot more work between sessions than I am used to. Normal service will be shortly. In the meantime though I wanted to make a short post about how the campaign […]
The English language alpha release of Forbidden Lands was released to Kickstarter backers this week and I know there are plenty of people wanting to take it out for a test drive. And of course creating a character is like trying on new clothes. So, I’ve tried to make that a pret et porter experience […]
This chapter of the GM’s book looks at the character the GM controls, pressing home the idea that this is a game about people and relationships, , not about things. That idea is apparent even in the later section on organisations. None of them a faceless behemoths with anonymous black-clad agents (actually, I guess they […]
I’ve just finished playing in a great D&D 5th Edition campaign. I joined a local group a couple of years back to play Feng Shui 2. One of the group’s number was away at the time, but when he returned and we’d finished the Feng Shui, he volunteered to run an campaign. The setting was […]
It’s been a while since I last posted on this Where I Read …, partly because I’ve been busy doing other stuff, but also because my GMing priorities changed. We ran the character creation session for this game a few months ago, with the intention of getting into a campaign and completing it before Christmas. […]
A month ago, I sat down in our hired cottage, and started writing this. I never quite finished it. Or rather, I did finish it eventually, but never actually posted it. So, to round out the year, I’m putting it on-line just over a month late. A week before DragonMeet, I’m at a smallest “convention” […]
A while back, we offered listeners of the Coriolis Effect a chance to shape the show in 2018 by answering some questions in a simple on-line survey. Given that 2018 is just a few days away, I have closed the survey and started to to look at the results. First of all we asked listeners […]
Well, it’s taken me most of the week to recover from Dragonmeet. And I needed some time to do the work I am paid for, and to catch up on my PhD study, which has taken the hit for most of time I dedicated to gaming in November. (November involved a lot a gaming related […]
This isn’t an RPG. So why am I covering it on my RPG blog? Well, I can think of two reasons: firstly, it’s MY blog, so I can post whatever I like (and I like this); secondly, it’s a wonderful game that might well have come from, or be found in, your RPG world. Check […]
Click Here to take survey We’ve been publishing The Coriolis Effect podcast since May, and it quickly became more successful than we ever imagined. Thanks to you, all our lovely listeners. To be honest we bashed that first episode together quickly to see if there was any interest. And when it turned out there was interest, […]
First impressions. I’m confused. When the beta version dropped my weekly group were keen to take part in the play test. So we postponed the start of the Unkown Armies campaign and allocated a few sessions to this. Having just made my players devote a whole session to a UA cabal creations, I didn’t want to […]
Again, I’m somewhat puzzled over the allocation of chapters between books one and two. The content of this chapter, for example, seems mostly aimed at players rather than the GM, and yet it finds itself in the GM’s volume. A player might ask, “why do I even need a mechanic for objectives?” Indeed, in many […]
The natives of Nhamada are a proud but primitive race, which Foundation anthropologists believe are ancient humanites. Fierce warriors, perhaps bred for some long forgotten war, they organise in tribes and compete in an arcane system of inter-tribal sports and challenges. Foundation scientists have identified a unique response to trauma in the Nhamadan physiology which […]
The big RPG campaign launch since last time I looked at Kickstarter is 7th Sea: Khitai, from John Wick, the man (and company) that brought us possibly the most successful RPG Kickstarter ever last year, the relaunch of 7th Sea itself. I kicked in for that (PDF only) and the flow of books arriving in […]
The first chapter of book two, Run, is an introduction to GMing, but a more useful one than in many games. Actually that’s unfair. My perception is being bamboozled by the three book structure of this game. Lots of games have GM sections that are just as good, but they are towards the back of […]
I don’t recall if Tony rolled it randomly, or chose to come from Dabaran, but I was very happy to let him. Of course, it was a slight problem when, later in character generation, Tony and Dave decided their characters were twins, and Dave wanted his to have grown up on Karrmerruk. Obviously separated at […]
So, the big news this time is the launch yesterday of Forbidden Lands, the fantasy game combining an old school feel and the modern dice mechanics of Mutant: Year Zero (and Coriolis). It launched with a modest SEK100,000 target (very roughly £10,000) at 1pm my time, and by the time I went to bed, fans […]
The situation was ready and waiting, the adjustments from Fria Ligan’s subsequently published Hamurabi supplement made. So how did my players manage to make the story their own? Well, the first disruption had actually happened weeks ago, when I had to run an extra adventure at short note for just two of the players. To […]
This may be the meatiest chapter in the book. And I guess, in an RPG about magick, the chaper on magick deserves to be. It distinguishes between gutter magick, ritual magick, and the postmodern schools of magick that are part of the raison d’etre of the game. There eight of these schools explored, with the […]
I don’t normally write session logs, which can feel a bit “let me tell you about my character”, but yesterday’s game of Coriolis has given me plenty to think about. So I thought I might process some of that here. Yet again, it was a “at the last minute” game. Dave’s Symbaroum wasn’t ready for […]
So, we know how to create characters, and indeed how the rules work … for normal people. But you don’t want to be “normal” do you? Well actually, this game might well be one where you do – as the players set the campaign tone and objectives, it’s a flexible enough system to help normal […]
Time for another survey of what’s happening in the RPG scene on Kickstarter. Since my last post on the subject over a month ago, campaigns have come and gone, for example the well-regarded OSR SF game, Stars Without Number, funded a full colour revised edition. I also know that at least one reader of this blog […]
“What do you anticipate most for gaming in 2018?” The last RPGaDay post for 2017. My fellow The Coriolis Effect presenter, Dave, and I have a plan to respond differently if it runs again next year, which I only thought of about a week into this event. So that’s one thing we are looking forward […]
“What is an RPG genre mash-up that you would like to see?” Really, I don’t need this. I have’t gamed enough yet, in any one genre*, to be out looking to mash two genres together into something else. I doubt I ever will. That’s not to say I’m adverse to mash-ups arising naturally through play. […]
Kickstarter is a marvellous thing, which I seriously believe has brought about a Golden Age in gaming. Not everyone agrees that you should pay in advance for games, and neither should you have to. But, because some people do, everybody else gets to buy the game later, on line or in their Friendly Local Games […]
“What film/series is the biggest source of quotes for your group?” I’m fifty, most of the people I game with are around my age. I’m not saying we’ve grown out of quoting TV and film, but rather that we’ve seen so many films and TV that the quotes have almost detached themselves from their original […]
I could get all high-falutin’ here, and talk about the essential qualities players (and GMs, who are players doing a different thing) should possess, but I’m going to take a more prosaic approach. What do I put in a my bag when I go to a game? The book(s) of course, though as I write […]
“Which RPG provides the most useful resources?” Is it the core sets that provide the most useful resources? Or is it on-line services, supplements, campaigns etc? After-sales as it were? There are all sorts of ways I could answer this question, but I’m going to talk about published campaigns. And my current favourites are the […]
“What is the best way to thank your GM?” Have fun. We’re all here to have fun. A GM is playing the game as much as his or her players. So have fun and show it, let yourself go in role-play. Afterwards tell your GM about your favourite moment. Tell them how it made you […]
“Share a PWYW RPG publisher who should be charging more”* I’m not going to presume to advise any publisher upon their business model. But if a mate came an asked me how to go about pricing their first RPG thing, I don’t think I’d suggest Pay What You Want. One publisher that uses the model, […]
Please, please, please, graphic designers and layout artists (or rather, I suspect, commissioning editors), will you just STOP faffing about with overly fussy layout? Just because the costs of full colour production have come down to meet the price that RPG geeks seem willing to pay for books, it doesn’t mean we need to have colour […]
I really don’t like this question, “Which RPGs Are The Easiest For You To Run?” The ones I run of course. There are more RPGs out there than I could possibly run or even play. But if they look difficult to run, then I rarely even try. And if I do try, and they are […]
Which RPG does the most with fewest words? My real answer to this is: “let’s pretend”, roleplaying in its purest form. Two words = everything a child can imagine. Beat that, Lady Blackbird. But the problem comes when two children imagine different things: “BANG BANG! I shot you, you’re dead!” “No I’m not! You missed!” […]
I don’t. I like the new shiny, and I’m fifty, my home is full of stuff – I don’t need to go routing about for stuff I didn’t buy in the past… erm, except for one or two boardgames. I missed out of the last copies in the shop of Fury of Dracula and when […]
Day 19: Which RPG features the best writing? How do you define “best” writing? Best writing in a technical manual sense, explaining how to use the rules (the tools of roleplaying) as clearly as possible? That might throw up a “best” RPG that was clear and simple, short, and well laid out too possibly, but […]
Day 18: Which RPG have you played most in your life? Easy. Traveller. Oh? You want more? OK I can’t quite remember, but I think it was the second RPG I ever played. (Runequest might have pipped it to the post, but I don’t think so.) I do remember that first time creating a character, […]
I’m struggling to remember, which did I buy first? It was pretty close I bought both as cheap bundled PDFs around the same time. They were Unknown Armies (2nd edition) and Godlike. Looking back, it seems Unknown Armies pips the other to the post. Which is good, because I want to talk about Unknown Armies, […]
Day 16: Which RPG do you enjoy using as is? I’m going off-topic on this, but I guess my short answer is “pretty much all of them”. After all Fate, which yesterday I claimed as the RPG I most enjoyed adapting, s game that you play “as is” by adapting! That’s the rules. But my […]
Day 15: Which RPG do you enjoy adapting the most A lot of people seem to have a problem with Fate’s “complexity”. I don’t. I can’t claim to be a very good Fate GM, or even to have read the book cover to cover. I probably have by now, but I definitely read it in […]
Day 14: Which RPG do you prefer for open-ended campaign play? If only. If only I had the time, and some of us could have the commitment to the sort of regular session that enables a truly open-ended campaign. My first thought was “well, I wouldn’t be running it, that’s for certain”. But then, I […]
Day 13: Describe a game experience that changed how you play. It didn't go how I expected. I was running Fate. We'd created the campaign in the manner described in the book, through conversation, and had ended up with "first world war veterans vs. cannibal body-snatchers from space." The first session saw a PC death […]
Which RPG has the most inspiring interior art? I feel this year, I'm just joining a crowd. I'm writing this post a week ahead of when it is scheduled to go live, but I fear when it does it will be just one of thousands of tweets, blogs, FB posts and vlogs saying essentially the […]
I thought long and hard about this. At first I was going to say Firefly, because, well … because Firefly! But actually, why? I just dug out a piece I wrote for The Signal, the fabulous Firefly fan podcast, about the demise of the original Serenity RPG, which I have written about before in this […]
I don’t generally look for reviews. Role Playing Games are a different sort of purchase, it used to be that you’d pick up a players guide or core book because your GM says he’s going to run a campaign, or I you really want to play in the setting, and will put up with any […]
Day 8: A good RPG to play for about 10 sessions This is tough. I don't generally set out to play a game for around ten sessions. I've got into a sort of de facto "rule of three" habit: I try a game out once, for a sort of "pilot", then if that goes well […]
Day 8 What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2 hrs or less? I love the Warren. Playing Watership Down style rabbits in not new the world of RPGs, Bunnies and Burrows was one of the first games published. But the Warren is, I would argue, possibly the best Powered by the […]
Day 7 Most impactful session. Well, how do you define impact? Here's how I'll define it: a session that I remember, not for rolling a crit at the right time, or a fumble at the wrong one, but for roleplaying. We were playing Serenity, the first attempt at a game set in the 'Verse of […]
Day 6 You can game every day for a week. Describe what you’d do. We’ve got something like this planned. It came about after my 50th birthday earlier this year. I’d rented a big old house, and had different friend and family to stay each night of the weekend. The Friday night was Gaming night, […]
I've played more D&D in the last calendar year than I have ever played in my whole life. I ought to clarify. D&D was my first RPG. I bought the GW boxed edition back in 1978, I think during the summer holidays before going to secondary school. But my first attempt at playing it was […]
I follow my favourite publishers, of course – and those are (currently) Pelgrane Press, Evil Hat, Chaosium, Fria Ligan, Modiphius and (to a lesser extent) Pinnacle – but that doesn’t help me find the truly new RPGs, really. While I’m not a fan of separating out the whole “indy” scene (lets face it, apart from […]
I think this is an easy one to answer too, because I've had an idea knocking about in my head for a year or two, and if someone doesn't do it soon, I might have to. It's not a new idea idea at all. It's a licence I have in mind, and as a game […]
This is so easy. No question, no doubt. What published RPG do I wish I was playing right now? Nights Black Agents, and more specifically, The Dracula Dossier, the amazing improvised campaign from Ken Hite and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. I must make an admission here, for years I ignored Nights Black Agents, spurned and despised it […]
This is the first in a regular series of posts where I survey Kickstarter (to begin with – other crowd-sourcing sites might also be included in future posts) to pull out what’s happening in the tabletop RPG sector. Kickstarter has contributed to a golden age for roleplayers, enabling translations foreign language games like current fave […]
I’m not sure quite what the purpose of this chapter is, apart from to introduce the next couple of chapters to players. It starts with a rehearsal of what we read in Chapter 1: that behind the “normalcy” of our crowdsourced reality is another weirder one, but it firmly makes us, society, humanity, whatever, responsible […]
We know how this chapter normally works – explaining initiative, to-hit rolls, damage and healing first. Then other ways to get hurt, and maybe at the end a couple of paragraphs on social conflict, assuming that wasn’t covered in the skills chapter under Persuasion… But that ain’t how this game rolls, oh no. The first section […]
As I mentioned in my last post on the subject, the process of character creation in Unknown Armies is a group activity, led by the GM. So obviously (if somewhat annoyingly), that process is detailed in the GM’s book, Run, rather than the book sold as everything players need to know (harrumph). Therefore I’ve jumped […]
There is much to love about character creation in Unknown Armies. It is both structured and freeform, it can create anything from a suburban housewife to a god, it can create a god that is a suburban housewife, or the god of suburbia, is you so choose. It can create modern-day magic users that are […]
As I said, I’m going to take these books slow, chapter by chapter, writing a post for each. The first chapter is called Go. As the introductory chapter, it of course kicks off with a what is roleplaying section. Like many games it uses a percentile dice system, and suggest where newbies might find them. […]
Yes, you’ve seen this before. But this is a slightly extended version, written for the Coriolis Effect podcast. It extends the description of Samar, introduces another character, Alnadhl, and has a short paragraph about how the location might be used in play. Life on broad ship is dirty and restricted. Water is a carefully rationed […]
Over a series of posts, I’m going to be exploring the new edition of Unknown Armies. Its a game I’ve wanted to run for a long time, and when the third edition was Kickstarted, I was an eager backer, vacillating between digital and expensive Deluxe printed editions as my financial commitments waxed and waned. In […]
We had a couple of requests after our podcast for a transcript of the piece. So here it is: Ijma’urf One of the things I love about the setting of The Third Horizon is that it doesn’t have one overarching government, no Alliance, no Federation, no Empire, evil or otherwise. The clash of cultures, Firstcome […]
We were generating characters for Coriolis, and Andy wanted to be a Humanite. I think what attracted him was the idea of having a low reputation, rather than the extra talent Humanites get, but of course getting to chose an extra, humanite specific talent was quite exciting. As the character took shape, Andy’s hopes for […]
I’ve taken Fria Ligan’s printer friendly two sided version of the character sheet, and added fields to it using Acrobat DC. Its my first time doing this, so please do feedback any errors I’ve made, or improvements I could change in the comments. update There is now a form-fillable Ship Sheet also.
Well, the Coriolis Effect pilot episode was successful, and I see it’s brought visitors to this blog. The problem is, despite having pretentions towards being some sort of exciting public facing RPG magazine, it turned out to be a little backwater of the internet, where I threw a little stuff that I thought might be […]
Life on broad ship is dirty and restricted. Water is a carefully rationed resource on board. After weeks in space, and considerable time in stasis during portal jumps, what crews most want is a bath. So most spaceports have a Hamam or bathhouse, either within the spaceport itself, or very nearby. Samar’s Hamam is typical […]
My mate Dave was coming to the end of running his SOIAF campaign, and was going on and on about how he’d Kicked in on Coriolis, and how brilliant it was. As the Kickstarter campaign closed I foolishly replied, saying something like “I suppose I should get the PDF then” expecting that’s what we would […]
Well time flies doesn’t it? And I’ve had my head down all week, totally missing the start of RPGaDay, the hashtag campaign created by David Chapman, to celebrate August and Gen Con happening and I guess to raise the profile of RPGs generally within the Twittersphere. Normally I tweet a line or two and I […]
I was a relative latecomer to Legend of the Five Rings (L5R). It came on the scene in 1995, when my roleplaying was limited to the very occasional game of Traveller, and a brief flirtation with Mage. And back then, L5R was just a Collectable Card Game (CCG). Back then I had a very low opinion […]