Age of Ravens: reviews

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Friday, September 15, 2017

The Sprawl: Cyberpunk Hard Moves

GIRDERS FALL, EVERYONE DIES

So they get into a face-off with a corporate kill-team on an oil rig facility. The PCs have a superior position and they "Play Hardball." They want these guys to surrender and let them enter into the undersea research station to extract a target. The roll’s successful, the enemy team stands down. Then team leader from the corp groups makes them a counter-offer. He'll transfer 60 credits (a lot) to them immediately if they turn around and leave. He tells them the research station's infected with a bioweapon; they're heading down to neutralize it. The corp team's willing to blow themselves up rather than let it get loose.

The PCs proceed to as you might say, "dick around"

They push the guy, keep asking questions, bicker among themselves on and off comms. They stall while they try to make some contact with the cut off station. They don’t disarm these guys. Eventually the PCs push the leader to offer 75 credits.

They keep dicking around.

Finally one of the players again gets in the leader dude's face --- who they haven't disarmed mind you-- and tries to Fast Talk him for more money,

"I think you've got more to offer" he says.

The guy doesn't, but he says "I do have one more thing for you."

"Oh good. What's that?"

"The thirty seconds I'm giving you to get out of here because I triggered my bomb"

WHAT’S THE SPRAWL?

We hit session nine of ten last night for our campaign of The Sprawl. I expected a different game when I first played it. I’d imagined something more abstract, operating at a broader level. After two sessions as a player, I couldn’t decide what I thought. But it stuck with me and I put it on offer when I changed campaigns earlier this year.

The Sprawl’s a weird connector between two other games I’ve been running—The Veil and Blades in the Dark. It has the setting and technology of the former and the mission structure of the latter. The Veil’s has deeper world building via characters and explores issues I’m not sure The Sprawl would handle well. Blades in the Dark has a strong building element—your gang—it’s risky but you something more permanent.

In The Sprawl you’re standing on cracking ice. You have to keep moving or you’ll go under. It emulates the ethos and energy of classic cyberpunk: CP 2020, Shadowrun, CyberSpace. Those aren’t games I dug when they came out. I played them because the group liked them, but I never picked them first. I realized that I disliked long-term games where everything could blow up in an instant. That had happened several times. I once called these nihilistic games, but I’m not sure that’s the right term.

So why would I dig The Sprawl?

THE QUICK AND DIRTY

The Sprawl uses PbtA mechanics for stories about teams of operatives carrying out missions. It has all the expected cyberpunk archetypes: Fixer, Infiltrator, Tech, Drive, Hacker, Soldier. It adds to that a few more Killer (purely focused on mayhem), Hunter (skilled at tracking down targets), Reporter (using media tools to reveal the truth), and Pusher (a media figure playing with influence). The characters have badass skills, but also potentially serious obligations hanging over them. In character creation everyone creates a corporation. These will be most of the targets and employers for the campaign. If you start with cyberware you have to figure out how you paid for it. That means a connection to a corp who might own or be hunting your chromed ass.

Generally a session works like this. The team gets offered a job. They make a roll to see what they can negotiate out of the meet with the employer (better pay, more info, knowing who actually hired them). They then move to the Legwork phase. Here players investigate and plan out their op. They can get specific info as well as two resources: Intel (spend for a roll bonus) and Gear (spend to produce equipment). The group can keep doing this as long as they like, but they risk moving the “Legwork Clock” up. Like all clocks in The Sprawl, this has six segments. Filling the Legwork clocks means alerting your target to your actions.

Eventually the team has a plan and they move to the Action Phase. This covers more specific moves-- dealing with security, hacking systems, killing folks—to carry out objectives. There’s a Mission Clock for this as well. Hitting certain levels triggers different responses. Filling the Mission Clock means everything’s gone wrong—the mission’s blown and the group has to escape.

Assuming they’ve succeeded, the players can go to get paid. This is another roll, using the number of unfilled segments in the Legwork Clock as a bonus. High rolls give you more options (like marking XP, getting paid in full, not attracting attention, not being ambushed). In between mission time will likely be devoted to repairs, medical efforts, buying new equipment & cyberware, and getting revenge.

There’s more to the game. The Sprawl uses clocks in many interesting ways throughout. It has a solid tag-based approach to cyberware and equipment that’s easy to handle and track. The hacking system’s more extensive and detailed than you might expect from a PbtA game. The Sprawl’s XP system also has striking qualities. Advances cost ten points, where many others stick with 5 XP for an advance. That increase gives the system more room to drop XP bennies throughout the game. You mark XP when you take a job, make a plan, finish a job. More importantly each playbook has a set of Directives to choose from. These give XP when your character does something specific (“When you endanger the mission for financial gain, mark XP.”)

MY GAME’S CONTEXT

I’ve run The Sprawl for my Wednesday night online gaming group. It’s five players, all of whom have been playing together for 10+ years. Most I knew from f2f groups in the 20th Century; one I still play with locally. We’ve done Mutant & Masterminds and 13th Age. They’ve also played Numenera and WotC’s Gamma World together. After The Sprawl they’re switching over to Pathfinder. Three of the five players have really only played trad games. PbtA’s a big switch for them, but they have been down for it.

I wanted to keep some continuity with our last campaign. That had been an M&M 3e supers game with a tremendously effed up world. We’d used Microscope to build the 18 month gap between this supers campaign and the ones before it. As sometimes happens, the group had gone dark with their input. For The Sprawl I jumped forward 82 years, to 2099 in the same world. But there wouldn’t be any supers. We’d leave that an open question: why had they vanished? Where had they gone? I’d let that simmer in the background. It would be a straight cyberpunk game but with slight homage to Marvel’s 2099 series (Spider Man 2099, Punisher 2099, etc) and Batman Beyond.

I’ve posted the sessions so far on YouTube. You can see the video playlist here. We used Roll20 which has an amazing automated character. It’s one of the best. I used the clocks created by Fake_Alex_Blue. They’re great. In the recording you only see the Roll20 board—we use Roll20’s video/audio feed because I continue to have major problems with that (despite being a high level paid subscriber). That means you can’t see the players. OOH neither could I as the GM. This group doesn’t use cameras so I can’t see their faces. It makes things ten times harder as you may notice if you watch any of the sessions.

LET’S GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY

I loved The Sprawl, much more than I thought I would. It does mission-driven cyberpunk better than any other game I’ve played. It’s fun, mean, frenetic, and full of interesting choices. I like the play structure, the use of resources, and the variety in the playbooks.

If you’re looking for mean, wicked, mission-based cyberpunk, look to The Sprawl. I recommend it even if you’re not a PbtA GM. It has a ton of ideas and mechanics for handling situations in dynamic ways. There’s a ton you can steal from it.

I’m glad I bought it.

THINGS I COULD HAVE DONE BETTER

1. Because of the mission structure and challenge of running when you can’t see your players, I rush through some parts of the game. It’s a group that, after ten years, still has issues of talking over one another from time to time. Players will step away from the mic or mute themselves without an indicator. Sometimes they text or mention brb, but that can get lost when I’m running. So I’m never entirely sure if someone’s actually “at the table.” That makes me tense.

2. That rush meant I didn’t get create the cyberpunk atmosphere as richly as I could have. I have some good detail bits and I had a solid vision in my head of what the world was like. But I didn’t get that across as well as I could have. At times I focused so strongly on moving the heist/job/mission forward that it ended up a more generic thriller sequence.

3. I needed to vary my GM Moves more. In the latter half of the campaign I got better about putting hard choices out there and using soft GM moves to create atmosphere. Often I fell back to a couple of defaults—putting a physical threat in place, dealing harm, and moving clocks forward. The game has other tools and options. I should have explored those further.

4. We had a strange mix of characters: Infiltrator, Pusher, Hacker, Tech…and Killer. Having one PC strongly focused on force & combat made mission choice more difficult. If they went in quiet, then the Killer often could only look menacing, losing the opportunity to use many of their moves. On the other hand, if violence broke out, it made things more difficult for the other four characters to use their talents. I’m not sure I handled that balance well. There are a couple of other “combat” archetypes with some better non-com elements. Maybe I should have steered the player more that direction.

5. I don’t think I did a great job with the Hacking rules. I often ended up short-handing those elements. The game has a rich sub-system, but I often moved the hacker to the same set of things. When I run this again, I really need to be ready to handle that better.

THINGS I’D LIKE TO SEE

1. More tools for generating missions. There’s a supplement, November Metric, but it focuses on new locales and campaign frames. I’ve mentioned elsewhere the excellent Augmented Reality. It’s a supplement every cyberpunk GM should have in their collection and great for The Sprawl. But I’d also like something more involved. Andrew Shields has done an amazing PnP “Heist Deck” for Blades in the Dark. It has detailed obstacles, treasures, and important people. I think something like that for The Sprawl would be awesome. I’d likely follow that same structure.

2. I have to go back and look again, but I’d like more support on two fronts for the non-mission parts of the game. The basic moves are smartly directed at the mission structure. I’d like some optional moves for life outside of that, though I don’t know exactly what that would look like. Moves for finding and setting up missions could be awesome. Right now the default is that someone approaches the group. I’d like to see a little more support for PC proactivity.

3. More ideas for Directives, one of the key XP generators. Several of my players hit up against these and had a difficult time. They work for players who know PbtA games and those who want to hard exploit the system. They’re also nastier and more chaos causing in other games. I wonder if something like Dungeon World’s Flags might be better or if that would just dull the edge.

END NOTATION

Again, to recap I dig The Sprawl. It’s a set of rules for a specific kind of game and it does that well. It isn’t a universal cyberpunk rpg and that’s for the better. It has a rich flavor with has tricks and tools you could steal for games like Leverage & Blades in the Dark. Or you could use those to enhance it. Good stuff.

Oh, but I didn't mention the uplifted cyber-lemur who ripped out The Pusher's eye...

Thursday, July 6, 2017

MCC, Conan, and Grimm: Play All the Play

I've had the chance to try several new-to-me rpgs recently. Here are my impressions of three I played online.

MUTANT CRAWL CLASSICS

The Mutant Crawl Classics Kickstarter pdf auspiciously arrived the same week I got to play an online session with James Walls. He ran a Waterworld-SeaQuest inspired MCC 0-level funnel as part of Lawful Good Gaming. They’re a group of GMs who put on events to support charities. Players can buy a seat by making a donation. In this case we appropriately gave money to the Ocean Conservancy.

I was super-excited to play this. I’d backed Mutant Crawl Classics purely out of my nostalgia for 1st Edition Gamma World. GW had a gonzo that we took seriously at the time. Only later did TSR make that more technicolor and cartoony. As importantly, I’d leapt at the chance to play with Walls. I follow him on G+ and he’s always posting interesting write ups of his game. His “Disney Crawl Classics” session report is amazing. It inspired me to do a Willy Wonka hack of the same adventure for RPG Geek’s VirtuaCon a couple years ago (before I’d heard of Blood in the Chocolate).

Walls set up a classic funnel with four players and three characters each. We lived in a flooded world, aboard a crashed version of the SeaQuest DSV vessel. Lord Darwinius, the Dolphin Lord, commanded the colony. It was at once appropriately gonzo and creepy. Darwinius had continually cloned his human friend, Lucas Wolenczak, to serve as aids and helpers. But he’d also genetically modified them...

Let’s just leave it at that.

We had to travel out to find ancient relics as a rite of passage. If we succeeded, we could become part of the Dolphquisition. They gave us a pseudo-automated boat ala Pirates of the Caribbean that one person figured out how to operate. Now we had a Captain! We explored and got killed, repeatedly. The conflict in the sunken Hall of Presidents against animatronic Nixon and others did many of us in. As is right and proper, I lost two of my three characters. We had an awesome end scene delivering and pitching our relic finds to Lord Darwinius.

I dig OSR games from time to time and I like good gonzo. This did both sides of the equation right. Mutant Crawl Classics isn’t that far from Dungeon Crawl Classics. In fact at the funnel level, the only real differences are cosmetic mutations and tech rolls for figuring out equipment. Once you hit first level in the full game, you manifest mutant abilities and can choose a character class.

I’ve had a chance to skim the full MCC pdf. It looks good, but I in play couldn’t easily find a couple of the basic rules. The group I played with mentioned some problems they’d seen with the mechanics, in particular the Shaman class. I checked with my local OSR-pert, Steve Sigety. He said the Shaman issue had blown up on the boards, with players finding a host of typos and errata. Some DCC basic info had been left out as well. Goodman Games has sent an email to backers saying they would be fixing some errors. But they also stated that they’d playtested thoroughly and whatever problems readers saw weren’t actual issues. That’s at least my read from the email.

Those changes have meant a push-back on the printing, though how long wasn’t clear. I think they’ll still have copies for Gen Con. Maybe?

In any case, I enjoyed Mutant Crawl Classics, though I only saw the thinnest slice of the mechanics. It isn’t a generic post-apocalyptic game. Like Gamma World it has a strong sense of place and setting, with automatons and AI divinities. That being said I suspect you’ll be able to adapt modules from GW and The Mutant Epoch, another one which shares this tone. You’ll also likely be able to rework DCC adventures. Overall I dig it, and I’m looking forward to the hardcover. I might even run a little of it for The Gauntlet when it finally lands.

ROBERT E. HOWARD’S CONAN

Modiphius’ version is the fifth attempt at a Conan RPG (following TSR’s AD&D module & stand-alone game; GURPS Conan; and Mongoose’s d20 version). While I ran REH: Conan from the Quickstart, the final KS big book is apparently just landing in people’s hands. I didn’t back it, but my curiosity about the “2d20” system it uses pushed me to try it out. I also dug the full title: Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age of Undreamed Of, which stress the source material.

For better or worse. I never read that much Conan growing up; Elric and Doc Savage filled in as my pulp touchstones. In recent years, I’ve come back to the books (along with the Fafred & Grey Mouser stories). When I read or listen to a Conan audiobook I switch between an admiration for the visceral, poetic style and cringing at the other stuff. There’s a lot of problematic shit there. I acknowledge that, but I also wanted to explore this iconic world, having only played in a handful of Conan sessions years ago (in Rolemaster…)

REH Conan uses 2d20 for all resolution. You test against Attribute + Expertise. A decent attribute would be a 10 and decent skill a 2, giving you a 12 or less. Each die which rolls that value or below give you a success. If you have Focus number in a skill, then every die which rolls that number or below generates two successes. Imagine that as a crit value you can buy up. Difficulties range from 1 to 5, with 2 being a decent default for challenging tasks. Everything’s done as a test—so an attack’s a D1 unless the target defends, in which case it’s a contest or “struggle” of successes.

That’s supported by the “Momentum” mechanic. When you score more successes on a skill test than the difficulty rating, the excess becomes Momentum. You can immediately spend that to boost your action. You can’t keep momentum from turn to turn, but you can drop it into a group pool. That represents cooperation, leadership, and teamwork. This pool sticks around better, dropping one at the end of every scene and every round within a combat scene.

Those two mechanics work well together. Damage, on the other hand, feels a little wonkier. You roll d6’s for a successful hit. An average attack might roll 5 dice, with some of those coming from stat and some from the weapon itself. But you’re not reading those dice straight. Instead each 1 rolled does one damage, each 2 does two. But each 3 and 4 do nothing. BUT each 5 and 6 do one damage, plus they can create a special effect. Most weapons have an FX which can be triggered by these 5 & 6 rolls. They include things like extra damage, unbalancing, piercing armor, etc.

Damage affects an ongoing set of HP, called Vigor for the physical side of things. You mark down your Vigor as you take damage. If you run out of Vigor, you start taking wounds which cause die penalties. Vigor clears between scenes or by spending a fortune point during an action scene. You have two different damage tracks, one for physical and one for mental. To keep in genre, everyone begins with a Steely Gaze that deals mental stress.

REH Conan has a ton of moving parts. Player actions generate Doom points which the GM can spend for effects. Momentum and fortune points add tons of options to actions. In combat players have many maneuver choices. Keep in mind I’m just working from the Quick Start so the big book may have much more.

We liked many elements of the game. In particular the shared momentum pool felt good. It made supporting other players a viable option. I dug that you get momentum for any roll over the needed difficulty, so awesome non-combat rolls don’t go to waste. I also thought the character special abilities felt interesting though we only see a few in the QS. I like the GM’s Doom pool. It reminds me of Coriolis. That Doom pool will definitely grow in play for a simple reason. If players want to perform a defense reaction out of turn, they have to give the GM a Doom.

But it’s also a game with a lot of details to track. REH Conan comes in just over what I consider the maximum number of skills for a game. It has 25 and I draw the line at 24. But each of these skills has three distinct pieces of info to recall: stat, skill level, and focus. You have tons of choices in combat: momentum, fortune, maneuvers, and more but that can result in analysis paralysis and slow down. I also don’t dig having two separate damage tracks. If you have both then anyone throwing non-standard damage (i.e. mental) often won’t stack with their companion’s attacks. The damage dice also take some getting used to. I like the concept, but it slowed things down because of the online tools we had to use for that.

We played via Roll20 since it has a solid pre-built character sheet with automation. I entered in the details for the seven pre-gen PCs from the quick start by hand. There’s so much info there and no explanation so I know I got some things wrong. If you watch the sessions you’ll notice the PCs damage calculations double-dip on damage. The sheet also used tiny, tiny font for some of the tracking elements. But the biggest problem came from the die roller. Rolling the automated 2d20 was OK, except that you then had to mouseover the results to see if you’d gotten extra success from Focus. Damage was worse, even though we had a rollable table built for the dice. You had to stop, check the dice, figure out any rerolls, etc. All of that in the tiny, bottom corner box with a finicky pop up. I don’t think that helped the experience.

All that being said, I dug this as a trad game. If I wanted a trad, steel-thewed Conan rpg I’d go for this, but only face-to-face. In person you have tangible dice and the fun of sorting the results. I’m dumb, so I’d probably buy the specialty dice they sell. REH Conan has a decent feel and some fun mechanics to encourage some combat choices (for melee characters). Complexity-wise, it falls between Mutant & Masterminds and 13th Age for me.

You can see the videos of those two sessions here. (Session One, Session Two). We discuss our impressions at the end of the second session.

GRIMM

I also recently ran two sessions of Grimm, an OOP rpg from Fantasy Flight. Grimm began as a d20 sourcebook- the most notable of the Horizon series from Fantasy Flight. In it children from our world end up sucked into a twisted land where dark versions of all of these tales lay in wait to ambush them. The original booklet hinted at rich world-building. It was dark and disturbing with a new take on the children in peril genre. Later Fantasy Flight published this stand-alone version of the game- expanding and developing the concepts with the Grimm hardcover. This ditched d20 in favor of a completely new system.

I’d run Grimm over a decade ago, adapting True20 and working from the thinner booklet. I dug it enough that I bought the hardcover of the later edition. My copy, complete with a massive printing error, has sat on my shelf. But someone from The Gauntlet mentioned it in passing, so I dug it out.

To keep my story short, I really like the setting, but dislike the mechanics. They didn’t click for me. When I go to run these online sessions, my first step is to make a cheat sheet. That’s how I digest the rules. Grimm’s opaque, with details scattered, which made that challenging. Characters have three groups of skills Core Traits (your default attributes), Playground (physical tasks), and Study (knowledge). I like some of those-- 4H, Country Club, Scamper—they’re evocative. Each of these as a “Grade Level” rating.

When you actually go to do something, the GM sets a grade level difficulty. The player check their grade for the task and rolls a d6. If they roll a 2-5, they simply act at that grade level. If they roll a 1, they act at one level lower. If they roll a 6, they act one grade higher and may roll again trying to get another six. It’s simple, but weirdly unsatisfying. Especially since the game then layers lots of complexities on top of that: multiple dice for certain circumstances, injury penalties, focusing, relative statures, combat maneuvers, etc. It’s clunky.

A clearer set of rules could have worked around that, but the density works against there. There’s a lot of mechanics going on. It feels as complex as REH Conan. And at the base you’re usually rolling a single die to see if you do the norm. It has other issues: overlapping abilities, fenced off talents assuming a long game, imbalance of archetypes & abilities. It’s something that a GM and table who invested time in it could get around. I think a game about kids fantastical adventures, even terrifying ones, needs a lighter system.

The setting nearly saves the whole thing for me. It has lots of ideas and cool set pieces. It’s more of a toolbox than a full campaign, despite being strongly level-based. Grimm has so many ideas, but some feel discordant to one another- characters and elements don’t necessarily fit together. The tone shifts from place to place. The hard cover version’s much larger than the d20 one, 3+ times larger, but that doesn’t necessarily help it. The shorter text forced the designers to be focused, concise, and clear. The hardcover has more material, some of it great, some of it muddying things.

If I wanted to run Grimm again (and I do). I’d port it over to an easier system. I’d even consider going back to my True20 version. I don’t think the setting needs the power curve and stepped approach of a classic level-based game. A more open system like BRP, ORE System, Fate, or PbtA could do the job better. I’d need to figure out how imagination and the magic works, but generally it wouldn’t too difficult a hack.

You can see the videos of those two sessions here. (Session One, Session Two). We discuss our impressions at the end of the second session.

Friday, June 23, 2017

Telling Tales from the Loop

Should I love Tales from the Loop? I’m child of the 1980’s. I turned double digits as the decade began, so it includes my formative years, from grade to middle to high school to college. But I’ve never watched The Goonies, Explorers, or even finished Stranger Things on Netflix. I hadn’t given much thought to the “Bike Kids and Weird things” genre. But something about TftL hit me and hit hard. Though I’d only run one session (and that only half an adventure) I took it with me to Origins for Games on Demand.

And yeah, now I love Tales from the Loop.

I dug it before, but each of the three times I ran Tales, I uncovered something new. I saw different player interactions, the kinds of stories it could tell, how cool a longer campaign would be, and how well the system supported everything.

In Tales you play 1980’s kids, 10 to 15 years old, dealing with the strangeness in your town. You’re friends and have a hideout. The Loop of the title is a massive supercollider project which seems to draw the weird to it. It encircles your hometown. It is and isn’t the 1980’s of our memory. Certain tech exists—autonomous robots, levitating industrial vehicles—but cell phones are still massive and people still drive Ford Sierras. The setting comes from a series of illustrations by Simon Stålenhag.

Tales from the Loop spells out play six principles:

Your home town is full of strange and fantastic things.
Everyday life is dull and unforgiving.
Adults are out of reach and out of touch.
The land of the Loop is dangerous but Kids will not die.
The game is played scene by scene.
The world is described collaboratively.

It uses the same d6 pool system as Free League’s previous rpgs Mutant: Year Zero and Coriolis, with a few changes. You still buy additional effects with extra successes, but those are even more spelled out. Damage has been simplified. Like Coriolis, it sticks with a uniform dice rather than splitting them by type. Here it makes sense to dispose of Gear Dice as a thing. Pushing for a reroll simply imposes one of the four possible conditions which in turn give a cumulative die penalty. All in all it’s smooth, simple, and easily explained. Even more than the earlier games, Tales from the Loop leans into indie, Fate, and PbtA-style play. It’s easy to adapt approaches from those. TftL abstracts some elements (like big confrontations, mystery arcs) even more than I usually do.

YOUR LOOP MAY VARY

The core book includes two settings, the original Swedish locale and one set in Boulder, CO. They do a nice job of providing alternate names to make the material interchangeable. A few things don’t quite work (American kids hanging out at the “kiosk” for example). But I grew up in the Midwest, so that’s what I know. I shifted the setting to Wayward, Ohio, a relatively rural city, boosted by the influx of money and attention from The Loop.

In my version, The Loop hasn’t been completed. Massive construction happens all around the city—drawing in workers, creating enormous dig sites, and suggesting a world that’s the changing. Wayward itself has boomed and expanded with the promise of the project. But it’s struggled with delays; many subdivisions and businesses stand empty or half-completed.

Despite The Loop’s incompleteness, it still affects the area. It draws in spies, grifters, saboteurs, mad scientists, and weirdos. More importantly the influence of The Loop reaches across time. It will be completed, so its paranormal effects can be felt in the past.

PRESENTING THE GAME

To present my new locale I reworked a Google map, clearing off labels and adding details. I used the names from my youth to make things easier to remember. While we didn’t use the map much at the table, it was nice to have. I also went through and reworked the character archetypes into “Playbooks” which include all the steps and choices of character creation on one sheet. I made some changes to terminology and names in a couple of places. I also put all of the game’s stated Principles on a sheet. On the reverse side, I listed the Top 25 singles for 1985-87 as well as a list of college radio bands. That gave a nice touchstone and several players appreciated it.

Though I didn’t really reference it at the table, I also made up a GM cheat sheet with a ton of lists and details. Some of the NPC relationships have cross-connections so I put those on there for reference. You can see that here. I also used the really nice cheat sheet someone put together online. I dig it, but I think you could cut that down significantly and increase the font size. As it stands, it makes the game look much more complicated than it actually is.

If you want to see the map, playbooks, GM cheat, or music list, I’ve put all thatin a Dropbox folder here.

Jason Cordova’s shown me the importance of setting out a game’s concept and theme at start. I told players we would spend the first hour or so doing characters, establishing connections, and answering my leading questions. After that we’d do a home scene, set up the mystery, and play that out. I mentioned our break and the fact that if we hit the last half hour, I might start compressing events to wrap things up. Before character creation I stressed that all the characters would be friends. Figuring out why can be a challenging, especially when you mix awkward and popular archetypes. I walked through walked through the six principles, and then had them pick archetypes.

The first session I skipped doing home scenes at the start and moved right to the mystery incident. I made a mistake there. In the latter two sessions I saw how strongly that framed the characters. I have to remember that for the future.

The high-tech elements show up in the pitch and book images, but it’s easy to forget about those. At least for the story I told, they served as a backdrop: one Hick had a robot hauler; another robot popped up in a mad scientist’s lab. I need to think about how to integrate those elements into play. The original art has a subtlety to it: a mixture of industrial design and everyday mundanity. I might bring that forward by printing out some of most relevant images and just having those on the table. They could point to the backdrop of automatons, flying freight vessels, and even dinosaurs. And they could do that without getting in the way of play.

THE MYSTERY

I wrote up my own scenario. Someone online mentioned they’d played one of the core book adventures as a demo at a con. I didn’t want to risk of putting something out there players had already read or experienced. I developed a basic inciting incident and a flexible set of directions they could go. I tried to leave the perpetrator(s) and cast open enough that I could slot in NPCs from their relationships. That worked decently, though I didn’t hit all of those NPCs in play. After the first session, I realized we didn’t need to have the players pick two NPC connections. That ended up being too much. For session 2 & 3, they picked one and I managed more references and appearances from that pool.

I don’t want to give away the mystery, since I might use it again. But I managed to have three completely different solutions and perpetrators for each session. Each came from the NPC picks from the session start. That made me pretty happy.

SOME PLAY THOUGHTS

In Trouble: If you have a Troublemaker, they will dramatically set the terms of play. I think that’s good and interesting. This archetype determines the limits of “bad behavior” and tense interactions with adults. They also usually drive or pressure the group as a whole. As a GM you’ll want to keep that in mind.

Skill Limits: Though Tales from the Loop only has twelve skills, they do require the GM stop to explain them. The Physical ones are self-explanatory (Force, Move, and Sneak). The Tech ones are a little odd. Tinker’s clear: build and repair machines. But Program and Calculate feel like they could overlap. The GM needs to define those limits. Program’s successes can be used to write computer programs, but the skill’s described as manipulating electronic devices. Just computers or something else? On the other hand, Calculate is “the ability to understand machines and other technical systems.” I almost think “Operate” might be a better term here. The GM needs to clarify those and convey that to the players. The Mind skills are clean- though you’ll still want to define what Investigate does vs. Empathize (human perception) and Comprehend (research). I think the latter should probably be call Research, Dig Up, or something similar.

Finally Heart has the skills that require the most explanation. Charm’s easy. That’s all soft forms of manipulation. Contact’s a little strange—it’s about knowing the right person to get something. So maybe to get access, an item, or a piece of info. How does that overlap with Investigate—could you sub one for the other? Finally Lead is one of the most useful skills, allowing players to bank successes and clear conditions. It really needs an individual shout-out. The rules leave one question open: does the lack of a “hard” social skill mean that kids can’t intimidate? Should you use Force for that? Maybe Lead?

Pressure: While it holds true in many games, I love the way Tales stresses that if you roll, something always happens. It suggests connecting failures and fallout to each character’s Problem. It definitely feels like GM Moves without saying as much. In some of the sessions I did a better job of hitting conditions and putting the pressure on. The existence of the Lead skill (which can clear these) and Anchors (NPCs you can have a scene with to recover) means I should be more aggressive. Since I don’t go to the dice that often, I reduce that pressure. That’s something I need to take into account. I also let the players use both Luck and Push to reroll the same roll, I have to check if that’s in the rules.

OVERALL

Anyway, I think Tales from the Loop is awesome. This hasn’t really been a review, I haven’t even talked about what’s in the book and how well put together it is. It has been immensely satisfying to run and its something I’m going to come back to again.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Islands in The Veil: Cyberpunk PbtA

SNOW CRASH TEST DUMMIES

They say as you get older, your taste in music ossifies. That it’s harder for something new and novel to break through and grab your attention, create joy for you. I wonder if that’s true for rpgs? In the last year I’ve read a bunch I thought would grab me. I thought they’d hit the sweet spot of excitement I got when I first read the Ghostbusters or James Bond 007 rpg. Most didn’t.

The Veil did.

The Veil’s an amazing rpg which embraces modern cyberpunk-esque themes and ideas. I don’t know how else to explain it. I ran two sessions of it online for The Gauntlet Hangouts. I dug it and it left me wanting more. More than a formal review, I have some thoughts on it and why it works for me.

Session One AP

Session Two AP

SOURCE TAGS AND CODES

I’m struck by the differences in The Veil’s approach to cyberpunk and my own experiences with that in games. I first encountered Cyberpunk 2013 in ’88 while at a shop in Chicago. Within a couple of years, it’d become a major rpg and trail blazed a whole series of like games (GURPS Cyberpunk, Cyberspace, CyberHERO, and of course Shadowrun. Cyberpunk 2020 became a go-to game for our local group up through the late 1990’s, with my late friend Barry in particular running many campaigns of it. Working at the local game store, I also got to peek in on other gamers’ approach to these games.

One thing divided me from many of the players and GMs: I’d read a lot of cyberpunk fiction: Gibson, Walter Jon Williams, Pat Cadigan, K.W. Jeter, George Alec Effinger. I wasn’t an expert or even that deeply into it, but I’d read these authors. That wasn’t true for many in our group. Some picked up bits and pieces. But for the most part, their vision of cyberpunk came from the RPGs rather than any novel or short story source material.

On the other hand they knew some sources I didn’t. Looking back it’s pretty clear that three anime heavily shaped their imagination: Ghost in the Shell, Akira, and most importantly Appleseed. I wouldn’t see those until much later; GitS not until this year. I hadn’t read the associated manga either. Appleseed leaned heavily into the chrome and military side of things. That complemented the typical games we encountered: we always played Edgerunners carrying merc missions of questionable ethics. We’d shift that formula from time to time, for example we got vampires in our cyberpunk once Ianus released their Grimm’s Cybertales and related products.

The Veil comes from another place. It’s the product of someone who has absorbed and synthesized the divergent streams of cyberpunk media: books, films, rpgs, etc. In doing so he’s made a game that has the anime feels and themes without being a caricature. The Veil’s cyberpunk without being entirely about murder, chrome, and loadout. It also manages to handle transhumanist themes while remaining comprehensible and connected to humanity. That’s something Transhuman Space, Eclipse Phase, and Mindjammer don’t do for me. It doesn’t feel like a regurgitation of older cyberpunk games, religiously sticking to the same play style and only redressing the setting.

PRODUCTIVE PLACEMENT

My disclaimer: I know Fraser Simons from online gaming; I’ve gotten to play with him several times. We even played The Sprawl together. That’s how I originally heard about The Veil. Honestly I only backed it because he seemed like a smart and earnest dude. I was prepared to be pleasantly bland about the game, probably praising its awesome look. But after getting The Veil to the table for two sessions I want more. It’s clicks for me. Years of gunbunny, amoral, and nihilistic cyberpunk had turned me off. The Veil flips that for me. It aligns with what I want out of a game.

SPECIFICATIONS

The Veil’s a PbtA cyberpunk game, so it has system approach drawn from Apocalypse World and like games. It has a looser setting than other rpgs in the genre. Here player/MC collaboration creates the world. We’ve seen that before with The Sprawl, but it has a strong story structure. The Sprawl deliberately echoes classic burning chrome and grimy operator cyberpunk games, with a mission approach focusing play. The Veil has one key setting conceit, the Veil itself. The setting, however you create it, has a level of augmented reality everyone’s plugged into. Several actions in the game tie to the Veil literally and metaphorically. At first I wasn’t sure about that, but in play the device has brought cool moments to the table. Only after playing a couple of sessions did I realize how much you could shape the concept of the Veil itself: how it works, what it does, how potent it is, who has control.

Like most PbtA games, players have a set of basic moves. These tie in some of the cool concepts of the setting (the Veil as an info source, honor debts implied by giri). Fraser’s structured these moves smartly. More than other PbtA adaptations he keeps autonomy and choice in the players’ hands. There’s less of the “pick things that eliminate bad stuff hitting you” choices within the moves. The same smart approach carries over to the playbooks.

PLAYBACK PAYBOOKS

The Veil has twelve of playbooks. They’re all striking and distinct, carving out their own niche in the fiction. Each has a small, but evocative set of unique moves. These support the playbook’s theme but offer enough difference that picking a particular one at the start makes a statement about how you see the character. But as important as the moves, each playbook contains background questions and decisions. These aren’t just the usual relationship and backstory questions. They ask you to define fundamental aspects of the world and your role in it.

For example, The Veil includes the concept of Giri, an honor debt. It takes the place of debts, strings, bonds, from other PbtA games. The choice of terminology plays into some anime tropes. Characters who act as “Street Samurai” don’t have to be just killers, they tie into a moral code. Giri’s a global system with some supplemental moves. It serves as a mechanic for all characters.

But you also have the Honorbound playbook. This character builds on and changes the concept of giri within the setting. They enforce giri. The Honorbound player decides their “workplace” for & its relation to giri. They can define it as traditional, commercial, ritualistic, legalist, hidden. They also select circumstances which generate giri, a hugely important point. Whether you incur an obligation when you offend someone’s honor or breaking commercial contracts speaks volumes about your world. The kinds of penalties available to an Honorbound say something as well.

Sherri and I spent a long car ride talking about what the different formulations could mean. What if giri’s recorded and public? If it is transferrable and even sold on a market? You could also read/build a HB character just as a cop or a sheriff. Maybe it’s about wergild and keeping the peace through a balance of enforcers. What if the Honorbound acts behinds the scenes? There’s no officially accepted system for giri, but the HB’s order believes in one. They might be terrorists trying to shape society. If persons can incur giri, can an institution? an artificial intelligence?

Each playbook has something that it buys into and changes within the world. The Catabolist deals with cybernetics and inplants. The Apparatus about artificial life. The Architect about the metaverse & Veil. The Wayward about what lies about of the urban world. What the players choose as playbooks has dramatic impact on the game you’re going to play. That’s compounded by the background choices players make to flesh those elements out. That’s true in the best PbtA games, and the The Veil embraces that more than most. The combination and interactions of the playbooks within a group creates a distinct play universe.

MECHANATION

I haven’t talked much about the actual mechanics of play. If you’re familiar with PbtA, everything within The Veil should be easy to pick up. You may not get the implications of everything at first glance, though. It really builds emergent play. For example, characters don’t have “stats” like other games. Instead, they have states which represent emotions: Mad, Sad, Scared, Peaceful, Joyful, Powerful. So while rolls represent proficiency in the abstract, they’re more about characterization. The Veil has a “Feeling Wheel,” something I thought was dumb at first glance. It breaks down those emotional states into subtypes. It comes from therapy for emotional express.

My experience with tracking emotions in Headspace has made me doubly shy. But once we got the system to the table, I saw the beauty of it. Choosing your feelings helps explicate your character to yourself, the MC, and the other players. The wheel offers a non-intrusive vocabulary for that. As important, it almost always puts the choice and power in your hand when you go to make a roll. You don’t have to remember that X move uses Y stat. That’s gone. Instead you decide how this affects you. That’s smartly combined with an emotional spiking mechanic that makes spamming a particular stat dangerous. I dig it very much.

THINKING ABOUT CYBER

Sherri used to use the term “machine-love” for games, movies, and anime, that love The Tech. Gun lists, mecha suits, sweet bikes, hot chick robots—any media with a fascination with chrome and weapons. There’s a lot of old school cyberpunk where that’s your first impression. Characters are archetypes; they’re not fully fleshed beings. They’re iconic rather than evolving. The characters might have a unique spin or background, but they remain objects: dead, metal tools just as much as the equipment they carry.

The Veil doesn’t feel that way to me. It isn’t just that it uses the tag approach to cyberwear and guns. Its more about how it connects the characters’ lives to their place in the world. That makes it an open game. The Veil takes to heart the “play to see what happens” PbtA admonition. Each PC ends up with a ton of interesting material to play from. You can wrestled with the questions of place and identity we’ve seen in media like Ex Machina, Witch Hunter Robin, Accelerando, and beyond.

IN THE SHORT RUN

But that may itself be something of a weakness- or at least make it more challenging to bring The Veil to the table and get everything out of it. Character creation’s a deep part of the process. Players have many decisions, not just picks. They’ll begin to weave a tapestry in that first session. I knew that’d be a challenge in about five hours, split in two. I thought establishing setting details ahead of time would cut that cognitive load. That helped but we still put a long time into the CC process. We engaged with some of those elements in play, but we had many more directions we could have gone in.

Because of that we came away from those two sessions wanting more. Honestly as soon as I can figure out how to schedule it in, I’m going to run a longer term campaign of The Veil, either online or f2f. I think you’d need at least six, probably more like 10-12 sessions to get at the depth offered here. That makes scheduling challenging. The structure of the game and that richness also means I’m uncertain about offering this to my 6 player face-to-face group. I think The Veil benefits from a tighter PC party.

To be fair, I made a conscious choice to play from the book and engage the cc rules. Fraser has a quick-start, called Glitch City. That has a crafted setting and pre-gen characters. As well, the supplement he’s currently Kickstarting, The Veil: Cascade, has more material on how to scale this. I’ve backed that.

SMALL GLITCH

Any things that bother me? Yes, The Veil follows Masks in not actually putting the playbooks in the book itself. That really bugs me. We have sections discussing the elements of those playbooks, but not the questions and set up elements of those characters. We do get one page with images of the two pages of the playbooks, but they’re so small as to be unreadable. It frustrated me in Masks and I hope to god this isn’t the trend going forward for PbtA games.

END LINE

I need to wrap up and I haven’t even gotten to the form factor of The Veil. It’s gorgeous, with clean layout and great artwork. The pdf uses a white text background (yeah!). The softcover’s a-effing-mazing. It’s solid, larger than trade size. The glossy paper—something I often don’t dig—works here. I cannot believe this is Fraser’s first release. It’s one of the nicest rpg products I’ve bought.

Overall, Sherri and I love The Veil. It’s jumped to the top of my “must play more” list. As I mentioned above, at the time of this writing there’s a Kickstarter going on for the supplement. You can buy that alone or with the core book there. You can also just buy the core book via that campaign or from Indie Press Revolution. Highly recommended.

Gauntlet Hangouts Actual Plays

SESSION ONE

SESSION TWO

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Mutant Year Zero: RPGs I Love

I cut my teeth on Gamma World in the late 70’s, being blown up by Torc Grenades and eaten by psychic vegetation. But post-apocalyptic wasn’t really my thing. It would be another 30+ years before I played it again. My friend Dave ran a homebrew Fallout rpg, based on a video game I never dug. Had a great time, but filled my wasteland quota. But in 2014 I started my History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs, one of the most requested genres. That finally put Mutant: Year Zero on my radar.

It wasn’t because the game immediately appealed to me. Instead I was trying to trace the evolution of the Mutant RPG, a Swedish release from 1984. Mutant had gone through multiple iterations- becoming cyberpunk in one and spinning off Mutant Chronicles in another. A couple of smart folks in my G+ feed recommended Mutant Year Zero. So I picked it up. And I read it. And then I ordered the GM screen. And then the dice sets. And then the expansions.

And then I ran it.

GLOOM AND HOPE

In Mutant Year Zero you play- as you might imagine- mutants in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. How that came to be isn’t clear. But it’s dark. You live in a desperate community overseen by an Elder, called an Ark. The world outside’s full of horror and The Rot. Your community’s primitive, just hanging on the brink. In the early days of a MYZ campaign, you check at the end of session to see how many people died. Even the mutations are messy and dangerous. They can explode and more problems. These challenges t ought to feel dark and hopeless.

But it doesn’t.

Partly that comes from how you build characters, partly from each session’s opening activity. I have a group of players who came out of a Fate-inspired campaign (control, competency). I worried how they’d react to this switch, but they’ve embraced it.

Sherri’s said that Mutant Year Zero stands at that perfect point between Trad and Indie gaming for her. It merges the atmosphere of both. You’ll first see that in character creation. You choose one of eight roles (Gearhead, Slave, Enforcer, etc). These are presented “playbook style.” So In addition to mechanical decisions you make picks from sets of choices: about your appearance, your relationships to other PCs, your relationships to NPCs, your Big Dream. These build bonds and develop details about the world itself.

The mechanical side of the game’s pretty simple. You assign numbers to the four stats and the twelve skills. These are low numbers, five’s max . Each role gets a unique 13th skill. These include the pathfinding of the Stalker, the deal making of the Fixer, the beast mastery of the Dog Handler, and the gang control of the Boss. You get one talent, feat-like abilities, and one random mutation. You also write down your gear. Then you build your Ark.

Sidebar: Gear: Here’s where Mutant Year Zero gets me. Encumbrance’s a traditional mechanic, a means of invoking ‘realism’ in the setting. In MYZ it becomes another point of pressure and hard choice. Normally I ignore encumbrance and item tracking because the complexity to payoff ratio’s pretty high. But this system’s so simple it works. You have a number of slots-- represented by rows on your character sheet-- equal to twice your Strength. So anywhere from 2 to 10. Most items take up one row. Heavy items take two rows and you can write in two light items on one row. OK, enough space for equipment and good. But you also need supplies to survive- grub, water, and booze. Four rations of these count as a single regular item. What do you do when you find a cool object in the waste? What do you drop?

BUILDING THE ARK

After character creation you take the hopeful connections to other characters and use those to build your Ark. As you read out your links and name NPCs, you collaboratively map out the community. You make a series of choices about what it looks like, how it feels, who has power. This starts you out with a collective sense of command and authority. You build a cool place you can invest in.

Then you find out what dire straits it is in. You have four development tracks- all important and vital: Food Supply, Technology, Society & Culture, and Warfare & Defense. Each has an impact on the fiction and the mechanics. For example, you need high Tech to understand artifacts easily. You need Food to reduce the number of deaths each session. All of these tracks start at zero.

But you can change this. There’s an “Assembly” at the start of each session where you choose a “Project”. These start simply: Basic Palisades, Pigsty, Temple. Later as they meet certain requirements, they get more interesting: Tavern, Water Wheel, Ink & Paper. It’s a Civ-like tech tree. Once a project’s selected, you can spend some your time and energy time working on it. You roll an associated Skill and count successes towards the number required to finish it. Early projects usually take a session to complete, later ones may take more. Of course you can only do one project per session. So every choice matters. For example, working on a project can be a hard call- other obligations and the siren call of exploring the Zone can eat up time.

In my group, the projects moved to the center. Players love them. They dig the choices and how they reshape the terrain of the community. It also ties into another important setting element: artifacts. I love the goofiness of the artifacts in this game. When an air mattress can be a significant find, celebrated by the players, you know it works. MYZ has a card deck which includes Mutations, Artifacts, and Threats. They’re a great and tangible handouts and players love them. It makes randomization easy.

How do these connect to Ark development? You’re supposed to turn over any artifacts to the Elder. They place them in “The Dawn Vault.” In game terms, artifacts turned in can raise your Ark’s ratings. A chainsaw gives +d6 Tech, a painting gives +d6 Culture, a crossbow gives +1 Tech and +1 Warfare. There’s social pressure to do this, which makes the choice interesting, especially when something’s useful. My players have leaned towards sacrificing things in order to make the Ark better.

DO YOU WANT TO ROLL AGAIN?

I need to dive into the Mutant Year Zero’s mechanics for a moment because they’re so supportive of the atmosphere. The game reserves test for important places; it specifically says to work to avoid perception-type rolls all the time. When you do make a test, you roll a pool of d6’s based on Stat + Skill. If you have appropriate gear you may roll its bonus dice. MYZ sells a set of dice for the game, you don’t have to use them, but they’re nice. Stat dice are called Base Dice (they’re yellow), skills use Skill Dice (they’re green), and equipment uses Gear Dice (they’re black).

When you roll, you want at least one “6”. That’s represented by the Rad Symbol on the MYZ dice. Each six is a success. You usually only need one success to win. But if you roll more successes, you get bonuses. In combat, for example, extra successes can be turned into:

Extra point of damage (repeatable)
Subdue or tiring- cause one point of Fatigue
Increase your Initiative by 2 for next turn
Knocking something from opponent (a weapon or object)
Knock them over

If you take a defensive action, for each success you can:

Reduce one success rolled by attacker
Subdue or tire- cause one point of Fatigue
Increase your Init by 2 for next turn
Knock something from opponent (a weapon or object)
Knock over
Counter and inflict straight weapon damage

Many of the unique role skills give bonuses to spend extra successes on. For example the Gearhead can make things stronger, have more uses, or be more reliable.

So again, all you need is one success…but more is better.

And you always have the option to push your roll. If you do, you pick up all the dice that don’t show a “1” or “6”. You reroll those. Add in any successes from “6’s”. Woot! Look how great and easy that was.

But…if you rolled any “1’s” on your Base dice (those from stats) you take damage on that stat. See your stats are also your damage tracks. So you get worse as you take damage. And keep in mind your stat’s going to be 5 at most. So that’s pretty rough. As well, if you rolled “1’s” on your Gear dice, you reduce that items rating by one per.

This makes for a tough, push-your-luck choice. Let’s say you really need to make a roll. Desperately need to. But on your first attempt, you rolled two “1’s” on your Base dice. Now you know that if you push your roll, you’re definitely going to take 2 damage on that stat. And you’re rerolling one other Base die, so if it comes up a “1” as well, you’re going out. But you’re also rerolling a bunch of Skill and Gear dice, so odds are decent you’ll get a success. These other dice can’t do damage to you, but you might deplete your equipment. But you have to reroll them all; you can’t cherry pick.

You can see the pressure. In play it’s awesome. We don’t roll that much, but when we do, it’s significant.

Want another push your luck mechanic? Consider mutations. Each session, you get a Mutation Point (MP), used to activate powers. As well, when you take damage from pushing rolls, you gain an MP per damage. So there’s some reward built into the system. Now when you actually activate a mutant power it happens. There’s no resistance or skill check. You spend a point and do X. I like that. BUT you do roll a die for each MP you spent. If you roll a “1,” then there’s a chance of a misfire. You roll another d6 to see what happens. That can be good: overclocking your powers or refunding your MP spent. Woot! But it cancan be bad, in which case you gain a new mutation power. But you also permanently lose a stat point.

Tough Choices.

Sidebar: Incidentally, Paul Beakley's written a ton of smart stuff about Mutant Year Zero. If you're interested, I recommend checking out what he says. He sees a lot of details I miss.

DOWN DOWN DOWN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE

So what pushes you to the choices? What do you actually do in the game? Generally you’ll spend some time within the community, usually choosing between working on a project or carrying out your character’s agenda. You’ll also be responding to the Threat on the table, which may mean staying at home or venturing out into the zone.

At the start of a session, the GM randomly determines the Threat. I’ve been using the card deck for this, setting aside those I’ve already drawn. The core book has a random table. After the Assembly, the GM sets the stage and presents that threat. Some are local—sabotage within the community; some are nearby—some kind of monster stalking those who venture just outside the ark’s borders; some require a journey—locating a new filter for the community’s water purifier. They’re all robust and easy to riff on. A few might require more work (a murder among the community for example). Regardless Mutant Year Zero suggests not prepping for these. You should run with the randomness. It offers some other ways to do this, but the message overall is: put it out there and see what happens. Players will find their fun.

On the one hand you may really dig the Ark stuff. The game supports that with nice random tables for NPCs. There’s always going to be tension among Bosses within a camp, so you have cool power play stories. MYZ encourages social interactions in a couple of ways. First, several roles have skills that function mostly within the Ark. For example the Fixer can take time to set up deals in order to generate money (in the form of bullets) and/or resources. Second, there’s an easy mechanic for social manipulation, whether that’s via charm or intimidation. That doesn’t exclude role-playing scenes, but offers a nice backbone for it. Finally, the way MYZ doles out experience incentivizes social connections. It uses a series of questions (ala various PbtA games). Each “yes” answer generates a point of XP. Did you do work on a Project? Did you sacrifice or risk something for the NPC you want to protect? Did you sacrifice or risk something for the NPC you hate? Did you sacrifice or risk something for your PC “Buddy”? Did you make progress towards your Big Dream?

But you’re as likely venture out into the Zone, the land outside your Ark. And that’s a trad Hexcrawl. Mutant Year Zero supplies several maps broken into squares: desert, grey-tinged, pseudo New York, etc Take your pick. My players chose one with many lakes.. At the start of the game, you mark on the map. X marks the Ark. It’s hugely satisfying to take a permanent marker and writing on something like this. You can see the shape of the terrain, spot weird details printed on the map, and write in discoveries as you make them. This is some of the trad that Sherri mentioned.

MYZ has great tech supporting exploration. On the players side, they have to deal with questions of supplies and encumbrance. How armed are they? What artifacts are they carrying? How much grub and water do they take? That last one’s important because they have to spend one of each per day or suffer penalties. But they’re also the resource they spend to heal damage. Don’t take enough and they might be limping along for a long time. Eventually the PCs might buy talents to help offset this, but it remains a challenge. They also have to track the Rot, points of contamination which may build up in their system over time. On the positive side, several of the roles have cool skills related to exploration. The Stalker’s the most vital. Their skill Find the Path allows them to spot danger, move the group through quickly, or locate any cached artifacts. Players get XP for exploring zones as well.

On the other side, the GM has a set of great and easy to use random tables. That allows them to generate the kind of zone, the terrain, special features, and threats very quickly. It strikes a balance between too simple and too detailed. They can generate these on the fly or put together a list to work from. It supports the improvisation.

Plus Mutant Year Zero has write ups for several special zones with bigger stories. GMs can drop these in easily. Many offer new factions and peoples the PCs will have to deal with. Free League has also released several Zone Compendiums with new areas. Beyond that there’s also a meta-plot story connected to the origins of the PC’s ark and the fall of the world. Gamemasters can choose to use that or not.

Does it hold together? I’m not a usually a random charts GM. I’ll look through them for inspiration and sketch out lists for the game. They’re more toolbox than a tool. But Mutant Year Zero hits a sweet spot. It generates exactly enough bits to frame things. It plugs in the threats easily. It makes everything reinforce the atmosphere. I love it.

Last session the players worked their way through multiple zones. They’d managed to salvage a broken down truck a couple of sessions before. Now they set out for a strange location they’d gotten coordinates for. But they planned to do that via an Industrial Dump run by an NPC they’d met. We went through ghostly woods, they set fire to horrible zone crows who tried to keep them out of a building, they explored an abandoned church with strange graves outside, they opted to go around an unmoving yellowish fog, they sic’d a giant boar they’d mind control onto a group of cannibals holed up at an old gun range, they got caught in a torrential rainstorm as they traveled along the edge of a massive crater.

Finally at the dump site they got to dig through garbage, looking for artifacts and interesting scrap. That was a half-hour plus of rolling on the giant random item table: trombone, electric toothbrush, Santa mask, electronic keyboard, and more. They found only one artifact but it was awesome, a leather jacket in great shape with a flaming skull on the back.

It was the best.

FINAL BROADCAST

In short I’ve had a great time running Mutant Year Zero. I’ve not really run post-apocalyptic before, and MYZ makes it easy. It has the kind of lean mechanics I’m more comfortable with these day. It makes usually trad gameplay elements (like the Hexcrawl) work within that context. The system doesn’t take long to get, but it hides the sting. Life’s tough for your mutants. Your powers can kill you. Exploring can murder you. Just being outside can poison you. But for all that, seriously for all that, it feels hopeful. Players can build their Ark and leave a lasting legacy. I recommend it.

Sidebar: Other Worlds: Mutant Year Zero has a sequel game: GenLab Alpha. It’s in the same setting, but you play Anthropomorphic Animals trapped in an automated experiment. The system’s entirely compatible and you can cross the two if you wish. But Genlab Alpha offers its own campaign, not about zone exploration. Instead you’re building an underground revolutionary network. You want to overthrow your masters and gain freedom from their murderous and arbitrary experiments. It’s cool and quite different. There’s a Kickstarter currently underway for the third game in the setting, Mutant: Mechatron- Rise of the Robots which has those as the PCs. Eventually we’ll see a final volume covering the remains of unmutated humanity.

You’ll also see the MYZ mechanics in Coriolis, a sci-fi game. It changes up how the push system operates in an interesting way. I ran it twice. I talked about that on Episode 81 of the Gauntlet Podcast. I also posted the AP videos (session one, session two). The system also powers Tales from the Loop, which I can’t wait to actually try.