Neverending Pretending

Put It on My Tab

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 14:54:00 -0400

Just had what I thought was an interesting insight in the difference between skill checks and saves:

With skill checks, you pay cash to get the information or narrative advancement. No success, no info/advancement
With saves, you pay credit for it. You get the information, but need to determine whether you were seen, heard, left evidence of your own, dropped or broke a piece of equipment, &c

Mörk Hammare

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 12:20:00 -0400

I hang out with some fine folks who enjoy Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay a whole bunch. Equally enthusiastic among its three editions: first, second, and fourth. When Ben Tobbit announced a new Mörk Borg-derived system called Black Power and Brimstone with a Free Quickstart, comparison to WFRP and The Old World was guaranteed to follow.

Now, many of our conversations around WFRP center around how much are folks playing WFRP the system vs. how much are folks playing WFRP the setting and how much or little the two can or should be coupled.

Many suggestions have been proffered for a system replacement for WFRP, and some of them even present settings that are more closely aligned with the Grim World of Perilous Adventure: Kriegsmesser, Warlock!, Best Left Buried, Shadow of the Demon Lord. Even Mörk Borg itself ratchets up the camp and dreariness of the most outlandish WFRP motifs. But Black Powder and Brimstone purports to offer a world closer in tone, technology, and culture to that of The Old World.

When one of my friends expressed a little dismay that if they were to go the BP&B route, they’d be “playing WFRP with a d20”. So, recognizing that Mörk Borg’s action resolution is pretty localized to one real page of rules (p. 26), I came up with a drop-in replacement that uses percentile dice and roll-under-or-equal-to, just like WFRP: Mörk Hammare (“Dark Hammer” in Swedish). And because most Mörk Borg derivatives use the same resolution, it can easily be ported to _CY_BORG, Death in Space, Pirate Borg, Frontier Scum, Cast Away, Farewell to Arms, and more.

Just Use Luck

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 08:40:00 -0400

Every game provides a mechanism to determine the success or failure of a character’s actions. Whether testing abilities, skills, saves, attacks, dodges, or senses, all these boil down to:

“Do I have better, worse, or indifferent odds of accomplishing what I’m trying to do here?”

And so, every roll in a game is a Luck roll. All that changes from situation to situation is the fictional positioning of the character (Luck favors the prepared, after all). If no roll is being made, Luck isn’t being courted. The action is either impossible or it’s a fait accompli.

I wanted this to be the heart of the way Journeyman works. The aspects of a character neither offer an inherent benefit, nor impose an inherent penalty. They merely describe the character and offer affordances for the referee in the moment to determine whether or not they affect the situation. Fezzik’s gigantism provides ample advantage when it comes to intimidating a portcullis guard, gives him even odds when wrestling a white ape of Barsoom, but would work against him if he were attempting to squeeze through a narrow cave fissure deep in the Great Underground Empire.

None of this removes the suspense of not knowing the outcome of an action, and none of it removes player or referee agency. So the next time you’re in a position to adjudicate a situation, see if you can’t reframe the action to answer a simple question: Who has Luck’s favor?

Journeyman: Reborn

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 18:30:00 -0400

After stewing on the previous incarnation of Journeyman, I decided to strip it down to the bone and build it back up to something I think is a light, extensible, and expressive framework that can support any number of settings and genres.

I had a few guiding principles. It needed:

A consistent way to resolve tasks when randomness is needed.

I wanted to avoid minigames and multiple, sometimes inconsistent, subsystems for different aspects of the game. “2d6, roll high” is an extremely simple concept to keep in mind for task resolution.

As little character quantification as possible.

I enjoy games that take a more literary approach to character design, and I wanted to see what players could come up with in an unbounded playing field.

No power bloat.

The protagonists in stories I enjoy rarely get tremendously more powerful as time goes on. Typically, they improve by getting new equipment or gaining allies. I wanted to have a game that explored that kind of growth without such a focus on increasing numbers on the character sheet.

No reliance on any dice beyond d6.

Admittedly, this is a purely stylistic stance. I collect all sorts of dice, and enjoy chucking them when I can, but I relish the simplicity of the d6 and wanted to hew close to the Traveller roots.

[I love you, too, d12, we all know you’re the perfect polyhedral die.]

So, I’ve released its new incarnation, and you can download it on my itch.io page

Introducing the Journeyman Engine

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 19:47:00 -0400

I’d like to introduce you to a homebrew system I’ve been working on recently. I call it the Journeyman Engine, and it ~~comprises elements~~ steals liberally from some of my favorite Odd Borg Hack games.

I was hoping to create a lightweight system that supported rich and flavorful character concepts with enough knobs, buttons, and levers that interacting with the world would be fun but not a burden.

Resolving risky actions

Any time your character is going to try to do something risky, you’ll roll two dice, applying any appropriate modifiers, and compare the total against a range of outcomes:

Roll	Outcome
6 or less	Failure (2 might be a Fumble)
7 - 9	Success at a cost
10 or more	Success (12 or more might be a Critical)

Die ranks

One die comes from your character’s Ability (Strength, Agility, Wits, Empathy) and one die comes from your character’s Skill. The dice you use depend on the rank of each:

Die	Ability	Skill
d4	Weak	Unskilled
d6	Average	Apprentice
d8	Strong	Journeyman
d10	Elite	Master

Example

With this, it’s easy to see that Magdalene, a stoic swordsman with weak Empathy (d4) and unskilled in Manipulation (d4) can only hope to succeed at a cost when trying to persuade the noble into acquiescing to her request. That is, at least, without aid from equipment or ficitonal positioning. Were she to supply the noble with enough wine or present the signet ring of the noble’s husband, she might get a +1 or +2 to her roll, opening up the possibility of an outright success.

Pushing a roll

Were she to fail, she could attempt to push the roll, giving her one final chance to succceed, at the expense of rolling her Ability die to see if it is reduced. On a 1 or 2, her Ability die would be degraded one step on the Dice Chain.

Dice chain

d10 -> d8 -> d6 -> d4 -> Broken!

Broken!

When an Ability reaches Broken, the character takes on a condition, appropriate to the Ability. Physical failures result in Damage while Mental failures result in Stress.

The Fae Queen’s Grief

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 11:39:00 -0400

In June of 2020 a group of folks gathered to produce and sell a book of single-spread adventures with the intention of sending proceeds to support a bail fund for protesters targeted and jailed in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

My son Lex and I wrote an adventure, and I’m releasing it now on itch as Pay-What-You-Want.

It’s a short dungeon crawl through an ancient holding taken over by mysterious verdant growth.

Family Ties - Session 0: Character Creation

Thu, 12 May 2022 19:30:00 -0400

I recently started getting more interested in Ironsworn as the engine for some solo roleplaying. But instead of running in the quasi-Medieval Ironlands setting, I wanted to try a modern urban horror game. Based on some recommendations and feedback, I chose to use the new Starforged system, just removing the starship and exploration aspects, and modifying some of the assets and tables in play.

For setting and mood, I chose the modern world of Kult: Divinity Lost ¹ and set my story in a fictionalized version of Richmond, Virginia. For the purposes of a solo game, I felt it would be best to play as a Sleeper character, slowly coming to the realization that the world around him is an illusion, and occasionally gaining glimpses past the Veil.

Some of the themes I wanted to explore in this game are:

Family duty versus personal autonomy
Fate versus self direction
The id, the ego, and the super-ego

Coupled with all of that, I’ve been binging various horror and personal drama media over the past few months that I felt certain would inform and guide some of the situations I’d run into.

I started to develop a character, Simon Brinkman, who’d be a thinker and a helper. Not too old with a few close contacts he could rely on. The idea of a large family came to mind. Many of the dramas I’ve been watching lately deal with the intrigues of family life. The phrase “the seventh son of a seventh son” tugged at me. To keep things mysterious, Simon would be the unwitting seventh son. His grandfather Llewellyn Brinkman sired six sons with his wife Miriam before she died. His father Matthew might not actually be his father… ²

For his stat spread, I gave him 1 in Edge and Iron, 2 in Shadow and Wits, and 3 in Heart. He’s always been good at finding things, so I made him a Sleuth, and he unknowingly relies on his natural Empath abilities. Soon, his Haunted nature will make itself known.

We create one Bond, his good friend Liz Tollier. She’s a resident in the ER at VCU Medical Center. Simon has known her since high school, and apart from a very brief, very awkward period of dating, they’ve maintained a strong friendship ever since. ³

The last step to getting this story started is an inciting event. In Simon’s case, it consists of two voice mails:

“Hey, Simon. It’s your dad. Say, listen. Any chance you’re free this week? There’s… there’s something I need to tell you. And it should be in person. It’s not… nothing… nothing bad, heh. Always that way, right? But best not over the phone, and certainly not on a voice mail. Call me back and let’s grab dinner. Your choice, my treat. Love you.”

“Mister Simon Brinkman? This is Sergeant Dennis Beauchamp with the Virginia State Police. This call is in regards to a Matthew Brinkman. Please call at your earliest convenience. Day or night. Thank you.”

In the next session, we’ll witness Simon’s father’s funeral, and see how he handles family he hasn’t seen in years.

Kult relies heavily on many themes and ideas found in Gnostic traditions. The world we inhabit and navigate is an illusory construct. We humans have been blindered to our own divinity, trapped in a material cage. A quasi-religious Matrix, if you will. ↩︎
Kult also explores mature topics and uses graphic imagery in its depiction of the world and the inhabitants therein. Throughout my Family Ties posts, I’ll include Content Warnings at the start should these topics and descriptions come into play. ↩︎
Since she’s an initial Bond, we’ll make her Formidable (1 box per progression), and she’ll impart a +3 to any roll where they act in concert towards something. ↩︎

What I Ran or Played in 2021

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 12:39:00 -0400

In preparation for this blog, I thought it might be wise to talk about some of the games I ran or played in 2021. The year started off strong as we were still in the throes of COVID’s first lockdown and vaccines weren’t yet available. I was playing RPGs roughly five nights a week with a good mix as GM and as player. As summer approached and the world seemed to be waking up a bit, sessions dropped to three or fewer times per week. In that time, I ran or played the following systems/settings:

Ran

UVG - One of my longest running campaigns, this group has been playing pretty steady since mid-2020. We started using FATE Accelerated, then moved to Tiny D6, before settling on my own hack of Troika! for the system.
Troika! - I ran weekly sessions for my teenager and his friends for a while. They chased an evil Sorceror across multiple spheres and got into a variety of misadventures along the way.
Mutant Year Zero - My regular Saturday evening group spent a good long while exploring the wastes around a future London and dealing with troubles and intrigues within the Ark.
Vaesen - Ran the same Saturday evening crew through the adventure included in the core rule book.
Warpstar! - Ran half a dozen sessions of A Pound of Flesh using Warpstar! as the system before it petered out.
Dungeon Crawl Classics - I ran The Portal Under the Stars as a one-shot for a group between regular sessions.
Barbarians of the Ruined Earth - This was my Tuesday group for a good spell. Trailing and dealing with a marauding sorcerous warlord and his beastly horde.
Cthulhu Deep Green - Ran a few sessions of Operation: Fulminate late in the year. We haven’t finished it yet.

Played

Call of Cthulhu - Playing in a series of playtest sessions for a friend’s new adventure/sourcebook that’s been really intriguing.
Cthulhu Dark - Joined the Miskatonic University Podcast crew in a playtest session as a teenage painter touched (or cursed) with insight into the eldritch.
Sunset Kills - A Buffyish group of high school misfits battling werewolves and a bizarre carnival.
Trophy Gold - Played Evlyn Moreau’s Where the Wheat Grows Tall over several sessions.
Electric Bastionland - Played a one-shot with the Miskatonic University Podcast crew.
Custom Year Zero Engine games - Played in a group that started off as a Knave hack running a pseudo-Bronze Age Mesopotamian world, but we were all enamored with the YZE and the GM started to craft a custom set of skills and a magic system that fit the world.
Knave - Began as an OSE adventure, we eventually switched over to Knave. The world our GM created was clever. A Westworld-style amusement planet focused on fantasy. The park had long been abandoned and the AIs governing the system had gone insane long ago. We played as autonomous hosts, still fully grounded in the make-believe world.
Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - For a few sessions this summer, when we could sit outside and socialize in person, my local group got together to run one of the Candlekeep Mysteries adventures. I played an apprentice wizard emloyed as a docent of the keep.

Welcome to Neverending Pretending

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 06:15:00 -0400

New Year, New Blog

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.” - Plato

“Now is better than never.” - The Zen of Python

I know in my work life as in my private life, I’ve caused myself a lot of suffering by overanalyzing the beginning of something. Over the course of 2020 and 2021, my RPG hobby resurrected in a big way. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two years thinking about what makes gaming fun for me and hopefully for the people at my table. I’ve spoken about a lot of it with folks in voice chats, but never properly put thought to word.

Until now.

My number one intention for this blog is to act as a repository for what I hope to be a useful resource for folks who want to tackle settings and adventures for crunchier systems in a more minimalist way.

Welcome to Neverending Pretending!