The Knight’s Dream by Antonio de Pereda via Wikipedia

Well, she’s at it again.  I don’t know if it was something she ate, or our recent binge on paranoid paranormal programming (X-Files, I’m looking at you), or the fact that I won’t shut up about Intwischa’s story-rich run through a Marvel Heroic Role Playing (MHRP) campaign; in all likelihood, it’s a nerdy cocktail of all three stimuli.

No matter the source, however, my wife had another dream this morning that made me stop cooking breakfast and say “Hold on, let me write this down.”  (For details on the first occurrence of this phenomenon, check out the link at the end of this post.)  This time, her subconscious was kind enough to help me flesh out some gripping details for a story that I haven’t even got to telling yet.

That is, until today.

The Background

Our current MHRP campaign focuses intently on the nature of superpowers, and in our game world there are only two sources: sorcery and a super soldier virus.  Instead of the Allied scientists using their experiments to give the world Captain America, our alternate timeline saw the rise of super soldiers as a result of Nazi attempts at genetic engineering.  The destruction of the Third Reich’s laboratories that housed these experiments during the Allied invasion of Germany released this insidious genetic material into the general public, where it mutated and spread like a virus.  Any “supers” in our current campaign, then, are individuals for whom this dormant gene has been activated and created in them inhuman abilities.

The Dream Sequence

In my wife’s dream, she was a single mother who managed to hide her latent power of invisibility while raising her young son. However, her son manifested a multitude of powers and quickly drew the attention of local super villains who found his talents ‘very useful.’  Soon, they were both fleeing through a city under siege as buildings collapsed and cars were crushed all around them.  Pursuing them through the streets was a man ‘with wings, kind of like Hawkman’ and a ‘glowing scepter, that he could use to control metal.’  His hair was long and blonde, much like a certain Asgardian’s.

They ran as fast as they could, but the villain was relentless.  In the end, however, the mother and child sought refuge in the offices of a scientist who created costumes and tools for superheroes, and evaded their pursuers.

The Connection

As we’ve been fleshing out the background of our modern MHRP setting, it seemed only natural that one of the main villains would have ties to that evil ideology of World War II.  So as the need for a ‘marquis’ nemesis for my character arose, I quickly created a neo-Nazi super villain who uses his invulnerability to further the Third Reich’s grotesque goals.  I hadn’t sketched him out though, or statted him up; all I really had was this brief bio, and a name: Iron Eagle.

Listening to my wife describe her dream, I realized that her flying assailant was a near-perfect match for my faceless villain.  Iron Eagle seems like a fine title for  a flying, metal-manipulating menace with otherworldly tech and an Aryan hairdo.

There’s another incidental connection to our MHRP universe lodged here in this dream.  Our very first venture into this alternate universe involved our heroes guiding a young girl with divine powers through a wasted landscape besieged by alien invaders. Now, none of our characters were single mothers and we were rescuing a daughter and not a son, but the parallels between these two threads are hard to miss.

The New Threat

The more I’ve thought about Iron Eagle, the more his look has evolved into a strange amalgam of Angel/Archangel, Doctor Doom, and Magneto.  His powers  follow along these lines as well.

IRON EAGLE (Identity Unknown)

Affiliations: Solo d10, Buddy d6, Team d8

Distinctions: Wanted Terrorist, Mutant Supremacist, Magnetic Personality

Limit: Overzealous. Shutdown any Engineered Evil power to add d6 to the doom pool. Recover this power by activating an opportunity.

The Iron Scepter (Power Set)

Concussive Blasts d10, Energy Weapon d10, Transmutation d10, Superhuman Strength d10,

SFX: Area Attack: Add a d6 and keep an additional effect die for each additional target.

SFX: Collateral Damage. Step back the highest die in the pool to add d6 to an attack action. Add the highest-rolling die to the doom pool before calculating the total.

Limit: Gear: Shut down the Iron Scepter and step up or add d6 to the to the doom pool.  Spend a d6 from the doom pool to recover.

Specialties

Menace Master d10, Combat Master d10, Crime Master d10, Science Expert d8, Tech Expert d8

Related Posts

What Games May Come: A Dream-Inspired RPG Moment

First Impressions of Marvel Heroic Role Playing

Skill Challenges for Marvel Heroic Role Playing

FAIL by amboo who? via Flickr

So it’s been four months since I shared some gaming resolutions I intended to keep in this current year.  After a completely unintended hiatus in posting, as one busy week at work turned into six and my free time disappeared like scotch at a Cabin Trip, I took some time this week to take stock of the progress I’ve made on these resolutions thus far.

Just to save you the trouble of having to link to that post at the bottom of this page, let me review them for you right here:

• Try New Systems
• Explore New Themes
• Draw More

Try New Systems

Right out of the gate, I’m getting a “C” on my resolution report card.  I have been trying new systems; Spirit of the Century, Marvel Heroic Role Playing, and Traveller by name.  The group consensus on the Marvel game especially has been overwhelmingly positive- just in time for the publisher to announce they’re done supporting the system (see below).  And the Traveller character creation system, which you’re certain to hear more about next week, is almost like a game in and of itself.  After completing the process collectively last night, we almost decided to just launch into another round of PC generation rather than play the heroes we’d just created.  It was a blast!

The average grade assigned above, however, is due to my failure to try the new systems I resolved back in January to try: A Song of Ice & Fire RPG, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Malifaux/Into the Breach.  If I’m being honest, I don’t even own the books for any of these systems.  I do have a goodly number of models, beautifully built and half painted, that will form Malifaux crews this summer.  As yet, however, I have little to no knowledge of the rules set that governs them.  At least, between Matt and I, we’ll have some awesome scenery to set our models up on, even if none of us know what they can do once they’re there!

Explore New Themes

I think this resolution is going to get a “B-” right now.  Our recent Savage Worlds Deluxe campaign was pretty successful, and saw the first time our group has explored a horror-themed setting.  The dark mood and darker threats resulted in multiple deaths, mostly of PC’s family members, and two party members suffering heart attacks.  (That would be the characters, not the players.)

Another theme I’ve explored personally in several of our latest endeavors is playing different types of female characters.  I’ve written in the past about our group’s past efforts at this cross-casting, and I’ve made an effort this year to delve into some other female character archetypes.  Previous PCs have played the seductive temptress and the nurturing protector; this winter I added a “mama bear” character, followed by an independent career-minded mutant.  Exploring this particular theme has made these games fresh and new for me, as I’ve had the opportunity to tell some stories that I might never have found otherwise.

The “minus” on the “B-” above is (once again) from a failure on my part to explore the specific themes I detailed in my original resolution post: a winter-themed game, and an evil character.  I was hoping that the winter months might lend themselves to the first, we ended up in a distant jungle setting and a wooded autumn world instead.  And while I got to run a doozie of a wicked NPC for our Savage Worlds campaign, complete with fell powers and deep-rooted betrayal, it was only a taste of what playing an evil PC would be like.

Draw More

I don’t even get a grade here, just a big fat “Incomplete.”  I sketched the head of one character during a company meeting, and started to design a starship for our Traveller campaign but only ended up with a vague outline.  In short, I’m really sucking it up.

What I have done for at least one character, who’ll be getting a feature article of her own next week, is customize a character miniature for use in game play.  The inspiration for this model was equal parts conveniently possessing an appropriate miniature, the knowledge that she’d be appearing in the mechanically heavy D&D 4E system, and the fact that I was already knee-deep in building, sculpting, and painting Malifaux miniatures, so everything was right at hand.  I think she turned out pretty well, even if I didn’t resolve to build more character minis this year.  Hmmm… Maybe it’s not too late to change this one up.

RELATED POSTS

More RPG Resolutions for 2013

Hitting Like a Girl: A Role Playing Report Card

An OCD Game Master’s Reaction to Savage Worlds

MWP Cancels Marvel Heroic Role Playing Line

Newsboy in 1905 via Wikipedia

Bad news for those of us who enjoy Margaret Weis Productions’ Marvel Heroic Roleplay. It seems that they couldn’t justify maintaining the license, and have been forced to cancel the whole line.

“Our first event, CIVIL WAR, was successful and well received, but it didn’t garner the level of sales necessary to sustain the rest of the line.”

This is a shame, since MHRP has been one of the most interesting and innovative games I’ve tried in quite a while. The good news is that Cortex, the system upon which it’s based, is alive and well. They also recently acquired the Firefly license, so hopefully we’ll have another awesome game to look forward to from MWP.

Thanks for the heads-up Matt.

Gaspra via Wikipedia

Continuing with our recent sci-fi theme, I have three ideas for use in a game of Traveller (or other such far future RPG).  Enjoy!

Congregation of Bell (Bellites)

Though he’s been dead for over fifty years, the cult of Pliny Bell has endured, and even grown. Bell preached a gospel of purity and meditation in the hopes of contacting, and potentially becoming, one of the “Ancient Masters”. They used technological (some said psychic) devices to measure “purity” and the depth of meditation, as well as to enhance the meditative experience.

A rumor spread that the group developed psychic powers through its practices, which ensured that their reputation was tarnished throughout much of the Imperium. Due to this social pressure, most Bellites practice in secret. The exception is in the Gethi system, from which the cult spread, where they form the majority of the population.

In fact, some Bellites do develop latent psychic abilities as a side effect of their meditation, a truth that the organizations hides zealously. The even deeper, darker secret is that Pliny Bell isn’t as dead as he should be. Before his body failed, the old scientist uploaded his mind into a fantastically powerful computer on Gethi Prime. The followers meditating with his devices essentially contribute their own thoughts, memories, and neural processing power to the communal pool running Bell’s personality. Bellites in other systems also link together to house shards of Bell, which synchronize with the core personality whenever carried home.

Midas

Far out in a sparsely populated sector beyond the civilized zones, there is said to exist an asteroid known as Midas. It’s said that Midas is surrounded by a cloud of orbiting dark matter, hiding it from both scanners and visible light. Numerous tales are told of the prospectors who stumble upon this anomaly, and precariously guide their ships through the protective cloud to find within an object several kilometers wide composed of 90% gold. Some versions also claim that the surface is covered in kilometer after kilometer of alien hieroglyphs, but the gold is a constant. Tragically, these unlucky fellows invariably (and usually violently) die before they’re able to return with their mining ships.

The legend of Midas has caused no shortage of dreamers to spend years scouring the outer fringes, searching for dark matter clouds. There have even been skirmishes between bands of treasure hunters over message buoys, escape pods, and mining ship hulks thought to contain hints to the location of the the lost rock.

Poseidon

Poseidon is a dwarf planet, terraformed early in the colonization of its system. It was moved from an outer orbit to one within the Goldilocks Zone, and fitted with gravitational enhancers to create a planetoid capable of sustaining a breathable atmosphere. It remains one of the largest inhabitable masses in the sector.

Unfortunately, the Planetary Architect position was handed to a largely inexperienced man, the son of the then Governor, and a simple mathematical error caused the importation of far more water than was required. Thus, Poseidon’s surface area today remains 95% water covered. The colonial authorities, however, marketed it as a luxury planet, and its oceans are now plied by countless floating resort islands weaving a path between fish and algae farms, elevator hoses pumping water back into orbit, and slums made up of hundreds of lashed together rafts.

Even many hundreds of years after colonization, there remain pockets of frozen nitrogen and carbon monoxide under Poseidon’s crust. They have been known to come into contact with the ocean above when the rocky crust is compromised. These incidents result in an explosive out-gassing of the flash thawed ice, with catastrophic effects for any unfortunate ships above. Such events have been intentionally staged as a sort of water-based fireworks display for resort island audiences (at a safe distance of course).

Cassini Saturn Orbit Insertion by JPL via Wikipedia

In celebration of next week’s kickoff of our first Traveller campaign, today I’ve got a bunch of links for a sci-fi game. Enjoy!

To start us off, we have Shortymonster’s guest post at Stuffer Shack. Waking Up is the seed for a sci-fi game, in which the players are brought out of their cryogenic sleep into an unexpected situation. Lots of possibilities here for several plot types.

As it happens, that was my only gaming link. The rest are all real-world space news. For instance, this story about how volcanos kept early Mars warm. This could be an interesting terraforming method for budding planetary engineers.

In this article, scientists mull the possibilities of a fusion rocket. This would shorten the trip to mars from eight months to one, which would make such a trip much more feasible.

For my final link, I have Popular Mechanics’ article on how to build a starship. This cool story discusses the logistics and design considerations of sending humans on a multi-generation voyage. Great food for the imagination!

Training at the Royal Military College of Canada via Wikipedia

One of the concepts I liked in Fourth Edition D&D was the Skill Challenge. This allowed a team to pit its abilities against a non-combat problem. When done well, they facilitate using in your character features, and can let non-combat encounters scratch the dice rolling itch.

In our recent one shots, I tried porting the skill challenge idea into Marvel Heroic Roleplay. Of course, “skill challenge” is a bit of a misnomer here, since the MHRP characters can chip in with whatever abilities are at their disposal. I thought of a couple ways of doing this, but I’ve tried only one. Here’s what I came up with.

Per Character Challenge

Since I was running a oneshot, or at least that was the intent, I used the version I thought would be faster: the per-character method. Present the situation to the players, and ask each individually how they’ll contribute to the resolution. Each player describes how they intend to help, we work out consequences for success or failure, and then the player rolls against the Doom Pool.

If they succeed, we generally create some sort of one use asset usable by that character. Failure would create a temporary complication, usable against the PC. In either case, the asset or consequence is set by the Effect of the roll, and could potentially be used against the group, if appropriate.

Example

The example I tried was a survival situation. Normally, given that the characters are superheroes, I wouldn’t even bother them with this sort of pedestrian conflict. In this case, however, they were traveling with a bunch of “civilians”, so the challenge of survival became more “how do you get the civilians through the jungle?”

Bryan, playing Black Thorn, a plant controller, said that his character would command the jungle plants to create an easier path for the group. He succeeded, and created a d8 asset of “Well Rested”. Matt, whose character transformed into a large rock-man, decided that he would stay in rock form to use less resources, and knock a path through the less vegetable obstacles. Unfortunately, Matt failed his roll, so we agreed that he’d been spending so long in his non-human form that his mind was being affected, and he got a complication.

Persistant Challenge

My other idea was to essentially treat the obstacle as if it were a solo opponent, giving it a multi die “stress track”. The characters could take turns trying to overcome the problem using whatever tools they had at their disposal. The obstacle, on its turn, would attempt to cause complications, or potentially even damage.

Using this method, a character’s successful roll would “damage” the problem they faced. The GM would roll the Doom Pool for the obstacle, and successes would be applied against the PCs as appropriate. The characters overcome their problem when they eliminate its dice. If the characters are knocked out, then they suffer complications, leftover stress, or potentially even trauma as normal.

Example

Using the same survival situation, perhaps I decided that it was a 2d8 obstacle. Bryan’s Black Thorn goes first, doing 1d8 “damage” to their survival situation. Matt’s Monolith goes next, but fails to do damage. Now the challenge gets its own roll. It devotes extra dice to target the whole group, and ends up creating a d8 complication on both characters of “Dehydrated Civilians”.

When to Use This

Don’t make every problem the characters face into an all-out challenge. These are meant to be the bigger obstacles, ones that would take at least a page or two in a comic. Most things can be accomplished with the regular old roll against the Doom Pool.

An advantage of the Persistent version is that you can actually draw it out over a whole session. Keep track of the challenge’s stress track, and interleave bouts with the obstacle with other scenes. This represents an ongoing problem that the PCs face at the same time as other conflicts. For example, the survival situation could be confronted between encounters with the mutant locals.

Hope this idea will be useful. Let me know if you use it in your game!

Gloedelampe fatninger by Lysmand via Wikipedia

I always enjoy Shortymonster’s historical posts, and this time he hits on another of my interests, the Victorian Era. Not too long ago, our main campaign was Dresden Files RPG set in Victorian England, and I wrote a series of articles very broadly covering the period. Shortymonster gets into much more detail, listing some very specific points of Victorian etiquette. Not only would the ideas be useful for someone playing a Victorian character, but they also gets you in the mood for playing a game in that setting. At least, it had that effect on me.

Meanwhile, over at Gaming Ballistic, Douglas Cole links to an idea for a sandbox game. It has similarities to the game Matt ran for our Swords and Wizardry campaign. However, it adds a unique element of taking and holding land. It definitely sounds interesting.

Mary Rose – Carpentry Tools by Peter Crossman of the Mary Rose Trust via Wikipedia

RPG Booster reliably comes up with come cool projects, both original and linked, and this week was no exception. First, we have some progress on their project to produce cards summarizing spells from Pathfinder. This week, they debuted Druid Spell Cards, levels 0-2, which look awesome. These will definitely be a great resource for Pathfinder fans!

Next up, Alabast describes another GM’s project to make magnetic dungeon walls. This is a cool setup, allowing the map to be both customizable and stable, and is impressive looking too. Stuff like this makes me wish I had more time to tinker.

Keno Goose by Nazox via Wikipedia

Over at Dungeon Mastering, they’ve had a surprising amount of trouble trying to give away books. You know you can’t resist the lure of more game books! Head over and enter one (or all) of their four concurrent givaways, including this week’s prize of a softcover D&D 3.5 PHB.

Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice, otherwise known as the Stuffer Shack, they’re running their 2013 RPG Site of the Year contest. They’ve got some awesome prizes in store, so if you run a RPG site, head over and enter!

Die, Bone by Kolby Kirk via Wikipedia

Over at Gaming Ballistic recently, Douglas Cole wrote about modeling short term combat fatigue in GURPS. He did this by assigning point costs to actions, and allowing characters to recover points by taking a quick breather. This would achieve his goal of duplicating the lulls in combat as the opponents catch their breaths. This instantly made me consider how we could achieve the same effect with Charlie’s cascading dice mechanic.

Rules

Everybody gets a stamina die, maybe d4 for less fit characters like casters, d6 for more fit characters, and maybe even a d8 for those guys who just never quit. The player rolls their die along with any strenuous action: fighting, defending, running, climbing, etc. Following the usual cascading dice method, you fall down a die size whenever you roll a one.

With each die below your normal level, you take a cumulative -1 penalty to physical actions. If you fall below a d4, you’re Stunned, Shaken, or whatever condition in your system du jour represents the inability to act.

Resting

At any time, you can take your turn to rest. This restores one die level, up to your character’s maximum. You can combine this with things like drinking a potion, aiming a weapon, or other non-strenuous actions.  Also, spending a turn Stunned (or whatever) counts as a rest for recovery purposes.

Example

Fi Tor the warrior swings his mighty battle ax, rolling his d6 stamina die along with his to-hit die/dice. He hits, and rolls a six for stamina. All is good.

The foul enemy returns the attack, and our hero parries the succession of blows. Fi Tor, however, rolls his stamina die for his defense, and rolls a one. His stamina die drops to a d4, and he’s now taking a -1 penalty to his attacks (maybe his defenses too?)

Instead of attacking on his turn, Fi Tor hunkers down behind his shield to catch his breath, thus returning to his usual d6 stamina die, and removing his penalty.

Closing Thoughts

I haven’t tried this out yet, but it sounds workable. Applying the fatigue penalty to defenses seems realistic, though potentially brutal. Interestingly, this mechanic also opens up the strategy of ganging up on a powerful opponent not to damage them initially, but rather to force repeated fatigue rolls to tire them out. Thoughts?