Introductory Recap

This is the third post on the development of a bespoke game system for use in my latest campaign, which is now scheduled to start play on October 21st – so finishing this has become a priority.

Let’s start with a recap. A couple of minor details that weren’t properly explained the first time around are presented in italic bold.

Stats:

In the first article, I listed the 18 stats that I expected to use, with some notes on how they would tie into the game system. I have re-ordered them slightly in the list below to move most of the calculated stats to the bottom of the list.

• STR – Strength, i.e. physical force.
• CON – Constitution, i.e. health.
• RES – Resistance to physical harm, assuming maximum defensive armor. Lighter armors subtract from it.
• NIM – Nimbleness. Heavier armors will subtract from it.
• DEX – overall measure of manual Dexterity, used for manipulating tools and keyboards. The stat rolled is averaged with NIM to get the actual stat value. Hand protection will subtract from it.
• ACC – Accuracy with aimed weapons.
• MEL – effectiveness with Melee weapons & unarmed combat.
• PRAC – the character’s aptitude for Practical skills.
• THEO – the character’s aptitude for intellectual/analytic/Theory skills.
• ENC – Encyclopedic Knowledge, the character’s knowledge bank of facts and processes.
• LAN – the character’s capacity for quick-learning Languages. Discussed below.
• AWA – Awareness of the environment around the character, used for “spot” and “listen” checks.
• PERS – Personality, a combination of Presence, Charisma, and Persuasiveness, the foundation of any interpersonal skills.
• END – Endurance. Starts equal to CON.
• INT – Intelligence. Equal to 1/4 of (PRAC + THEO + ENC + LAN), + 1d6, -1d6.
• HP – Hit Points. Equal to 2 x CON + RES + NIM.
• SHK – Shock Threshold. equal to 1/5th HP, round up.
• KARMA – The universe’s debt to the character’s good fortune. Initially 10, -1 for each stat with a score of 17 or better, +1 for each stat with a score of 8 or less. Karma can be sacrificed in-game to gain a lucky advantage or to buy off a restriction placed on the PCs by the campaign background, the latter at prices to be determined by the GM. Some penalties must be bought off collectively by all PCs contributing to a pool. The GM can also throw unlucky circumstances at the PCs which turn into a Karma boost if the PCs overcome the circumstance indirectly, i.e. without directly countering with PC Karma, effectively adding to the XP that the characters get for the adventure.

It then went into the stat population process – how stat values are generated and allocated – in some detail, so I won’t repeat it here.

Stat Checks

Roll 4d6 + modifier from the GM. The character needs to get stat or less on this roll to succeed in the challenge.

Improving Stats

During Character Generation, +1 to a stat for -3 skill points or -1 to a stat for +2 skill points.

Skills

Skill Base Values

Stat / 2 +2, round up.

Skill Points

Starting skill points = INT x 2.

Skill Definitions

Characters define their own skills. Their profession must be the first such skill listed.

Skills are then classified by the GM as Specific, Narrow, or Broad. Specific skills are only useful for one small, closely-related set of tasks; Narrow skills are useful for a somewhat wider variety of tasks; and Broad skills are useful in a wide variety of applications. These cost 1, 2, or 4 skill points, respectively.

Skill Checks

When the PC attempts a task, he lists any skills he feels are relevant. The GM selects a stat basis that he thinks is most relevant and picks the single skill that is most appropriate from the list offered by the player.

Skill ranks + stat basis + modifier = target value. Player rolls 3d6 and must get less than or equal to the target value to succeed.

If a character has more than one skill that might be relevant, he must select the most relevant one, breaking ties in favor of narrowness. Each additional skill, if the GM agrees that it is also relevant, adds 2 to the target value for the check.

Weapon Skills

Characters can take weapon skills. These are broadly defined, and cost 2 skill points each, or general category skills, costing 3 skill points each. “Gun” is a general category, and so is “Firearm”. “Handgun” or “Pistol” or “Rifle” are broadly defined weapons types. If characters want to waste their points, a specific skill in a specific model (1 point) can also be applied.

Unproficient

If a character has no ranks in the skill he is attempting to use, his chance of success is defined by the relevant Skill Foundation alone, +1 for each indirectly-related skill the GM deems appropriate.

Improving Skills

Additional ranks in a skill cost 1 skill point per rank.

Skill Standards [from article 2]

Expert/Professional = 3 ranks
Skilled Assistant = 2 ranks
Trainees/Junior Assistants = 1 rank
Unskilled/Support Staff = 0 ranks

Eventual Success

If the referee deems a circumstance to be such that the characters will eventually succeed and is more interested in how long it takes to achieve that success, instead of applying “Extra Time” as a modifier, he can use the degree of success or failure on the skill or stat check as an index and interpret the “extra time” as an indicator of how long success takes to achieve. He may apply a modifier to this result based on the degree of success that the characters indicate is desired.

For example, if setting up a camp site, the characters may deem a marginal success as undesirable. Based on the standards that they describe, the GM may decide that success by 5 or more is what they want to achieve; when they make their check, he reduces the margin of success by 5, accordingly, before consulting the extra time chart.

There is a trade-off possible in which quality of outcome is further traded for extra time taken to achieve it, or vice-versa, and the GM may also interpret the results for the players in such a way that they have the choice of accepting an outcome or of spending more time to achieve a better result.

Disadvantages

These are ranked in terms of applicability of circumstance by the GM and awarded values of 1, 2, or 4 points, (specific to general). Specific disadvantages cause a reduction in proficiency in one particular skill or similar area of activity. Two points affect a broader range of activities, while 4 point skills affect a very wide range of activities. For example, “Poor at Mathematics” is a 2-point disadvantage.

If the Disadvantage is one that isn’t readily/directly applicable to skill checks, the impact on the character’s life and freedom of choice should be assessed and a value chosen based on a skill penalty of similar impact.

Multiple ranks can be taken in a Disadvantage; each confers the equivalent of two negative ranks. Each additional rank reduces in value by 1 point to a minimum of one point.

Disadvantage Points add directly to the number of Skill Points available to the character.

Karma Limits

There is a limit to the total number of ranks that a character can have in a given disadvantage equal to his starting Karma divided by 3, round up.

There is a limit to the number of disadvantages that a character can earn points from that is equal to his current Karma.

Removing/Reducing Disadvantages

Before a Disadvantage can be removed, it must be reduced to a single rank. Normally, only one rank can be removed from a given disadvantage per adventure but this restriction can be varied by the GM if it seems appropriate.

To remove a rank in a disadvantage, the character expends 1 point of Karma, reducing his Karma total accordingly.

Karmic Debt

If a character’s Karma drops in the course of an adventure to the point that he is forced to reduce one or more disadvantages because they would exceed the Karmic Limit described above, he is forced to experience a Complication.

A Complication is a player-invoked setback that worsens one or more other disadvantages by one rank for each rank in the Disadvantage being nullified. If he can no longer do so because his disadvantages are at the maximum permitted level, a stat other than Karma is semi-permanently reduced as a consequence of the setback. Note that this has to happen in-play.

The nature of the setback offered by the player and the number of stat points lost determine the value of the Complication – minus one point in one stat is worth one rank in the setback. That means that the scale of the Complication should be set to match the total unpaid Karmic Debt accrued by the event.

Another form of setback that is acceptable is for the player to deliberately blow a mission-critical roll for his character and refuse a re-roll.

Setbacks are treated as disadvantages worth “negative karma” and can be paid off whenever the GM deems it appropriate by the expenditure of earned Karma, i,e, XP (see below).

Karmic Starvation

If a reduction in disadvantages means that a character has expended more on skills than his disadvantages can pay for, he experiences Karmic Starvation. This mandates a Complication, as above, but instead of reducing ranks in Disadvantages, it temporarily reduces the amount of skill points expended by two skill points per rank in the Complication.

Other Uses For Karma

• Karma can be used to re-roll a failed roll at the player’s discretion, or to give another character a +5 in a mission-critical roll. These applications consume one Karma.
• Karma can be converted into additional Skill Points at the rate of 2 Skill points per point of Karma consumed.
• Karma can be converted into a stat increase at the rate of 2 Karma per +1. Once a stat exceeds 25, this cost doubles, and for every +5 to that limit, it doubles again. Note that this is far more expensive than during character construction.
• Karma can be expended during character construction to modify rolled stats. Every point of Karma consumed permits one stat to be reduced by 1 and another to be increased by 2. Note that this also affects the character’s Starting Karma.
• Karma can be expended to obtain a stroke of good fortune in the course of an adventure. The player tells the GM what “good luck” he would like to have and the GM counts the number of successful rolls that he would normally require in order to achieve the same outcome. That count is the cost of the stroke of good fortune, in Karma. If the cost is more than the character can or is willing to pay, the GM may propose a lower-cost variation that gives the PCs some or even all of what they want; the GM is expected to work with the players in this respect.
• Karma can be expended to reduce or remove a limitation placed on the characters by the campaign setup or background, for example to expand a character’s Meitner Field Radius, permitting them to carry more equipment through a Zener Transition. An explanation for this change will be incorporated into the next adventure by the GM, and the benefit will take effect from that time, NOT immediately.
• Finally, Karma can be expended to delay the next Zener Transition long enough for the PCs to complete their current adventure. The cost in Karma is the Time Shift shown on the modifiers table. This will only be possible after three specific campaign upgrades are purchased – enlarged Meitner Fields (PCs can carry equipment), Limited Comms to Zener Command (who design a detector), and Zener Transition Threshold Detection (when the PCs build the device designed by Zener Command).

Experience

Experience is earned for surviving an adventure.

More experience is earned for helping the locals deal with whatever problem they are experiencing when the PCs arrive. +50% XP for a solution to be implemented by the locals following PC advice, double XP for a solution to the problem that is put in place by the PCs, and these are doubled again for a permanent solution to the problem. Typical BASE xp will be 1-3 per game session, lower more often than higher, based on the length of the adventure and the difficulties that have to be overcome.

Selfish or amoral behavior reduces XP award is by 1, but this will be waived if the whole purpose of the plotline is to benefit the PCs in some way.

XP is paid in additional Karma.

The GM can (and probably will) choose to introduce an additional complication into an adventure at any time, at the cost of immediately giving the directly-affected character or characters 2 Karma, or he can give an NPC +10 to a roll (GREATLY increasing their chances of success) and increasing the Karma of one or more PCs by 1. He can do this AFTER a roll is made, turning a failure into a success . These immediate payments are in addition to any Karma earned in the course of the adventure. Increasing the difficulty can also increase the Karmic Reward at the end of the adventure. However, setbacks and complications from Karmic Debt or Karmic Starvation do not affect the Karmic Payout.

If a PC chooses to, he can sacrifice Karma to nullify or redress this interference through a stroke of good fortune, as described earlier; doing so means that the complication introduced by the GM also doesn’t count toward the end-of-adventure bonus. You get “paid” to solve your own problems through game-play, not use the game mechanics to do it for you.

Unspent Karma is always useful to have, but spending it improves the self-reliance of the PCs. Having too much unspent Karma effectively reduces the effectiveness of the PCs, having not enough can induce Karmic Debt or Karmic Starvation. The margin that a player considers safe is up to him!

As the PCs discover the situation that they are in, the GM may choose to symbolically reflect each piece of bad news for the players with a token representing an increased XP value for the adventure. The more impossible the situation seems to be, the more Karma he makes “up for grabs” – if the PCs are clever enough to earn it!

Equipment

Equipment in general is defined in the same way as skills (broad, narrow, specific) but is never the basis of a check. Equipment does count for the purposes of “other appropriate skills” or “indirectly-related skills”, provided the equipment is actually being used for the task – actually having a “.33 special” doesn’t help in firing that 44 Magnum.

Unless noted otherwise as part of the circumstances, a skill implies having the appropriate equipment; buying the equipment specifically in addition to the skill implies that the character has something that’s been customized or modified to suit them. So “Fisherman” implies having a rod and reel, or the means to improvise something. Actually buying a Fishing Rod in addition is unnecessary (but does provide a bonus to your fisherman skill checks).

If circumstances have left the character without those implied tools, that’s a factor that the GM takes into account with his circumstantial modifiers.

Three exceptions are weapons, armor, and Campaign MacGuffins.

Weapons

The cost and characteristics of a weapon are calculated as follows:

• The base damage inflicted by a weapon is up to the GM. As a rule of thumb, most melee weapons will be 1d6 or smaller, most handguns will be 2d6, most rifles will be 3d6, most shotguns will be 4d6, most grenades will be 5d6, most anti-vehicle weapons will 6d6 or more. Base Damage: 1 point for 1/3 d6, 2 points for 1/2 d6, 3 points for 1d6, 4 points for 2d6, 5 points for 3d6, and so on.
• Rate Of Fire: 1 point for 1 shot per round, 2 points for a short burst per round (conferring an extra d6 on the damage), 3 points for full auto (confers an extra 2 1/2 d6 per round).
• Additional Damage: 1 point for each +1 to damage.
• Maximum Range: The above costs are added together and compared to the universal index table (see below) to determine the base range. The GM can then restrict this to an “effective range”, reducing the cost of the weapon 1 point for every 2 steps up the table. Weapons defined as “Melee” automatically have zero range, but additional range can then be bought as “reach”.

This cost is halved (round up) if the character takes an appropriate skill in the weapon’s use.

Note that until PCs buy an Expanded Meitner Field, there are limits on what weaponry a character can carry.

Equipment that PCs obtain in the course of an adventure but can’t take with them costs nothing.

If the equipment is completely consumed or used up in the course of an adventure, the PC is refunded all but 1 point of the actual cost.

Armor

The cost and characteristics of armor are calculated as follows:

• Hardness (1-10 scale) – each step on the scale increases the protection provided by the armor in the form of bonus Resistance.
• Coverage (1-4 scale) – each step on the scale increases the amount of protection provided by the armor by approximately 25%, so one-quarter coverage, half-coverage, three-quarters coverage, or whole-body coverage.
• These are multiplied together, The penalty imposed to Nimbleness is then decided based on what the GM considers reasonable and added to the total.
• The result divided by three is the cost of the armor in Skill Points.

This cost is halved (round up) if the character takes an appropriate skill in the armor’s use.

Note that until PCs buy an Expanded Meitner Field, there are limits on what weaponry a character can carry.

Equipment that PCs obtain in the course of an adventure but can’t take with them costs nothing.

If the equipment is completely consumed or used up in the course of an adventure, the PC is refunded all but 1 point of the actual cost.

Campaign MacGuffins

Some of the campaign limitations are so “big” that they have to be bought off in stages, for example constructing a reliable communications link back to Zener Command. Less-reliable comms will become available as plot devices in the meanwhile.

Each point of Karma expended for the purpose by any PC adds to the total invested in “Campaign MacGuffins” and is translated into a component of the whole or a refinement of the design or construction that will be incorporated into the next adventure.

These tangible Campaign MacGuffins will be given suitable names in-game, e.g. “crystal radio set”. When the GM feels that the characters have accumulated enough of them, an improvement will be made in one restriction. These amounts are being left flexible for now, but the rough scale is intended to be 4 points for a minor improvement, 10 points for a new capability, 20 points for the complete removal of a limitation.

A couple of side-notes before I continue.

XP Balance

First, part of the rationale behind the point costs for Campaign MacGuffins suggested above is that I want time for the players to get used to a given “state of the campaign” before the next upgrade, part of it refers to the value that I expect it to have in terms of advantages to the PCs, and part of it is controlling the amount of XP that the characters have available for improvement in their abilities.

Take another look at that XP-earning profile. To make an adventure interesting, there might be a couple of setbacks thrown into the plot. There could be as many as 3 base XP. That gets us to 7. If the PCs provide a permanent solution to whatever the problem is that the locals are experiencing when the PCs arrive, that gets multiplied by 4, to 28, and there are two PCs in this campaign, so that’s effectively 56 between them. On top of that, there’s 4-8 instant XP for those setbacks – so, “best-case” scenario from the PC’s point of view gives them as much as 64 xp to spend.

If a couple of points get expended by each on re-rolls, and maybe a couple more on “stroke of good luck” – call it 8 points between them – and if each keeps 8 points unspent for the next adventure, that leaves 40 points. 20 points spent on a major Campaign Macguffin, and that will leave 20 to spend on skills and stats – from a major adventure.

A smaller adventure might have one setback affecting both PCs, and would only be worth a base of 1 xp. Again assuming a best-case scenario, that’s (2+2)x4=16 xp each, or a total between them of 32 xp. With the same 8 spent, and the same 16 held in reserve by both, that leaves 8 – enough for a minor Campaign Macguffin and 2 points each for a small skill or stat improvement.

Those aren’t huge amounts, given perhaps half-a-dozen to a dozen skills and 18 stats.

Of course, the players might spend less, and keep a smaller reserve, and might already have a reserve from previous adventures – so they might have more to spend. At the same time, as the campaign proceeds, they will also have expenses for equipment to eat into those past reserves.

Although the numbers were tossed out fairly quickly in the first article, there was actually a lot of thought given to campaign balance behind the scenes. The goal is to give away enough experience that the campaign and PCs keep progressing, while not being enough to produce overwhelming change, and keeping the PCs hungry for more..

Min-Maxing is extremely difficult

Another key consideration behind the scenes is that the system is designed to give players multiple priorities to choose between, several of them contradictory if not competing. The goal is to make min-maxing very hard to achieve.

This mattered in the design because one of the expected players is very good at doing this sort of thing almost instinctively, while the other is not. Making it more difficult to find a clear path to overwhelming advantage should equalize the two.

In particular, the stat roll selection mechanism is intended to ensure that all characters have room to develop. Choosing a high INT brings skill flexibility, which will pay off over the longer term, but sucks a lot of points out of the character in the short term, when stat improvement is at its most efficient, and well-chosen skills are at their most valuable.

But each of the stats brings a benefit to the character, there are no obvious dump stats, and that’s not by accident.

Which brings me to the second article, and the populating of the Modifiers Table. This is a central feature of the game system. I have compiled everything into a single table (which fits on two pages) but I’ll break it down below. First, incidental rules; second the base values and progression rates; and third, the actual tables. In addition, near the end of the boxed-off recap, a two-page PDF putting everything together into a single two-page table (A4 in size, so if you print a copy you will want to take that into account).

Additional Rules

Impossible Chances

If it is impossible for the character to succeed, a character can try for a miracle success. For every extra dice they roll and count toward the total, they increase the target by +2, up to the point where a possible roll is achieved.

If a character can’t fail, the character can choose to add “extra benefits” to their attempt. The GM evaluates what benefit or trick the player wants to add as an increase in the difficulty. For every 2 over 18/-, the difficulty target gets reduced by 2 for every extra dice that the character gets to roll, while ignoring all but the lowest 3.

These are intended to (1) give PCs a chance at achieving a hail-Mary pass; and (2) offer them a benefit if they increase the chance of failing when success would otherwise be automatic, both as optional rules that the player (not the GM) can invoke.

Loads

A Balanced load counts for 1/2 of its actual weight. An unbalanced load counts for its full weight. A Distributed load counts for 1/3 of its actual weight.

Shared loads are calculated by dividing the total load by the number of participants gives each individual load, and the group can only move as fast, and as far, as it’s most heavily-burdened character.

Vehicle STR defines their carrying capacity, which is used for fuel, passengers, and luggage. These are considered balanced loads.

Target Size Adjustment

If the range modifier is greater than the target size modifier, add the Range Adjustment Modifier based on the difference. If the range modifier is smaller than the target size modifier, subtract the difference.

Cover

Cover reduces the effective size of the target as shown. So does choosing a more precise target vs attacking the full body of an opponent.

The system is based on +0 for fully-exposed human. -1 for head & torso or aiming for a flesh wound; -2 for head and neck; -3 for an open hand or a weapon in hand; -6 for an eye socket.

Extra Time Spent/Rushing

Taking extra time or rushing a task produces the modifier shown on the time chart. This does not apply to aiming weapons, which have a special interpretation of the time chart (see below). Simply pointing a weapon in the general direction of a target and pulling the trigger (i.e. suppression fire) is defined as having a -5 chance to hit.

Aiming

The time spent aiming is converted to a bonus to hit according to the time chart. Pistols capped at 2 sec, Rifles capped at 10 sec, Sniper attacks capped at 10 min.

Assistants

The number of assistants of skill level 1 less than the lead operator for a given bonus is shown on the table of values. For assistants of skill level 2 less, drop one level on the table, and so on.

Table Summary

Base Table Values:

Weight/Load: index 10 = 30kg
Distance/Range: index 0 = 1m
Target Size: index 0 = 1m² at 2m, 10=1000m² at 2m.
Aiming/Extra Time: This is non-linear, consult the table.
Delicacy: index 0 = 1 cm
Scaling: index 0 = x1
Assistants: 0 = None at skill -1, 1 step down for additional reductions in skill

Table Value Progressions:

Weight/Load: x2 Weight for +7 index value.
Distance/Range: x10 distance for +10 index value
Target Size: index +1 = Approx x2
Aiming/Extra Time: This is non-linear, consult the table.
Delicacy: index +1 = /2, index +2=/10.
Scaling: index +1 = x10
Assistants: index +1 = +(index+1), +1 after index 2

Tables

In addition to being presented below, the Zener Gate system tables have also been compiled into a 2-page PDF (in the format they were ultimately intended to take), which can be downloaded by clicking the icon to the left.

Weight/Load Table: -24 1.5 kg pistol + holster; two grenades, 4 loaves of bread -11 4 kg rifle, lightweight sleeping bag -8 5 kg pickax, riding saddle -7 6 kg portable astronomy telescope -6 6.5kg heavy sleeping bag -5 7 kg folding cot, cloth & aluminum -4 8 kg shot-put, baby -3 8.7 kg sleeping bag, arctic weight, wide-band radio receiver -2 9.6 kg large baby -1 10.5 kg typical overnight bag, portable TV set 0 12 kg aluminum 12′ ladder, M-60 light machine gun 1 13 kg 25 gallon barrel of water, western saddle, bicycle 2 14 kg heavy overnight bag, small wood & canvas folding table, 1-man tent 3 15 kg large metal toolbox, man-length of light rope 4 17 kg block-and-tackle 5 18.5 kg Encyclopedia Set 6 20 kg Small Child, Chainsaw, 2-man canvas tent 7 22.5 kg Small Missile, goat 8 25 kg Full Suitcase, Small TV 9 27 kg 4-man canvas tent 10 30 kg Movie camera 11 33 kg 12 36 kg 13 40 kg child 14 45 kg small sack of mail 15 50 kg older child 16 55 kg 17 60 kg early teen 18 66 kg 19 72kg 20 80 kg teenager, slightly-built adult 21 88 kg 22 100 kg healthy large adult 23 110 kg overweight/large adult 24 120 kg 25 132 kg 26 144 kg 27 160 kg 28 175 kg 29 200 kg piano 30 220 kg 31 240 kg 32 265 kg 33 290 kg 34 320 kg 35 350 kg 36 400 kg Large motorcycle 37 440kg

 

Distance/Range Table: -8 16cm pistol barrel, female hand -7 20 cm male hand & wrist -6 25 cm 1′ -5 32 cm -4 40 cm forearm & hand -3 50 cm forearm, hand, pistol barrel -2 64 cm ~2′ -1 80 cm arm’s length 0 1m 3′ 1 1.3m ~4.25′ 2 1.6m ~5.25′ 3 2m 3 normal steps, 4 2.5m ~8′ 5 3.2m ~10.5′ 6 4m 13.1′, approx length of a small car 7 5m ~1.5 small cars or approx 10 sec walk at slow pace (2km/h) 8 6.4m ~21′ (length of a semitrailer) 9 8m ~26′ 10 10m ~33′ 11 13m ~42.5′ (distance traveled in ~0.5 sec at 60mph or walked in ~10 sec at normal pace (4 km/h)) 12 16m ~52′ (distance traveled in ~0.5 sec at 75mph, or 1 sec at 35mph, or walked in ~10sec at brisk pace (6 km/h)) 13 20m >65′ 14 25m railway carriage, ~82′, distance traveled in 0.93 sec at 60mph) 15 32m ~105′ (distance traveled in ~2 sec at 35mph or walked in ~1min at slow pace (2km/h)) 16 40m ~130′ (distance traveled in 1.2 sec at 75mph) 17 50m 164′ 18 65m ~213′ (distance traveled in 2.4 sec at 60mph or walked in ~1 min at normal pace (4km/h)) 19 80m ~262.5′ (distance traveled in 2.4 sec at 75mph) 20 100m 328′ (distance walked in 1 min at brisk pace (6km/h)) 21 130m 426.5′ 22 160m 525′ 23 200m >655′ 24 250m ~820′, about 1 city block 25 320m 1050′ or 0.2 miles, ~1 sec at Mach 1 26 400m 1/4 mile 27 500m 0.31 miles 28 650m 0.4 miles, ~1 sec at Mach 2 29 800m 1/2 mile 30 1 km 0.6 miles, 1 sec at Mach 3 31 1.3 km 0.8 miles, 1 sec at Mach 4 32 1.6 km 1 mile (distance traveled in 1 min at 60 mph or 1 sec at Mach 5) 33 2 km 1.25 miles 34 2.5km 1.55 miles (distance traveled in ~1.25 min at 75mph, or in 7.33 sec at mach 1) 35 3.2km 2 miles 36 4km 2.5 miles (~6 sec at Mach 2) 37 5km 3.1 miles (2.9 sec at Mach 5)

 
Target Size Table:

Target Size Table (at 2m): -8 Keyhole -7 Ring, Bulls-eye -6 Eye Socket -5 Finger -4 Fist -3 Open hand or weapon in hand -2 Human head and neck -1 Human head and torso, or aiming for a Flesh Wound 0 1 square m Whole Human Body 1 Large Motorcycle, Doorway 2 Small Car Side View 3 Truck Side View 4 Aircraft control cabin 5 Fishing Trawler, Barn Door 6 Locomotive, Barn Side 7 Small Train 8 Large Train, Freighter (Side view), Small House 9 Large House 10 Small Mansion, Lighthouse 11 Large Mansion, Eiffel Tower 12 The Pentagon (top view) 13 Small Skyscraper (side view) 14 12,000 square m 15 25,000 square m 16 50,000 square m 17 1 square km 18 2 square km 19 4 square km 20 8 square km 21 15 square km 22 30 square km 23 60 square km 24 120 square km 25 250 square km

 

Range Adjustment: +1 1 +2 3 +3 7 +4 12 +5 18 +6 25 +7 33 +8 42 +9 52 +10 63

 

Aiming/Extra Time Table: -6 < x 0.1 -5 x 0.1 -4 x 0.2 -3 x 0.4 -2 x 0.6 -1 x 0.75 0 x 1 1 x 1.5 2 x 2 3 x 5 4 x 10 5 x 20 6 x 50 7 x 100 8 x 200 9 x 500 10 x 1,000 11 x 2,000 12 x 5,000 13 x 10,000+

 

Delicacy Table: -2 1m -1 5 cm 0 1 cm A marble, Bone thickness 1 5 mm Ants, Seeds 2 1 mm Pixel, Furniture tolerance 3 0.1 mm Human hair, Resolution limit – naked eye 4 0.05 mm Thickness, paper sheet; Human skin cell 5 0.01 mm Silk fiber, 1971 transistor 6 5 µm Cell nucleus, X Chromosome, Red blood cell 7 1 µm (1 micron) Y chromosome, clay particle, e coli bacterium 8 500 nm largest virus; 750 nm = red wavelength, 400 nm = violet wavelength 9 100 nm HIV Virus; Resolution limit – optical microscope 10 50 nm Hepatitis B virus Infrared wavelength 11 10 nm 25 nm = 2017 transistors 12 5 nm Cell membrane, DNA 13 1 nm = 100 Angstroms Buckyball 14 50 Angstroms Glucose molecule, Cesium atom 15 10 Angstroms 34 Å = Carbon atom 28 Å = Water molecule 16 5 Angstroms Resolution limit – electron microscope 17 1 Angstrom 3.1 Å = Hydrogen atom, 2.5 Å = Helium atom 18 0.5 Angstroms 19 1 picometer Gamma Ray wavelengths Resolution limit – theoretical gamma-ray microscope 20 50 femtometers 21 10 femtometers 15 fm = Uranium nucleus 22 5 femtometers 3 fm = Helium nucleus 23 1 femtometer Proton, Neutron 24 500 attometers 25 100 attometers smallest confirmed objects in existence

 
Scaling Table:

Scaling Table: 0 x1 1 x 10 (Magnifying glass, Jeweler’s loupe) High-quality precision manual tools 2 x 100 Scaling limit, precision manual tools 3 x1000 Primitive process-based designer tools, Computerized scaling tools 4 x10k Generation-2 process-based tools, Computerized scaling tools 5 x100k (Resolution limit, optical microscopes) Generation-3 process-based tools, Light/laser-based scaling tools 6 x 1M Generation-4 process-based tools, Energy-beam-based scaling tools 7 x 10M Virus-based nanotechnology, Generation-5 process-based tools 8 x 100M True nanomachines, the Nanocar 9 x 1000M (Resolution limit – Electron Microscopes) Process-based chemical tools, Buckyballs 10 x 10G or more (Sci-Fi Only)

 

Assistants Table: 0 None @ skill -1 1 @ skill -2 2-3 @ skill -3 4-7 @ skill -4 1 1 @ skill -1 2-3 @ skill -2 4-7 @ skill -3 8-12 @ skill -4 2 2-3 @ skill -1 4-7 @ skill -2 8-12 @ skill -3 13-18 @ skill -4 3 4-7 @ skill -1 8-12 @ skill -2 13-18 @ skill -3 19-25 @ skill -4 4 8-12 @ skill -1 13-18 @ skill -2 19-25 @ skill -3 26-33 @ skill -4 5 13-18 @ skill -1 19-25 @ skill -2 26-33 @ skill -3 34-42 @ skill -4 6 19-25 @ skill -1 26-33 @ skill -2 34-42 @ skill -3 43-52 @ skill -4 7 26-33 @ skill -1 34-42 @ skill -2 43-52 @ skill -3 53-63 @ skill -4 8 34-42 @ skill -1 43-52 @ skill -2 53-63 @ skill -3 64-75 @ skill -4 9 43-52 @ skill -1 53-63 @ skill -2 64-75 @ skill -3 76-88 @ skill -4 10 53-63 @ skill -1 64-75 @ skill -2 76-88 @ skill -3 89-102 @ skill -4 11 64-75 @ skill -1 76-88 @ skill -2 89-102 @ skill -3 103-117 @ skill -4 12 76-88 @ skill -1 89-102 @ skill -2 103-117 @ skill -3 118-133 @ skill -4 13 89-102 @ skill -1 103-117 @ skill -2 118-133 @ skill -3 134-150 @ skill -4 14 103-117 @ skill -1 118-133 @ skill -2 134-150 @ skill -3 151-168 @ skill -4

What Remains

At the end of the first article, in addition to the tables listed above (the populating of which consumed the entire second article), I listed a number of things that still needed to be completed before the rules would be ready to play – plus a few things that have come to light since. Answering those questions is what this third and final article is intended to achieve.

Hit Location

I have something of a love/hate relationship with Hit Location systems. They can greatly add to the verisimilitude of combat, or they can stifle it. They can be a pain to use, and a bigger pain to create, and they take up an inordinate amount of space in the rules. They make hidden assumptions – the Hero Games version assumes a bullet or other point attack, and don’t work well when considering a slashing attack or beam attack that transects the body in a relatively straight line that can start anywhere and go in any direction. It also fails spectacularly when shrapnel-style area attacks are involved. But, worst of all, I can never be sure that the modifiers applied to different locations are correct, and distrust the conflation and compounding of Hit Locations and Critical Hit damage.

I want the combat system in the Zener Gate campaign to be cinematic and fast-slowing, and that usually doesn’t accord well with a Hit Location mechanic.

Nevertheless, I have reluctantly convinced myself that a simple Hit Location system is required because of the presence of the target size / aiming rules, which distinguish between whole-body, head-and-torso, head, fist/heart, and eye-sized targets with different degrees of difficulty. If you hit with an attack in one of those bodily subdivisions, you need to know where; and if you miss with one of the smaller areas, does that mean that you’ve missed the entire target?

Because characters are already rolling multiple dice, I want to minimize the additions that this will entail, so I have decided on a simple d20-based system. However, under certain circumstances, the GM can mandate that a smaller die be used, increasing the likelihood of a particular result.

Hit Location Table: Whole-body Head & Torso Head & Neck Left Hand Right Hand    Eye    Location d% d% d% d% d% Skull/Scalp (automatic critical location) 1-5 1-7 1-10 1-2 1-2 1-15 Face 6-10 8-14 11-21 3-5 3-5 16-40 Neck (1 in 6 critical location) 11-15 15-21 22-28 6-10 6-10 41-55 Left chest (d12: 3 in 12 critical location) 16-30 22-35 29-42 11-20 11-15 56-60 Left upper arm (d6: 1-2=shoulder, 6=elbow) 31-35 36-42 43-49 21-30 – – Left abdomen/groin (1 in 6 critical location) 36-40 43-49 – 31-35 16-20 – Left forearm (d6: 6=left hand) 41-45 50-56 50-56 36-50 21-30 61-65 Right chest (1 in 6 critical location) 46-60 57-70 57-63 51-55 31-40 66-70 Right upper arm (d6: 1-2=shoulder, 6=elbow) 61-65 71-77 64-70 – 41-50 – Right abdomen/groin (1 in 6 critical location) 66-70 – – 56-60 51-55 – Right forearm (d6: 6=right hand) 71-75 78-84 71-77 61-70 56-70 71-75 Left leg (d12: 1-6=upper leg, 7=knee, 8-11= lower leg, 12=foot) 76-85 – – 71-80 (Upper Leg Only) 71-75 (Upper Leg Only) – Right leg (d12: 1-6=upper leg, 7=knee, 8-11= lower leg, 12=foot) 86-95 – – 81-85 (Upper Leg Only) 76-85 (Upper Leg Only) – Attacker’s choice, automatic critical location if one available 96-00 85-00 78-00 86-00 86-00 76-00

Hit Location Effects:

• Undefined Critical Location: +2 Trauma, -1, (-d3 on a crit) dmg to stat as shown below
• Non-Critical Location: +0 Trauma, -1 dmg to stat as shown below on critical

• Skull/Scalp +2 shock, +4 trauma, and (d8): 1-2=THEO, 3=ENC, 4-5=AWA, 6-8=PERS.
• Face +4 shock, +2 trauma and (d5): 1-2=CON, 3=THEO, 4-5=AWA.
• Eye +2 shock, +6 Trauma, and (d10, 2 rolls): 1=DEX, 2=ACC, 3-4=PRAC, 5-6=THEO, 7-9=AWA, 10=PERS.
• General Neck +1 shock, +2 Trauma, and (d5): 1-4=CON, 5=RES.
• General Chest +2 shock, +1 trauma, and (d8): 1=STR, 2-3=CON, 4-5=RES, 6=MEL, 7-8=END
• Shoulder (d4): 1-2=STR, 3-4=MEL
• General Upper Arm (d6): 1-2=STR, 3=DEX, 4=ACC, 5-6=MEL
• Elbow (d6): 1=STR, 2=DEX, 3=ACC, 4-5=MEL, 6=PRAC
• General Lower Arm (d6): 1=STR, 2-3=DEX, 4=ACC, 5=PRAC, 6=THEO
• Hand (d10, 2 rolls): 1=STR, 2-4=DEX, 5-6=ACC, 7-8=MEL, 9-10=PRAC
• General Abdomen/Groin +1 shock, +1 trauma, and (d12): 1=STR, 2-5=CON, 6-7=RES, 8=NIM, 9=MEL, 10-12=END
• General Upper Leg (d5): 1=STR, 2-3=NIM, 4-5=MEL
• Knee (d5): 1-2=STR, 3-4=NIM, 5=MEL
• General Lower Leg (d5): 1=STR, 2-4=NIM, 5=MEL
• Foot (d5): 1-3=NIM, 4-5=MEL

For the record, the risks by stat are:
STR: 14, CON: 12; RES 5; NIM 11; DEX 12; ACC 9, MEL 18; PRAC 10; THEO 8; ENC 1; AWA 10; PERS 5; END 5

or, to put them in sequence from greatest risk to lowest,
MEL 18,
STR 14,
CON, DEX (tie) 12,
NIM 11,
PRAC, AWA (tie) 10,
ACC 9,
THEO 8,
RES, PERS, END (tie) 5,
ENC 1

Initiative & Surprise

The GM should be aware of a character’s current AWA at all times, and have determined the collective AWA of the party using the “Assistance” rules. Whenever there is an opportunity for characters
to be surprised (Initiative 0) he should make a secret AWA check.

Initiative is based on 1d6, plus:

• 0 for the character with the lowest AWA, +1 for the character with the next lowest, and so on;
• 0 for the character with the highest MEL, +2 for the character with the next lowest, and so on.
• If it is more appropriate, the GM can use ACC instead of MEL.

Characters who cannot move automatically roll “1” on the d6. Characters who are surprised automatically roll “0” on the d6. Characters who are prone (GM determination) have their roll automatically capped at “3”. The modifiers given above only apply in rounds in which the character is not surprised.

Time

Time will be handled in three different ways within the campaign: Ordinary Time, Combat Time, and Micro-Time.

Ordinary Time

Ordinary Time is the most flexible. The Players tell the GM what they are doing and the GM advances time either to the conclusion of the task or to the next significant plot development, whichever comes first before prompting for a new choice of action by the PCs.

Combat Time

Combat Time is somewhat less flexible. Combat is cinematic in style, which is achieved by varying the length of combat turns. A combat turn is defined as the length of time required before a character has the opportunity to attack, based on their initiative numbers and combat abilities, in other words, until there is the opportunity for some change to occur in the status quo – typically 10 seconds, but it may be more or less at the GM’s discretion. If both sides have cover and are firing semi-automatic weapons with plenty of ammunition, it might be a minute or more before there is any opportunity to change the combat situation, for example, especially if both sides are concentrating on suppression fire, i.e. preventing the other side from getting a clean shot.

It follows that only a limited number of events can actually change the course of combat and end a combat turn. A mistake by one side or the other, a change in tactics, a change in the ammunition status of one or both forcing a change of tactics, the arrival of reinforcements, a lucky shot, or the conclusion of some sort of countdown.

The last requires some amplification – I was thinking of a situation in which characters are stalling for time while awaiting the outcome of some prior action already instituted, for example a character trying to pick a lock, or a grenade exploding, or some other such event.

Micro-Time

When characters have the same initiative value, combat will briefly enter micro-time. In sequence of lowest RES to highest, the characters with the same initiative value choose and announce their actions without those actions being carried out. This gives those with higher defensive values the chance to choose their actions taking into account what those of lesser values are going to attempt to do. The GM then resolves all those announced actions simultaneously.

The other function of micro-time is when fractions of a second make a difference. Without the internet, it’s hard to do basic research, but let’s assume (for the sake of argument) that a weapon/ammo combination has a muzzle velocity of 1000 m/s and the target is 250m away. That means that a single bullet will reach that target in 0.25 seconds. As noted in Article 2, “Mean Reaction Time for college-age individuals is about 160 milliseconds to detect an auditory stimulus, and approximately 190 milliseconds to detect visual stimulus. The mean reaction times for sprinters at the Beijing Olympics were 166 ms for males and 189 ms for females, but in one out of 1,000 starts they can achieve 109 ms and 121 ms, respectively.”

1000m/s is also near enough to the speed of sound, so there would be no auditory stimulus from the shot, but there might already have been some stimulus to which the target can react, or he might see a visual cue and react accordingly – 190 milliseconds would give just enough time to start doing something else if the character already has something in mind or is trained to react automatically to such cues. This can be enough to change the hit location roll, for example. Micro-time may be required to deal with events between the pulling of the trigger and the arrival of the round.

If the target has the next initiative, they can preempt their next action and automatically react. If not, they may attempt to do so by making a NIM save. The base modifier for such a save is determined by dividing the milliseconds by 60 (round off), finding the result on the time chart, and subtracting 10.

For example, 250ms = 4-and-a-sixth when divided by 60. That rounds to x4. Times four isn’t quite enough to get to the x5 value of +3, so the value is +2. Subtracting 10 gives a -8 modifier. Not good, but it could be worse!

The more time the target has to react, the easier this save becomes. 1000 ms divided by 60 = 50/3 =16 & 2/3, which rounds to x17. That isn’t enough to reach the x20 so the base modifier is the index that goes with x10, or +4. Subtracting 10 gives a -6 modifier.

Endurance

Ordinary activities cost 1 END per half hour. Strenuous non-combat activities (exercise, manual labor, forced march, etc) costs 4 END per hour. Combat costs 0 END per round, but each physical attack costs 2 END and each non-physical attack (just pull the trigger) 1 END..

Combat

I was going to look at d20 vs 3d6 or 4d6, but that choice was made for me when I thought up the extra dice for impossible results rule (summarized in the part 2 section above). But I haven’t talked about why some rolls are to be made on 3d6 and some on 4.

In a nutshell, it comes down to chance of failure. Skill checks operate on 3d6+modifiers vs half the stat+2, or less. So a stat of 20 needs 12 or less on 3d6, which is about a 65% chance of success if the modifiers are 0, about 55% for modifier of 1, and about 45% for a modifier of 2. A stat of 24 needs 14 or less on 3d6, so there is still a chance of failure even without modifiers. Stat Checks are run on the full stat value or less vs 4d6+modifiers. So a stat of 20 gives about 97.3% chance of failure without modifiers – but I expect to apply more modifiers to such rolls – and a stat of 24 gives a 100% chance of success without modifiers.

What should Combat rolls be made on? Well, it depends on the target numbers to be achieved. Defense will define what needs to be rolled for attack.

Defense

Defense = RES-15 + Armour, which is rated on a 0-10 scale (where 0 is none).

Attacks

A stat of 20 gives a defense score of 5+Armour. The attacker subtracts this from his attack stat roll + weapon skill ranks – if he has three of the latter (the maximum), and a stat of 20, that’s 15-5-armor, or 10-armor. To this, he adds any modifiers for target size, range, and aiming. For a human-sized whole-body target, that’s +0, and the range and aiming modifiers are designed to permit the attacker to cancel out one with another. So he needs to roll 10-armor or less on Nd6.

No armor: 10 or less. 1d6 and he always hits. 2d6 and he hits most of the time. 3d6 and it’s about 50-50. Adding armor reduces those chances – by up to 10. At maximum armor, he needs 0 or less – which says he can’t do it, regardless of whether N is 1, 2, 3, or 4. However, the “impossible result” rules offers a way out – he can increase the chance required by +2 and add a dice, repeating until he gets a possible success. 0+2=2 or less on N+1 dice – which works for 1d6. 0+2+2=4 or less on N+2 dice – which works for 2d6. 0+2+2+2=6 or less on N+3 dice, which works for 3d6. 0+2+2+2+2=8 or less on N+4 dice, which works for 4d6.

On 1d6, he would need 2 or less on 2d6 – a 1 in 36 chance.
On 2d6, he would need 4 or less on 4d6 – a 1 in 1296 chance.
On 3d6, he would need 6 or less on 6d6 – a 1 in 46,656 chance.
On 4d6, he would need 8 or less on 8d6 – a 1 in 1,679,616 chance.

Which of those results seems appropriate?

The only way to judge is to look at lesser armor values, and see how the chance changes – something I had hoped to avoid by going straight to the maximum-armor result.

• No armor: 10 or less. 1d6 and he always hits. 2d6 and he hits most of the time (~92%). 3d6 and it’s 52%. 4d6 and it’s about 17%. I have an immediate liking for the 2d6 and 3d6 results. The 4d6 roll is definitely out, and the 1d6 option doesn’t have enough variability, so forget it.
• Armour 1: 9 or less. 2d6 and he hits 83% of the time. 3d6 and it’s about 38%.
• Armour 2: 8 or less. 2d6 and he hits 72% or so of the time. 3d6 and it’s about 26%.
• Armour 3: 7 or less. 2d6 and he hits 58% of the time. 3d6 and it’s about 16%.
• Armour 4: 6 or less. 2d6 and he hits 42% of the time. 3d6 and it’s about 9%.
• Armour 5: 5 or less: 2d6 and he hits 28% of the time, a decline of about 1/3. 3d6 and its 4.6%, a loss of roughly half.
• Armour 6: 4 or less: 2d6 hits 17% of the time, a decline of almost half. 3d6 and it’s 1.85%, a loss of close to 2/3.
• Armour 7: 3 or less: 2d6 hits 8% of the time, half what it was. 3d6 hits 0.46% of the time, a massive loss.
• Armour 8: 2 or less on 2d6, i.e. 3% of the time, a loss of two-thirds. 2 or less on 3d6 becomes 4 or less on 4d6 hits 0.08% of the time, one sixth of the previous value.
• Armour 9: 1 or less on 2d6 becomes 3 or less on 3d6, a 0.46% chance of success, a massive drop of 85%. 1 or less on 3d6 becomes 3 or less on 4d6 becomes 5 or less on 5d6, a 0.128% chance of success – and, again, 1 sixth of the previous value.
• Finally, Armour 10: 0 or less on 2d6 becomes 2 or less on 3d6 becomes 4 or less on 4d6, a 0.08% chance, a loss of about almost 83%. 0 or less on 3d6 becomes 2 or less on 4d6 becomes 4 or less on 5d6 becomes 6 or less on 6d6, which is
  again exactly 1/6th of the previous chance of success, or 0.021%.

The pattern is clear – the 2d6 option is beset with wild inconsistencies in the change of chance of success as armor value rises, while the 3d6 option gives a neat, smooth pattern.

To sum up:

• Attacks cost 1 or 2 END (has to be paid before the attack proceeds).
• Subtract the target’s Defense score from the attacker’s attack stat roll (ACC or MEL).
• Add the attacker’s weapon skill ranks in the weapon being employed.
• Add any modifier for Target Size.
• Subtract any modifier for Range.
• Add any modifier for Aiming.
• This is what the attacker has to roll on 3d6 + any circumstantial modifiers applied by the GM in order for the attack to succeed.
• If the character rolled all 1’s on the dice and that is less than what they needed to hit, they have achieved a critical hit. This may do additional damage as indicated on the hit location table.
• if the attack succeeded, roll d% on the appropriate hit location table. Roll on any hit location sub-table. Roll to select the stat impacted as indicated on the hit location effects chart.
• If a critical hit results in no additional damage, the attacker is at +2 to attack the same target next combat round.

An attack that misses by no more than 5, when the target was smaller than whole-body for reasons other than cover will hit the next larger area, but will achieve -1 Shock and -1 Trauma.

An attack that misses by no more than 10, when the target was smaller than head+torso for reasons other than cover, uses the hit location chart two steps up, achieves -2 shock and zero trauma.

Damage & Recovery

Damage in the Zener Gate system comes in 4 varieties: Trauma, Shock, Stat, and Radiation.

• TRAUMA is physical damage. It is based on the weapon type as was described under equipment in the first article, plus any bonus trauma from hit location, and less any armor worn by the target. It subtracts from current hit points. Characters heal 1/3 of the total trauma inflicted (round up) after 1 day’s peaceful recuperation & rest, plus any healing ranks in medical equipment or skill ranks from a medical professional. The balance is healed at the rate of 1 point per additional day of rest, again plus 1 less per day than any healing ranks in medical equipment or skill ranks from a medical professional (minimum 1). This is deliberately unrealistically fast.
• SHOCK is stun damage that may produce unconsciousness, but not death. It’s base value is 1/2 TRAUMA done in an attack (round up), plus 1d6, plus any bonus trauma from hit location. If Shock exceeds the character’s Shock Threshold in 1 round, the character must make a CON save or be rendered unconscious for d10-4 seconds of time on the universal scale. For every point that the shock threshold is exceeded, there is a -1 penalty to the save and +1 modifier to the time roll. If the character makes this saving roll, he suffers only 1/2 the trauma indicated on the die roll + any bonus from hit location. If the cumulative Shock received over all attacks exceeds the character’s Hit Points, he falls unconscious for d10-7 minutes time on the universal scale. A character recovers 1/3 of accumulated shock damage at the end of combat or by skipping an action during combat, recovers another 1/3 from 40-CON minutes rest post-combat, and recovers the remainder after at least 4 hrs sleep.
• END is expended by various actions. d6 END can be recovered by skipping 2 successive rounds in combat or resting for 30 minutes in non-combat. The balance of any loss is recovered at the rate of 1 point for every hour of rest, or 30 minutes of sleep.
• Stat damage is inflicted by trauma according to location. The GM will incorporate any stat damage in his description of the outcome of an attack. Players are encouraged to roleplay accordingly. Stat damage reduces the affected stat by the indicated amount. 1/2 (round up) of any stat damage to 1/2 of the stats which have been reduced (round down) is recovered by 8 hours of sleep in a comfortable setting, or 1/4 (round up) to 1/4 (round down) from 8 hours of sleep in a less comfortable setting e.g. when camping. If multiple stats have been reduced, the character selects which stats experience this recovery. Half of the remainder (round up) can be healed at the same time as trauma at the rate of 1 point to 1/2 (round down) the affected stats. Medical care (ranks in appropriate skill) and equipment (ranks equivalent) increases one or both of these values, the player decides how this bonus is to be distributed. The remainder also heals at this rate but such healing can only commence when the character is completely free of Trauma damage. Note that stat losses reduce a character’s abilities immediately, which may detrimentally impact his combat capabilities.
• Radiation Damage is a special case that is dealt with separately below.

A quick example: A character is shot with a rifle for 2d6 trauma. He has armor 5. The attacker rolls 8 points of trauma damage. The hit location adds 1 additional trauma, for a total of 9-5=4 points. This is halved to give base shock of 2, plus 1d6, plus 2 additional shock from the hit location [chest], for a total of d6+4; the attacker rolls an 8, exceeding the SHOCK threshold of the target by 2. The character must make a CON save at -2 or fall unconscious for d10-4+2 on the time chart in seconds. The character fails and rolls a 6; adding the modifiers shown results in a 4. The character is unconscious for 10 seconds, and is forced to miss an action. He recovers 1/3 of the shock damage inflicted, rounding up, i.e. 3 points, at the end of that missed round, and since he was at -2, he awakens with 1 point of Shock Threshold; he would be well advised to take an additional round or two to steady himself.

The attack was not a critical hit and did not strike a Critical Location, so it inflicts 1 point of damage to a stat. The character rolls 1d8 as indicated on the Chest Effects chart and gets a 4, so the character loses 1 point of RES, effectively reducing his defenses by 1 for subsequent rounds of combat.

Death

If a character reaches zero or less in any stat other than their Shock Pool or Threshold, they are dying. Each round, they must make a CON roll to survive, with a +1 penalty cumulative per round including the first round affected. Medical attention (an appropriate skill check) each round can convert that +1 to a -1. If the character receives such attention with no penalty in effect and makes his CON check, he is restored to 1 point in the traumatized stat and is no longer dying.

For example, a character goes to -2 hit points in round D of combat. He must make a CON roll immediately or die. He succeeds and can act in round D. Next round, he must make another CON roll at +1 to the die roll. He again succeeds, and can act in round D+1. In round D+2, he must make another CON roll at +2 to the die roll. He succeeds and once again can act. In the round D+3, he receives medical attention which succeeds (an appropriate skill check is made), so the CON check penalty reduces from +2 to +1 instead of worsening to +3. He again succeeds, and can act. In round D+4, he again receives successful medical aid, so the +1 becomes a +0 instead of worsening. He makes his CON check at +0 to the die roll, so he is restored to 1 HP.

Other Armour Effects

Armour comes in 10 grades of effectiveness, which carry various effects on the stats of the wearer.

Resistance Modifier

Armour type 0 (i.e. none) reduces Resistance by 4.
Armour type 1 reduces Resistance by 3.
Armour type 2 reduces Resistance by 2.
Armour type 3 reduces Resistance by 1.

Nimbleness Modifier

Armour type 10 reduces NIM by 4.
Armour type 9 reduces NIM by 3.
Armour type 8 reduces NIM by 3.
Armour type 7 reduces NIM by 2.
Armour type 6 reduces NIM by 2.
Armour type 5 reduces NIM by 1.
Armour type 4 reduces NIM by 1.
Armour from a low-technology world adds 1, 2, or even 3 to the armor type for the purposes of determining NIM modifier.
Armour from a high-technology world subtracts 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 from the armor type for the purposes of determining NIM modifier.

Accuracy Modifier

Odd-numbered armors of type 5 and above reduce Accuracy by 1 every second armor type, i.e.
Armour type 10 reduces ACC by 3.
Armour type 9 reduces ACC by 3.
Armour type 8 reduces ACC by 2.
Armour type 7 reduces ACC by 2.
Armour type 6 reduces ACC by 1.
Armour type 5 reduces ACC by 1.
Armour from a low-technology world adds 1, 2, or even 3 to the armor type for the purposes of determining ACC modifier.
Armour from a high-technology world subtracts 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 from the armor type for the purposes of determining ACC modifier.

Melee Modifier

Even-numbered armors of type 6 and above reduce Melee by 2 every second armor type, i.e.
Armour type 10 reduces MEL by 6.
Armour type 9 reduces MEL by 4.
Armour type 8 reduces MEL by 4.
Armour type 7 reduces MEL by 2.
Armour type 6 reduces MEL by 2.
Armour from a low-technology world adds 1, 2, or even 3 to the armor type for the purposes of determining MEL modifier.
Armour from a high-technology world subtracts 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 from the armor type for the purposes of determining MEL modifier.

Dexterity Modifier

Every 2nd Armour type starting at type 4 confers a DEX penalty
Armour type 10 reduces DEX by 6.
Armour type 9 reduces DEX by 4.
Armour type 8 reduces DEX by 4.
Armour
type 7 reduces DEX by 2.
Armour type 6 reduces DEX by 2.
Armour type 5 reduces DEX by 1.
Armour type 4 reduces DEX by 1.

Languages

Languages are defined by era, and subdivided into spoken, heard, written and read. “Spoken” is the character’s ability to speak the language, “Heard” is the character’s ability to understand it when it is spoken to them. “Written” is the character’s ability to write something in the language, while “Read” is the character’s ability to read something written in the language.

Spoken and Heard form a natural pair, as do Written and Read.

Languages also have a different meaning by Ranks. 3 ranks = colloquial, 2 ranks = functional, 1 rank = conversational, 0 ranks = marginal.

Characters only purchase one aspect of a non-native language. They automatically get 1 rank less in the other part of the natural pair and 2 ranks less in the others. Each step removed from the defining era also reduces the ranks by between 0 and 0.5 – the amount varies. Ranks are rounded down, but this means that several eras will be at the same rank. Ranks round down except for ranks 0-point-something, which round up, i.e. once you have a language, you always have at least one rank in that language if the reduction is due to era.

Which aspect of a language that a character purchases will depend on in-game circumstances and opportunity, except when buying starting languages.

Example: 1920s Spanish:

The next significant event in Spanish history at the international scale was the formation of the EU, which saw a number of words from other languages start to migrate across borders. As a result of that, plus technological change, the language of the early 21st century is also a little different from the pre-EU language. In particular, cultural referents have changed. To an NPC from that time period, a PC with the example dialect would have an old-fashioned, almost archaic manner of speaking.

Era differences are not precise and are usually simply estimated by the GM.

Starting Languages

Characters are possessed of a rare genetic quirk that enables them to survive transit through a Zener Gate Transition. This genetic anomaly, for a still-unexplained reason, also makes Chronosquad members able to learn languages really quickly. This gift will be largely untapped prior to the start of play, but that doesn’t mean that a character starts without language skills.

For every 5 points in the INT stat, the character may select one free language to have at one rank in one aspect.

The character gets their native language for free, 3 ranks in all four disciplines. However, for each rank that they reduce one of these values, a character gets two to use in purchasing other languages. In addition, the character may spend ranks equal to their LAN skill in improving or acquiring additional languages.

It costs 1 point to buy a language skill at 0 ranks in all four aspects, Each additional point spent improves one of the aspects by 1 rank, with the others automatically increasing as explained above.

In-game language usage

Language skills are used primarily as an aide to roleplaying. When necessary, the GM may require a language roll (which is why the system is modeled on the skills system – most notably, when acquiring additional language skills in-game, as described below. Zero ranks gives a modifier of +15, one rank gives +10, two gives +5, and three gives +0.

In-game language acquisition & improvement

Languages can be obtained through immersion and attempted usage. To do so, the character spends the required time period as indicated below and makes a LAN check. If he succeeds, he acquires a rank in the language skill.

3 hours acquires the local language at 0 ranks, 6 hours more adds a 1st rank in one discipline, 12 hours more adds a second, and 24 hours more takes the ranks to 3.

If the process is interrupted by a Zener transition, it resumes at the next opportunity. If there is an era shift (quite likely), the modifier due to era must be “paid off” first.

Example:
A character acquires 1 rank of 16th century French “in the field” before a Zener Transition. At a future point, he finds himself in Russia during the Napoleonic invasion, surrounded by Troops speaking 18th century French (1 era difference). If not for the era difference, 12 hours of exposure to the more modern language would suffice to add a rank to his 16th century French, but because of the era difference, he has to first spend 6 hours (1 rank) adjusting his “ear” to the more modern usage. At the end of that time he needs to make a LAN check at +15 to complete that adjustment period. If he succeeds, the clock starts on the 12-hour interval; if not, the 6-hour interval restarts.

Alternatively, the character can choose to begin acquiring 18th Century French in addition to his 16th Century French. This restarts his “language experience clock” at zero, but his expertise in 16th Century French counts as a related skill, giving him +2 to his Language Rolls and avoiding the -1 (or whatever it might be) for era differences.

Of course, the normal mechanics surrounding die rolls are also in force – characters can use experience/karma to improve their chances or re-roll a failed roll, and in particular, characters can choose to delay the roll, spending extra time to improve the likelihood of success.

Spot/Listen Checks

From time to time, it will be necessary to determine whether or not characters notice something. This is handled as a simple AWA check, but (unlike most skills), the Range and Size modifiers are relevant. In addition, if the characters advise that they are actively looking out for something, they may get up to -5 improvement in the modifiers.

Radiation Damage

Performing a Zener Gate Transition exposes the Temporanaut to an unusual form of radiation consisting of accelerated particles and energies. Much of this will be Gamma Radiation but some will be other forms in which atomic particles within the bodies of the Temporanauts are subjected to extreme accelerations. One of the principle side effects of the unusual genetic makeup required to serve on a Chronosquad is a resistance to this radiation, which would otherwise kill quite quickly. (Side-note: It is anticipated that anti-radiation therapies of varying efficacy will become available to PCs from time to time. Supplies of these therapies will be strongly controlled by the GM to ensure that Radiation Damage remains a subject of concern to the PCs).

Radiation damage is handled as a separate category of long-term damage to the CON and HP of the character. Each time a character transitions between worlds/times, the character must make a CON roll at +15. If the character succeeds, he takes 1 point of long-term CON damage and d3 points of Trauma and Shock. If the character fails, the consequences are more severe. According to the circumstances, the GM rules the Zener Transition to be a category 1, 2, or 3 Event.

Category-1 events are the least damaging, and reflect a tranquil jump with minimal temporal change. Category-2 events are normal Transitions. A category 3 would represent entering a Zener Transition while under fire from particle-beam weapons or something of the sort, i.e. some sort of external conditions that make the Transition more damaging or problematic.

In a Category-1 Transition, the GM rolls 1d6. The character takes 1/2 of this as long-term CON damage and the entire amount as ordinary Shock and Trauma.

In a Category-2 Transition, the GM rolls 1d6. The character takes this amount as long-term CON damage and the result+6 as ordinary Shock and Trauma damage, some of which may be caused by an awkward landing on “arrival”.

With a Category-3 Transition, the GM has a choice: long-term damage or more severe short-term damage. The latter makes life more difficult for the PCs in the long term with less immediate threat, the latter reduces the long-term dangers but puts the characters at greater risk of imminent death and will almost certainly produce short-term complications in the form of a period of unconsciousness, which the GM is fully entitled to take advantage of in terms of capturing the characters or otherwise putting them into challenging circumstances in order to kick-start the adventure.

Category-3A Transitions are the long-term options. The GM rolls 2d6 long-term CON damage and halves the result to determine the Shock and Trauma suffered. Category-3B transitions do 1d6 long-term CON damage and 2d6+3 Shock and Trauma. The frequency of both types of Category-3 event will be about the same, with the GM favoring Category 3A early and saving his Category 3B events for when long-term CON loss begins to threaten the lives of the PCs.

Every successive Zener Transition after the first adds +1 to the damages experienced by the Temporanaut. If the fourth Zener Transition is a Category-1 event, for example, the character would experience 1/2 d6 +3 temporary CON damage and 1d6+3 shock and trauma. If the fifth transition is also a Category-1 event, the character would suffer 1/2 d6 +4 temporary CON damage and 1d6+4 shock and trauma, and so on.

Long-term CON damage is recovered differently to other forms of stat
damage. 24 hours after first exposure, the character regains up to 6 points of such damage, provided that this period includes at least 6 hours of restful sleep or 9 hours of less-comfortable rest. Then it’s 4, 2, and 1. Thereafter, it’s one every 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, and so on.

Anti-Radiation Therapies have four aspects.

• 1, 2, or 3 points of Immediate long-term CON loss healed.
• d3 to 3d6 reduction in the “extra damage” caused by repeated Transitions.
• d3 to 3d6 reduction in the steps down the “Recovery Time” track.
• d6 to 3d6 additional Shock damage suffered.
• d3 to 2d6 additional Trauma damage suffered.

Most Therapies will represent a combination of all four in some measure. As a general rule, the more advanced the treatment, the more effective it will be with fewer side-effects. Characters may choose to experience up to 1/2 the Shock and Trauma damage inflicted as END damage, recovered normally after a delay of 4d6 hours, but the reduction has to be the same in both – if you reduce trauma by 4 you must also reduce shock by 4, suffering 8 END loss while the treatment takes effect.

Note that in most societies, significant radiation exposure (warranting the issuing of Anti-radiation Therapies) is a politically/criminally significant event that will attract unwanted attention to the Temporanaut. This can only be avoided by stealing the Therapeutic medication from an appropriate facility.

Some anti-radiation therapies reduce in efficacy with repeated usage. These are potent medications that are not intended for repeated exposures – that simply doesn’t happen in normal life, and the developers would have no reason to test for it. The obvious exception would be any world which had suffered a nuclear war, where repeated exposures to radiation would be more commonplace (though no less concerning to officials).

At a metagame level, Radiation Exposure is intended to serve as a handicap to the PCs, not a punishment or direct threat. Rather than kill a PC with CON Loss, the GM is free to “transfer” the long-term CON loss to some other affected stat. This is healed as though it were still long-term CON loss.

If characters continue to Transition without receiving appropriate treatment for the accumulated radiation damage, their health will deteriorate (CON loss) to the point where other bodily functions begin to break down.

Note that CON losses from radiation have no effect on calculated stats – Hit Points, END, and Shock Resistance remain at the values set during character generation except as indicated by combat damage.

Cybernetic Enhancement

It may become possible for characters to undergo Cybernetic Enhancement in some time frames through the purchase and installation of appropriate “equipment”. Characters should think about this very carefully; side-effects and complications are always possible, power supplies may be affected strangely by Transitions, and repairs might be difficult or impossible to achieve in other time frames. Biological functions might be more limited, but they are also going to be more reliable, and the GM should have no compunction about taking advantage of the opportunities they afford for making life more difficult for PCs.

Other Drugs and Medications

It is anticipated that in some time frames, the characters will be able to come into possession of various other medications that are “Stat Enhancing”. These provide short-term gains in one stat or another, usually in the form of a die roll, and a loss to another stat (which may be deferred until after the medication wears off). As a general rule of thumb, the costs of using such a medication will be twice the short-term gain. There may be other side-effects as well.

For example, “Stimutabs” provide +1d3 STR for 1d3+3 hours (the players should know the first result and not the second). Using the enhanced STR costs 1 additional END and when the drug wears off, 1d6+6 points of damage divided evenly between NIM, DEX, and ACC – the character experiences “The Shakes” – for 60 x 1d6/4 minutes.

Are such drugs worth the consequences? Depends on the circumstances, that’s something that only the PC can judge (or, in some cases, a medical professional).

Other Medical Treatments

It is anticipated that some time-frames will have other forms of advanced healing treatment. This may be as simple and effective as the use of a hyperbaric chambour (can increase recovery from trauma and some stat losses 3-fold) or as complex as nanotech “restoratives” that repair stat damage, heal broken bones, etc. All of these technologies are “use at your own risk”. But remember that the goal is for the PCs to have adventures, mostly action-oriented; crippling that capability is not in the GM’s game plan.

Character Sheet

Although it’s untested and may require tweaking, I have also created a two-page character sheet to accompany the game system, which can be downloaded by clicking the icon to the right.

‘chorme’ from freeimages.com / Michel Amaro (which was possibly meant to be named ‘chrome’…)

The Elephant In The Gray Room is a metaphor that I have created to represent Plot Holes.

These are matters of huge significance or importance that everyone is overlooking because they are not immediately obvious, but that once you see one, you can never forget that it’s there.

This is a series about methods of fix plot holes so that even when they get noticed, it’s just a spur to your creativity and not a complete calamity.

Part one introduced the topic and offered a system for determining how critical the problem was, and the concept of matching the severity of the solution to that measure of criticality (you can read it here if you need to get up to speed).

Part two
dealt with minor repairs, the sort of things you can do to handle small problems before they have time to metastasize into something nastier.

Part three dealt with more serious repair techniques for plot holes of greater significance to the campaign in the medium term.

Part four is about to deal with plot holes that lead to substantial structural problems.

And part five, which will conclude the series, will deal with catastrophic problems and the critical repair techniques needed to correct them. And I hope you never need them – though, if you GM for long enough, the odds are that you will, eventually.

There are times when you discover that you’ve made a mistake that threatens to derail your whole campaign. This could be an NPC who is too powerful for the PCs, or a PC that is too powerful for the NPCs, or an NPC who is not powerful enough to pose the kind of threat that will drive the campaign forward. It could be that your long-term plotline has collapsed.

And that’s only about half of the possibilities! But we’re talking here about plot holes, and those are a specific sub-type of structural defect, though a broad one. What the structural problems under this umbrella have in common is that the campaign or some component of it, either as it will be or as it is expected to be, doesn’t work, doesn’t make sense, or conflicts with the campaign’s past or the standards of good GMing. Conflicting elements could be plot, or character, or metaplot, or history, or even exotic elements like prophecies.

(One GM I know once told me about an in-game prophecy that was supposed to define the plot outcome of events surrounding a key NPC, only for that NPC to be written out of the campaign in the first adventure – leaving the prophetic road-map of the campaign floating around and not really connecting with anything, even though it had been used as a guide to PC generation, i.e. the PCs were given roles to interpret that fulfilled different lines within the prophecy…)

Solutions from Part 2

You should never use an elephant gun when all you need is a fly swatter. It doesn’t happen often that you can fix a major problem with a minor repair, but you should never ignore the possibility.

The sooner you spot the problem, the more likely it is that the cumulative effects of a sustained smaller corrective mechanism can be used to fix it, simply because the problem has had that much less time to spawn domino consequences. However, the system of classification outlined in part 1 should minimize this possibility; you only get to a classification of “Major Structural Problem” if a smaller solution won’t solve your problem.

But perhaps the solution is simply inobvious, or a smaller solution can be part of solving the bigger problem, and so it is worth the effort to run through the solutions that have been offered thus far in the series to determine what, if any, role they might play in solving it.

Minor Repair Technique #1: Ignore the problem

This isn’t really a solution to problems of this scale, which are only assigned that status if they pose a significant threat to the campaign. Ignoring them and hoping they will go away only lets small problems become large and large problems breed more smaller ones.

Minor Repair Technique #2: Acknowledge and ignore

It’s possible but unlikely that this technique will offer any real solution to the situation, again because of the significance of the problems. I regard this as very much a last resort.

Minor Repair Technique #3: Depth Of Character

If the problem is one of characterization, this might hold a viable solution. Most of the time, the inconsistency is too fundamental for that to be the case, but this is such a simple solution that the problem needs to be considered in this context just in case this is one of those rare occasions.

Minor Repair Technique #4: NPCs are humanoid, too

You’re the main villain in the campaign, passionate – even driven – and have been obsessively planning your ultimate victory for centuries, polishing every nuance. And so far, everything has been going in accordance with that plan. That really rules out some sort of human error, unless the character can be given a massive conceptual blind spot, a key assumption that can remain a hidden flaw until the very last minute. I’ve used that technique on a number of occasions deliberately, but never had to use it to get out of plot hole – nevertheless, it should be a viable solution in some cases.

Minor Repair Technique #5: Retroactive Explanation

You’ve spent years carefully pruning and shaping the big finish to your campaign, only to tell the players “okay, go home and I’ll let you know what happens”. You can see immediately why this won’t work for this scale of problem. Bad enough for it to take place in the middle of the campaign, it’s so far removed from ideal at the end of a campaign that it’s not even worth considering.

Minor Repair Technique #6: The Wisdom Of Players

In theory, this is a viable solution. In practice, it means upsetting the apple-cart and letting the cat out of the bag about everything you’ve been building toward in the campaign, deflating and derailing the endgame. This may be suitable to smaller problems, but it is definitely not an option when problems become this serious.

Solutions from Part 3

There is an extent to which Major Structural Problems are simply “Significant Problems” with added urgency, seriousness, or repercussions. That means that the solutions discussed in detail the last part of this series need to be given careful consideration.

Significant Repair Technique #1: A New Plot Device

Everything written about this solution last time around remains valid. It can solve many problems, even of this scale. The caveat stated last time was that if you “Get it right and all is well; get it wrong, and you may do more damage than the original problem would have caused, or accelerated the onset of critical damage.” And that poses serious handicaps to the use of this technique to solve urgent structural problems; the seriousness of the problems amplifies and accentuates the risks and dangers. It therefore becomes even more critical that the restrictions and constraints described last time are observed.

At the same time, the scale of the problems posed by Major Structural Issues make it that much harder to get the solution right, increasing the risk of an unsatisfactory outcome. So this is a solution that can be used, but which requires extreme care.

Significant Repair Technique #2: Historical Event Narrative Revisit

“I only pull this weapon out of my toolkit when there is some reason why it can’t be roleplayed effectively. It’s no fun for the players to sit and listen to the GM for hour after hour, for example”. …”you may have enough time to do the job, or you may not, and you won’t know until the deadline begins to loom.” “You do have a ‘Plan B’, right? Because if you don’t, you can find that your crisis has escalated.”

All of which may be how you came to be in this mess in the first place.

This may offer a solution – with heavy emphasis and underlining on the word ‘may’. Urgency is always a factor when a crisis escalates, and Urgency doesn’t work well with this technique. Nor do you have unlimited time – the closer you get to the end of a campaign, the less scope you have for fill-ins and other forms of procrastination that might have bought you precious time earlier in the campaign.

This is an all-or-nothing solution, with no dodging the bullet if the deadline gets missed. Add in the fact that it’s at best a second cousin to a satisfactory answer, and it’s not something that I would either recommend or contemplate unless I was completely sure that no matter what interruptions took place I would be finished in ample time – and then only if there was no better solution. This is, at best, the penultimate resort when it comes to Major Structural Issues.

Significant Repair Technique #3: A Corrective Scene or Encounter

This solution down-sizes the concept of “a new plot device” to a retcon that can be dealt with in a single scene or encounter. Since I have already made the point that “a new plot device” may not be big enough and splashy enough to resolve a problem of this magnitude, it becomes extremely unlikely that this technique will suffice. That said, it may once have been the solution of choice – before the problem became in-your-face-urgent.

Major Structural Repair Techniques

Practicalities dictate that while some of the solutions already presented may hold promise, they present such difficulties or limits of application that most of the time, you will need to resort to a bespoke solution intentionally geared to this scale of problem. Your campaign is heading in the wrong direction for some reason, a head-on collision with the most substantial of nothings, a plot sinkhole so vast and central to the campaign that it threatens to swallow you and your campaign whole. This is not a time for wishful thinking and pie-in-the-sky solutions that might work if they can only be ready to implement in time – almost certainly, the solution will need to be as drastic as the problem is critical.

There are three such solutions. I’ve employed them all at one time or another.

Major Structural Repair Technique #1: A Corrective Adventure

The first is also the least likely to be sufficient, but an adventure for the sole purpose of filling the plot hole with something can be a viable solution to the problem. Your logic must be ironclad and the comprehensiveness of the solution equal to the problem at hand; half-measures won’t solve these problems, not any more. You may need to throw your campaign plan out the window and then see what you can salvage after the fact; depending on the scope of the issue and the lengths you have to go to in patching it, this might need to be “the adventure in which the whole campaign changes”.

I once discovered that due to the evolution of in-game circumstances, a master villain’s grand plot had been rendered an anticlimax. So I wrote an adventure in which he achieved everything he had been working toward since adventure1 of the campaign, only to discover that it wasn’t what he expected – so he renounced that prize and turned his sights toward a new goal. This required cannibalizing parts of the intended big finish and impacted on every adventure that remained between the Event and the Campaign Climax, altering motivations, objective, context, circumstances, moral restrictions, schemes, and personality.

An adventure in which the major objective is to alter the status quo is easy. Keeping it contained to a sufficient extent that it remains a single adventure is more difficult.

Major Structural Repair Technique #2: A New Layer Of Plot

In many ways, it’s easier to institute a series of changes in the form of a new layer of plot. This almost certainly entails extending the campaign, but that’s a small price to pay. It’s easier for three reasons: first, you aren’t trying to shoehorn the solutions to all your difficulties into one adventure, they are spread out amongst several; second, you don’t need to come up with everything all at once; parts of the solution can be deferred, making the imminent “trigger” adventure smaller in scope and hence, easier to write; and third, adding a new strand to the campaign freshens everything up.

The first Zenith-3 campaign was headed toward a big finish that would have been okay, but not spectacular, but not everything was ready for the sequel campaign. So I added a new layer of plot (and a number of self-contained adventures on the side) that extended the campaign by almost two years while I got my ducks in a row. Because of the changed in-game context and circumstances, the original plans for the big finish (which weren’t all that satisfactory) had to be scrapped, and were replaced with something altogether better, which seemed a lot less superficial and more tightly bound to events within the campaign – dating all the way back to their first adventure.

The big trick is to make it seem like the new plot layer was inevitable, and that’s easy to do if you base in on other things that have been established within the game. Whereas you may have previously employed Occam’s Razor and chosen the simplest explanation for an in-game event, under the new paradigm that event was but the tip of the newly-inserted iceberg.

Major Structural Repair Technique #3: Radical Character Overhaul/Transformation

The third solution works well in cases where the institution of a new layer of plot won’t solve the problem outright. It’s kind of like the “Depth Of Character” on steroids. Radically transforming an NPC or a PC so that the plot hole no longer exists can be seen as a drastic step, but – like most do-overs – it gives you a second chance to get things right with the benefit of hindsight.

NB: Don’t change a PC without the player’s permission!

To implement this solution, you need a triggering event, a reason for that event completely reshaping the character (at an in-game level, exposing potentials within the character that were always there beneath the surface), and specifics of the transformation. There should be consequences and ripples, and your plans for every adventure subsequent to the event needs to be reexamined and potentially rewritten to accommodate the changes. And you need an in-game reason why these potentials weren’t already being exploited. At a metagame level, the reasons will be painfully obvious, but everything that happens in or is justified by metagame events needs to be paired with in-game explanations.

Because this is only changing a single character, it can be the simplest of solutions; but because of the implications, it can also be the most complicated. As I said, every adventure still to be run within the campaign can be affected. This solution therefore requires careful thought and planning.

Major problems with an attached urgency can be solved, but they often entail drastic and decisive measures. The window for alternatives is small, and frequently closed before you’re even aware there is a problem. The good news is that each of these solutions can also be characterized as an opportunity; at the very least, you are giving your campaign a polish and fresh lick of paint..

That’s also true of most of the solutions that will be examined in Part 5 of this series, dealing with critical repairs – but they are necessarily so comprehensive in scope and so much work to implement that it can be hard to appreciate the positive benefits that they can yield, as you’ll see in the concluding article in this series.

A good GM’s comfort zone (green) covers most of the territory and his Range (green + yellow) is growing with only a few problem areas (red). This article simplifies this into a ‘Yes – within Range’ / ‘No – out of Range’ question, but the reality is a little more complex and nuanced, and I thought it important to acknowledge that.

For the last two days, what was an intermittent telephone and internet problem caused by excessive line noise has become no telephone and internet service at all. So I will be posting this via an Internet Cafe, but it will be the last post published until this mess is sorted out. Hopefully, that means that there will be a new post Monday and aside from this note, you’ll never know there was a disruption.

What is the difference between a good actor and a great actor? And what do those questions have to do with roleplaying?

Tell you what, let’s come back to those questions in a moment.

Shoes That Fit

To really succeed in playing a role, whoever is doing so – player or GM – needs to be able to immerse themselves in that role. You need to understand how that character thinks, which is often facilitated by understanding why the character thinks that way.

But that’s often not enough to give more than a wooden, superficial performance as the character. To really get under the character’s skin in a way that is manifestly obvious to everyone else at the table, the character has to be playable. That is achieved when the person controlling the character has a strong – even complete – understanding of the way the character’s abilities and attributes work, and how the character’s personality is expressed through them.

It is sometimes possible to achieve something close to roleplaying when only one of these requirements is achieved. Dragon’s Claw from my first Zenith-3 campaign illustrates and explains that point far more clearly than I could achieve without such an example.

Dragon’s Claw

Dragon’s Claw was a non-Asian martial artist who was raised in a Japanese temple by monks who believed that he was destined to become a great and enlightened warrior. The concept was something of a cross between “Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous” (which is known by a different title in the US, but I don’t have access to the internet to get the correct reference) and The Shadow. Because of this destiny, he was bequeathed and trained in the use of a Mystic Katana which granted him the ability to use his martial arts at a distance, amongst other things. This was to be a character steeped in Eastern Philosophy and Mysticism, according to the creator and player.

He wasn’t played that way. Instead, he was fiercely independent of the team, behaving as an overt vigilante from day one. No sooner had the team spent 30 minutes planning their approach to the problems at hand and agreeing to maintain a low profile than he was out trolling for muggers on Boston Common, and using his full intimidatory abilities to make himself memorable.

What’s more, the rules in use at the time favored item-based powers excessively, while under-rewarding martial arts abilities, so the former was where the player sunk his experience points, becoming known within the team as both a loose cannon and a “sword delivery system” – the other players’ choice of phrase, not mine.

At no point did the character enunciate a single example of Eastern Philosophy. The gulf between what the character was supposed (on paper) to be and what he actually was provided ongoing difficulties for both myself as GM and for the other players, who could never tell exactly what he would do in any given situation – only that he would think of himself first and the team a distant second.

It wasn’t that the character didn’t understand the concepts involved, or did not have numerous role models to draw on from his own television and filmic experiences – he possessed both. But in the heat of play, he struggled to apply that knowledge to his character in any manifest or meaningful way except when it came to set pieces prepared in advance, with my connivance. On such occasions, he was a completely different character.

The character was simply outside the player’s range – the character’s shoes didn’t fit the player.

This wasn’t the only occasion when that happened, even within that campaign. At one point, we had a mage who was reluctant to use magic (because there was a 1-10% chance, depending on the spell, of a miscast producing undesirable side effects), and a precognitive who didn’t understand how his character’s powers worked or could be used to achieve anything practical.

Both the former, and Dragon’s Claw, eventually dropped out of the campaign, replaced by other characters, while the player of the latter revealed that as much as he enjoyed the stories of Sherlock Holmes and various detective shows on TV, he himself struggled as a detective, and dropped out. For a while, the character became an NPC before being taken over by a different player – but that’s a whole different story.

In a completely different campaign – D&D this time – I had a player who wanted to play a Warlock. I struggled at the time (and still struggle to this day) to understand what makes this a viable character class, what separates them from a Mage with inbuilt system rorts that bypass some of the key limitations on the latter class, and – most importantly – how such a character thinks. That made it extremely difficult to prepare game content to focus on the character.

Before the player can walk a mile in their character’s shoes, those shoes have to fit both player and GM.

The Convention Connection

This becomes especially significant when it comes to convention gaming (not that I’ve done very much of it, but I have talked to GMs who have). GMing at a convention is done in one of two ways – either using pre-generated PCs created by the GM, enabling him to frame the adventure to suit those roles and personalities, or by having the Players bring in their own characters which the GM either approves or rejects based on his knowledge of, and the player’s adherence to, the guidelines layed down in advance by that GM.

The latter exposes the convention adventure to the headaches of players who simply can’t stretch their experience and mindset to encompass the perspective of the characters they are being asked to play, while the latter avoids those options, but limits the depth of integration between characters and adventure – making it harder, for example, to ensure that everyone gets equal screen time, and can make contributions of equal significance..

The ideal solution – characters that the players are familiar with sent to the GM in advance with personality profiles, etc – is usually impractical.

The aspects of Acting

This article actually started with a stray thought regarding acting, and especially the so-called “Range” of an actor.

For an actor to succeed in a role, three things have to happen. First, the actor must be able to put himself into the role he is portraying; Second, the actor must be able to express that character with nuance and plausibility; and third, the audience has to accept the actor in that role as though he were the character.

If the first two don’t happen, the chances of the last are greatly diminished.

Great actors are those with sufficient capability in the first two that they can inhabit a variety of roles with complete conviction and acceptance by the audience. Some actors can only manage roles within a particularly narrow scope; outside of that narrow range, they either fail the first, being unable to put themselves in the shoes of their character, or they fail the second, being able to sufficiently capture the character enough for a suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience. And, admittedly, some roles are easier than others.

A really great actor will get so deeply under the skin of his character that he is able to enlarge upon the role in some substantial way; this famously happened with Spock in the original Star Trek, for example, and many of the actors and actresses on Babylon 5 enlarged their roles, bringing additional definition to the races their characters represented in the process.

Some actors proved themselves excellent within a narrow window – Keanu Reeves, for example, in Speed and in the Matrix trilogy – but struggled when asked to step beyond that role. In many cases, the actor is able to talk a good game, displaying a deep understanding of the character in interviews, and yet somehow failing to deliver that understanding to an audience’s perceptions when actually performing on-screen.

It’s also fair to state that sometimes it’s not the actors’ fault; the director has to not only draw out the performance required, but has to capture it for others to see. It’s also fair to state that actors learn from their efforts, and grow into a role that they were unable to capture initially. (I’ve recently been re-watching early episodes of Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. and you can see that happen very quickly with the actor who plays Grant Ward, and a little more slowly with the actor who plays Fitz – compare the latter with his performances in seasons 3 and 4 and the contrast is very noticeable. But I’m wandering off point).

The actor’s job is clearly similar to that of the Player (or the GM when roleplaying an NPC) and the GM’s job similar to that of the Director.

A Player’s “Range”

I have known players who were great at playing “themselves plus ability X”, but who struggled to go beyond that. I have known players who were great at getting under a character’s skin, but who were utterly incapable of transforming that understanding into a performance that went beyond “themselves
plus ability X” when the time came. I have known players who found a role with which they were comfortable and who forever after played variations on that role regardless of the game system and genre in which any given game was taking place.

And I have known players who seemed to be able to cloak themselves in the mantle of a completely different, completely original, character, seemingly effortlessly.

I’m certainly not going to name names. Every player must be assumed to be doing his best to succeed in all three aspects of bringing to life the character they are playing. And sometimes, a player won’t realize that something is out of their “range” until they are committed to the role. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and instinctively tries to play to what they perceive as their strengths (which might be a third thing entirely).

Through The Looking Glass

So, what do you do when it becomes clear that a player is struggling to master a role that they have shouldered?

You have a number of options, not all of them desirable as outcomes.

• Lose the campaign
• Lose the player
• Give the player time
• Discover a touchstone
• Transform the character
• Amend the game mechanics
• Transfer the character
• Retire the character

As you might have guessed, I’m now going to examine each of these options.

Lose the campaign

The worst-case outcome, this is the result of forcing a player to continue in a role with which they are not succeeding, when that player (for some reason) does not want to drop out of the campaign or has no opportunity to do so. If you do nothing, this is one of the two possible default outcomes, and definitely rates as an undesirable. This is especially unlikely if a particular misfitting role is ruining everyone else’s fun at the table – and yes, I’ve seen that happen, too.

Lose the player

The more likely default is that the player will simply drop out of the campaign, and possibly out of roleplaying games altogether. I don;t consider this to be a particularly desirable result, either. These first two options are what we are trying to avoid. And it’s worth noting that it may take months or even years before accumulated distress yields one of these results, and that other problems can yield the same result – be sure that you’re fixing the real problem and not wasting time knocking down a straw man.

Give The Player Time

Discussing the character with the player can yield insights on both sides of the gaming table. That, plus time to either evolve the character, or the player’s familiarity with the game mechanics, or simply to come to grips with the character, may be all that’s required. The first thing to do is to talk to the player and tell him or her that you get the impression that he/she is finding it a difficult character to roleplay. Where the problem is in stage 2 of the acting process, the player can be unaware that there even is a problem – or it might be the GMs’ problem and he hasn’t realized it.

The player has four possible responses: “Yes”, “No”, “Sometimes”, or “What makes you think that?” Regardless of the answer, this is the starting point for a conversation that should prove enlightening for one or both participants, and may indicate one of the solutions below as appropriate.

Discover a touchstone

I have learned that there are often key words or phrases or concepts that can capture the essence of a character, and that reciting these to yourself at appropriate times can catapult your mindset into the one that’s required to get into the character. These are different for every player and every character, and sometimes there might not be one – the variables are so great that it can be almost impossible to discover one except by accident.

And certainly, this concept may not be a universal panacea;

The best technique that I have found is to sum up the character in a single phrase. If that phrase isn’t the touchstone (and it probably won’t be), look for other ways to express it, more abstractly, or from different perspectives, or by analogy, or symbolically. If that doesn’t work, identify the character’s strongest personality trait or outlook and run that through the same process.

I have two NPCs (neither in play at the moment, and neither of whom might show up in-game at all) for whom the touchstone is “Emotionally Volatile”. In one case, it represents a character who flies off the handle at each and every perceived setback and who is always ready to perceive a setback even when there isn’t one; in the other, it represents a character who has extreme emotional mood swings, lurching from extreme happiness to extreme anger to extreme fear to extreme depression to… well, you get the idea. Any sort of mood change in this individual is immediately carried to extremes. To get into character, I simply have to recite the touchstone to myself (remaining aware of the context). How well I then convey the resulting portrayal remains to be seen.

I have another NPC whose touchstone is “pragmatically obsessive”. That doesn’t mean that he is obsessed with being pragmatic, it means that he is an obsessive who will always be pragmatic when necessary, and who will continue to pursue his goals obsessively to the fullest extent of what it possible, regardless of the cost.

Transform the character

To whatever extent the game system allows, I have learned to incorporate a “looking glass” somewhere in a character’s early appearances – whether it’s a PC or an NPC – that lets me perform radical surgery on the character if it becomes necessary. This surgery can be conceptual, or it can be in the ways that the concept manifests itself.

When it becomes clear that it isn’t required for that purpose, I can re-task that :looking glass” to give the player the chance to walk down “Might-have-been” street with a temporary transformation. These serve as a change of pace and can be great fun for all involved.

In one of my campaigns, I included the house rule that characters could morph from one class to another and/or one race or another at any point in the first three game sessions – but that once a class or race were abandoned, the character could not go back to it. That worked fairly well, especially since I had a three-session adventure in mind to let the players “try out” their characters.

Amend the game mechanics

This might seem a radical suggestion, but if there’s a particular set of sub-rules that aren’t “working” for a player (or for yourself), you have to consider changing them.

That doesn’t mean that the rules aren’t functional; they might work perfectly (in theory) or even work perfectly for every other participant at the table.

Such changes can be temporary (spreading balm on the problem before it becomes inflamed), or indefinite, or even deliberately permanent.

I once knew a (novice) player who couldn’t wrap his head around the concept of “THAC0”. He was perfectly capable of doing the maths, he understood the theory, but given any practical occurrence of a need to work out what he needed to hit, and what impact that should have on his tactical decisions, his head yielded “error”, usually followed by “tilt”. So I adjusted the game system (AD&D) for him only,. restating the number as “To Hit Me” – i,e, what he needed to roll in order to hit a character with the same AC as he had, and revising it whenever necessary. Result: no more problems. Estimating an enemy’s AC relative to his own became a point of his roleplaying when entering a combat situation and told him immediately whether to run, look for a way to avoid combat, look for a way to gain an advantage (or nullify an advantage enjoyed by the enemy), or attack.

And, of course, there were times when it was appropriate to be a little vague about the result, or when it was appropriate that the character over- or under-estimate the opposition. The player knew that, and fed that into his roleplaying as well. That one slight change to the game mechanics (which didn’t really change the way that they worked at all) overcame his conceptual roadblock, transforming him from a tactical liability to the best tactician in that group of players!

Transfer The Character

A more extreme response is to give that PC to another player (who may or may not already have a character in the game) and let the player with the problem create a new and different PC – one that doesn’t suffer from the same problem.

Retire The Character

Or perhaps you might make the old PC an NPC until you can write them out of the campaign. A more extreme variation on this is to “retire” the character while the original player is still handling it, usually by deliberately orchestrating a personal calamity of some sort. Still another variation has the character remaining a permanent NPC who is reduced to a non-combat role, or who only shows up occasionally.

The latter works especially well in a superhero campaign, where it’s the norm for no-one to die forever (not even Bucky).

The GM’s “Range”

I make no bones about my problems with the Warlock character class. Others have no problem with it whatsoever, and even look at you funny if you mention it as a problem. The warlock simply lies outside my “range” as a GM.

When this happens, you have the solutions listed above, but you also have a couple of additional choices that might help.

• Run A Solo Example
• Alter the Class/Race
• Restrict or Remove the Class/Race

Run A Solo Example

Sometimes, running a solo game in which you are both player and GM helps you come to grips with a problem. You aren’t restricted by normal campaign etiquette when you do this; you can make assumptions, have them blow up in your face, and
change those assumptions – if necessary, in mid-combat. And because there’s no one to wait for, no explanations or descriptions to others required, this testing can proceed at lightning speed.

What should you be looking for? It depends on the specific issue that you are experiencing. If a conceptual issue, like my problem with Warlocks in D&D, the key question is “why?” Why is the class the way it is? Why is this ability the way it is? – And you aren’t looking for metagame answers, you are looking for answers that work in an in-game context, i.e. from the point of view of the character that you are playing. Quite often, such problems will come from an assumption that you have made that is unwarranted and having a detrimental effect, and they key to solving your mental blocks is to identify that assumption and change it. Sometimes that means amending the campaign background that is built on that assumption, or amending the class to avoid the clash that has produced the problem; but whatever the conflict is, before you can solve it you have to identify it.

Sometimes it’s helpful to compare the way the class or race (or whatever) plays in the basic rules relative to under your house rules. That’s also often a good place to start.

I have also experienced cases where there was nothing inherently wrong with the character affected, it was simply a matter of requiring the owner to juggle more things mentally than other classes; in this circumstance, the player may be able to cope (though it does raise the question of whether or not they are having to work harder for their fun – and some would say they enjoy the challenge); but you, as GM, are having difficulty keeping the character in focus with everything else that you have to keep track of. That’s a specific type of overload that can often be managed once you know the source of the problem.

Finally, double check everything, at least at first; what you understand from the descriptions and what those descriptions are actually saying can sometimes be two wildly different things. Make sure that you haven’t been you own worst enemy.

Alter the Class/Race

As the GM, and hopefully guided by the playtesting described above, you may find that you need to make alterations to the class or race to integrate them into the game world because there is a conflict between the two concepts, or to because you need to make the change to bring such characters into your “range” as a GM. If you go down this path, you will need to have a plan in place for dealing with characters of the affected type who may already be in-game, one that can be applied retroactively. This may be as simple as giving the character’s owner the opportunity to switch N levels of Warlock to N levels of Mage, plus (perhaps) a sweetener to the deal, or it may be something more complex. Remember that by changing the class/race, you are changing what they thought they were getting when they chose that trait of the character, inconveniencing them for your own benefit; the fact that solving the problem will also benefit everyone at the table in terms of fun should not be a factor, only a motivation.

Restrict or Remove the Class/Race

A more severe solution to be used only when the playtesting described doesn’t deliver an answer, or is impractical for some reason (which will usually involve the “real world”). Again, you will need a plan for addressing character classes already dedicated to the class/race and other choices that may have been made – if a character has been working toward a particular variant or subclass, or a particular race/class combination, this may nullify all their character choices from level 1 of the character.

The rule of thumb is to stay as true as possible to the personality of the character as it has been expressed in play; everything else can be changed to fit.

This is definitely not an option to consider lightly; it’s a last resort before you end up at one of the two deadly-ends listed under the “player-problem” options. It’s certainly not a step to be undertaken without serious discussion with any players affected.

Final Words

We’re all human, and we all have our limitations. In no two cases will those limitations be equal. Part of the technique for lasting at the game table is identifying your “Range” and working within it, with the occasional push to extend it just a little (without doing so explosively!) In particular, you need to focus on areas in which you and your players are equally within your working/’acting’ limits; it does no good for one of the two to be within their range while the other is way out of their depth.

If you’re exceptionally lucky, and exceptionally versatile, these problems will never be an issue at your game table. For most of us, that isn’t the case. You don’t become the best GM that you can possibly be by accident; you need to work at it, crawling beyond your limits until you can take baby steps towards the edges of a new limit. Some of this development comes naturally, just by doing; it’s not uncommon to look at something you’ve just created or played out and realize that X months or years before, it would have been utterly beyond you.

Being successful as a GM entails embracing the art of the practical, whether it’s the limits placed on the amount of prep that can practicably be completed prior to play, or the limits placed on you by your personal flaws and limitations. Own the space that you can reach, and cast a greedy eye on those that are beyond you, but don’t throw away what you have in an attempt to own even more of the creative potential within a game system. Know and own your range and the ranges of your players, and go beyond those limits only judiciously.

Beginners

Beginners, this advice doesn’t necessarily apply to you – not 100%, anyway. For the first few months or even years after you start, a lot of things will be outside your comfort zone. Set realistic goals and targets for self-improvement in the GMing art, and be prepared to make a lot of mistakes.

Some beginner GMs make the huge mistake of setting their first campaign in the game world or gaming space that they have always wanted to play in. They may have an idea for a particular fantasy world that consumes and fascinates them, into which they have poured all their creative energies for months or years.

While that level of enthusiasm can be an undeniable asset, your skills and abilities as a GM are almost certainly not up to the job of implementing your dream campaign right off the bat. Save it and polish it for later use, when you can do it justice; start with something smaller and let it – and your skills – grow organically until you’re ready.

The same is true for beginner players. Your dream class might be a spell-caster, capable of reshaping reality with but a word, a gesture, and the force of your will. But Mages are complex character classes to run; get your fundamentals down pat, first, with something simpler. I started with a rogue (who didn’t survive for very long), and my focus was immediately on discovering and conveying the personality of that individual. I was acutely aware that I had just scratched the surface of what looked like being a fun character to play when he was killed. The resulting frustration could have poisoned me on the hobby; instead, it lit a fire that has lasted for more than thirty years, because he survived as a character just long enough to give me that glimpse of the possibilities.

And never forget that the game should be fun for everyone – players and GM alike.

Image via Pixabay.com / martakoton

I’m not sure how I’ll go when it comes time to upload this article; my internet connection (and telephone) are giving me a lot of trouble at the moment. If I have to, I’ll hit an internet cafe tomorrow.

I’m always looking for ways to sneak campaign background and historical information into my adventures so that I don’t have to take time out from those adventures to brief players. This not only increases the level of interest players have in the subject, but also its relevance and verisimilitude (because the event is seen as having had an ongoing impact on the game world).

So, when Blair (my pulp co-GM) mentioned that a guest from India who appeared on a recent current affairs show had (in Blair’s eyes) a manifest prejudice against the British, which biased his answers and the opinions he expressed on the show, and that many others also resented the nation’s colonial history (not entirely without cause, I hasten to admit), my radar went “Ping”.

Grudges as a background delivery vehicle

Old grudges – with or without merit – can serve as an excellent mechanism for game background because what do people typically do when they have a grudge? They broadcast their opinion and the reasons for it to anyone who will listen. The more obsessive will relate virtually every activity they undertake to that grudge.

In the past, I have thought that to be effective, the grudge needed to be activated by the presence of a trigger amongst the PCs or in the circumstances that have led the PCs to interact with the NPC. But in thinking about this article, I have realized that this doesn’t matter – such strongly-held opinions will manifest anyway, given half a chance, and that provides a vector for an NPC to vent an overtly biased perception of the events in question.

If you decide in advance that you are going to employ this delivery mechanism, you can even restrict your campaign notes to a bare mention of the event, its cause, its trigger, its duration, and its outcome, like this:

“World War I: An assassination triggered an unnecessary war which, through a series of treaty ‘dominoes’, eventually involved or affected almost every government on Earth. About four years later, and after the death of over a million combatants, it ended in a negotiated armistice that imposed huge reparations and military restrictions on Germany (even though the Germans weren’t the instigators of the conflict).”

As anyone who knows anything about the “Great War” (and that should be most GMs), that is just about the most superficial recitation of events it’s possible to craft and still use something that reads comfortably as a paragraph. To be more succinct, you need to either leave things out – which is fine – or go beyond the rules of good English into something akin to bullet points:

“World War I: An assassination – treaty ‘dominoes’ – almost every nation on Earth – 4 years – killed over a million – ended by imposing huge reparations and military restrictions on Germany.”

Of course, if you do your writing the way I do, you would have started with those bullet points, using them to structure your narrative and make sure that you left nothing out.

When the time comes – which is either when you have an NPC in need of color or an in-game situation in which the details of the event become relevant – you simply introduce your “Background Delivery System” and have a character (motivated by an old grudge) provide the salient details to the PCs, usually in the form of a complaint about someone or something.

This technique works even if the subject is an event the players have never heard of before, or know of only in passing from a brief mention of the event in campaign or adventure briefing.

Motivating the PCs to seek out an NPC with a grudge

Picture the following scenario: Early in your campaign, your players acquire (either by contrivance or choice) a mission while being given minimal background information, not all of which is necessarily accurate. In the course of the adventure, they encounter several difficulties which could have been avoided or prepared for if they had been given better intelligence (in the military sense of the word). Despite these difficulties, they succeed in their quest/mission, only to discover that they were being used to further an agenda they strongly disapprove of.

It’s a good bet that they will make a solemn vow amongst themselves to never be so used, again.

This is not only a great way to introduce a mastermind villain (as the person manipulating the PCs or as the person in back of them), it’s an object lesson that the players are never likely to forget. Henceforth, when given inadequate intelligence, one of their highest priorities will be to find out more about the situation, preferably before they commit themselves. What’s more, that lesson is almost certain to carry over into other campaigns, especially under the same GM.

So the PCs need to ask someone questions about the situation they are about to become enmeshed in; whoever they ask is either the person with the grudge, or directs the PCs to speak to that person (perhaps with an appropriate warning).

What happens is that Background material becomes a source of roleplay. Your adventures might take a little longer to play out, and your prep might need to be a little more substantial, but (almost?) everyone will have more fun in the process.

A Hidden Assumption To Observe

This scenario implies a hidden assumption – that whatever is in the background material already provided to the PCs is everything they know about the situation in question.

Once you are aware of that situation, you can turn it into another vector for engaging the players with an adventure; all you need do is note some additional briefing information that you can provide when a player asks “What does [my character] know about….”

Providing a teasing tidbit not only tells the player that you have prepared this adventure with these specific PCs in mind,, it tells him or her (through your choice of phrasing) that there is more information to be had if they ask the right person the right question(s).

Tactical intelligence-gathering is often a secondary (and sometimes unrealized) source of gaming pleasure for the combat types who don’t necessarily get off on straight roleplay!

The NPC Conduit

Simply giving an NPC a personality doesn’t guarantee that they will have something to say. Quite often, NPCs are reactive, requiring the PCs to push certain “buttons” to get to the more interesting parts of the NPC. A lot of NPC color is superficial, and can be ignored after it is first noticed. “Every evening at sunset, [NPC] drinks a silent toast to the flag” is a great bit of NPC color – but at any other time of the day, unless someone asks about the practice (having observed it or heard of it as an eccentricity), it might as well not be there.

“Distrusting of Warlocks” is another example – unless the subject somehow comes up, or one of the PCs happens to be a Warlock, or the adventure happens to involve a Warlock somehow, the situation won’t come up and can seem forced if you parade it anyway.

A grudge isn’t like that, in one important respect – it gives the NPC something to talk about. In fact, it does so on every single occasion that the NPC appears. The first time (taking a war grudge as an example), it can be the general information; the next time, a key combatant, or an important battle, or some other NPCs opposing bias, or an official action that is viewed as disrespectful of veterans of the conflict and/or their memories… the list goes on and on.

Or perhaps the NPC lost his job after the manufacturing plant where he was employed was bought by Japanese businessmen – something that happened quite a lot in the 1980s – and consequently the NPC holds a grudge against the Japanese (something else that happened a lot back then). This grudge will manifest every time a Japanese gets mentioned, or is in the news; every time a business gets bought or sold; every time someone loses their job, or gets hired; every time someone retires; every time a trade union does something (even something unrelated) because it was often the unions who were cast in an adversarial role to the new management…. So, this week the character waves a newspaper around and complains, next week he is busy dumping all his crackers in the garbage because the company has just been bought, the time after, he is filling out his tax forms and complaining about big business avoiding their fair share of the tax burden, the week after that he’s celebrating because a Japanese CEO was caught with his hand in the cookie jar, the week after that it’s the prominence of Asians at the local high school…. the grudge becomes the NPCs defining characteristic simply because it can manifest in a different way on every separate occasion.

It seems quite clear that a grudge – defined as “a strong emotional response to factual triggers associated with the subject of the grudge, however peripherally” – adds massive amounts of color to an NPC at the same time as giving the NPC role-playable “content” to inject into any encounter.

But a little additional thought and creativity on the GM’s part can substantially enrich the role of the NPC with a grudge; all you need is to make the grudge confer some positive benefit to the character in a social sense. The NPC with a grudge against “the old enemy” can become a spokesman for veterans’ causes, or a ready source of completely unofficial aid to veterans in trouble. You can even use this as
the means to deliver the occasional adventure to the PCs – “I’ve got a buddy in a spot of trouble, and I thought you would be able to help”.

I never give a character a grudge without trying to find some respect in which that grudge can do something positive. Sometimes, the character with the grudge is unaware of the possibility (enabling growth in the character as the game progresses); sometimes he’s unaware of the connection; and sometimes, he knows full well that his grudge is motivating him.

Even a deeply-depressed nihilistic villain who wants to slaughter millions to spare them the pain that he has felt, and who sees everything through this murky web of imminent pain, acquires a richer, deeper characterization, in this way. His goal is to spare people from suffering, and there are all sorts of positive contributions that he can make to society in furtherance of that end with his right hand, even as his left is perpetrating monstrous deeds in the name of that cause.

Beware overuse

If the benefits are so huge, there has to be a temptation to give every NPC a grudge (I’ll deal with PCs and grudges a little later).

Don’t Do It.

Overuse will cause the technique to lose its effectiveness. You need the grudge to stand out, and that means using it only in a carefully-targeted manner. I’m always careful to employ three criteria: One, it has to give the character something interesting to talk about in encounters with the PCs; Two, it has to be logical that someone would have such a grudge, which requires either that the events be recent or that they have some vehicle of perpetuation through the years; Three, the subject has to have relevance to at least one significant adventure; and Four, it has to enrich and make interactive what would otherwise be a dry and stale subject within the campaign Background.

I want to amplify the caveat in item two a little before moving on. But some might take offense over what I have to say on a couple of delicate subjects – so if you find yourself in disagreement with anything in the inset panel below, I would ask that you simply skip to the end of it.

Contrast the US Civil War with Native American relations, in the context of a modern-day grudge. These days, if you were to be holding a grudge about what took place in the Civil War, you would be regarded as a bit of an eccentric if not an out-and-out kook. That’s what makes groups like the KKK such ready targets of ridicule; they seem so out of step, more of a cult than a valid political perspective. This causes them to be underrated as impediments to social progress, cartoon figures to be lampooned, rather than perpetrators of potential domestic terrorism. This is also true of the Taliban, who seek to apply 16th and 17th century social standards to a modern world for reasons of religious indoctrination and the acquisition of political power. Given the date on which this is being written, this point seems especially poignant.

Native Americans, on the other hand, have legitimate reasons to hold grudges today. The history of forcible relocation to reservations and broken treaties is perpetuated to this day by the legacies of those past acts. My own country has its own, not unrelated, problems in this area, though there was never a treaty made with the First Australians, and it is all too easy to understand grudges held over past political and social mistakes – even those made with what the people of the time considered best intentions. Rather than condemning those with such a grudge, we laud and encourage those who rise above them – they are held to a different social standard, in other words.

(For the record, I support recognition and reconciliation; I support and approve of all members of society being given an equal opportunity, with no-one getting unearned special privileges – with “unearned” as a key word – and I support a social safety net to ensure that all members of society receive a minimum standard of safety, security, health, and standard of living. And I support religious freedom, tolerance, and multiculturalism, right up to the point where such support places others at risk of harm, where the need for society to protect itself supersedes those freedoms).

Distortions of history

The benefits to GMs don’t end there. By definition, anyone with a grudge is going to have strong opinions and interpretations of events involving the subject of their grudge. As a general practice, because they have to see all sides of a situation in order to properly roleplay those involved in any faction, GMs tend to adopt a fairly neutral and arms-length position regarding their game histories. This causes an active disconnection between our personal opinions on any subject and the ‘official’ position. Like historians, we adopt an Olympian perspective.

If game history is to be delivered through the lens of of character with a grudge, there is no need to go to such lengths. Prep Research can be sloppier and even contradicted to some extent by subsequent manifestations of the same event. The character is telling a biased, distorted, and myopic version of the story. This is personal to them, somehow.

If you make it clear through their behavior and rhetoric that the NPC is speaking from the perspective of having a grudge, you don’t have to worry about the “other side of the story” (let alone the truth) until the PCs have the opportunity to interact with that “other side” – let the players filter the bias out for themselves, making whatever assumptions or interpretations they find necessary.

Even when the PCs do interact with “The Other Side Of The Story”, don’t make the mistake of making that the “true story”; it should be just as distorted and myopic, at least in critical areas. Only when PCs are in a position to learn the real truth, free of any bias, should that be of concern to the GM.

Most events involving humans don’t have immutable and incontrovertible timelines. Let’s take a hypothetical war between Elves and Dwarves – the Dwarves might date the beginning of the war from the date of Dwarfish incursion into Elvish Territory in response to what they consider lengthy provocations; the Elves might consider this just the overt escalation of a conflict that began when the Dwarves attempted to bargain in bad faith, abrogating or ignoring past treaties, months or even years earlier.

Does a battle begin when a raiding force begins to march, or when that force encounters the defenders of the raid’s target?

It all depends on your perspective. Even something as strongly defined as the Birth of the USA – July 4th of 1776 was when the Declaration Of Independence was signed, but did the revolution actually begin when they started negotiating it, days or weeks earlier?

Two sides to every story

The “winners” write the history? Says who?

Losers perpetuate their own version of events – so long as victory is less than total.

Even if that’s not the case, the experiences of the surviving losers in a conflict will enter the popular zeitgeist of their social group as a subculture within the victorious and dominant society – and, arguably, the social position that results could qualify as the type of “perpetuation” I was discussing above. Certainly, through to the 80s and 90s at the very least, African Americans could cite the long legacy of slavery and oppression as a driving impetus behind the struggle for Civil Rights, which is a profound example of the phenomenon.

It is often helpful to the GM to deliberately stock some part of his campaign with an advocate of “the other side” as soon as he introduces the character with The Grudge. This advocate need not appear at once, and need not appear with the same frequency as the character with The Grudge; his function is simply to remind the players from time-to-time that there is another perspective of perhaps equal validity. Nor does the GM need to worry about this NPCs manifesto until such time as he will appear in-game.

Simply make a note of his existence and pop him into some appropriate scene that seems a little quiet and needs livening up.

Three sides to every story

GMs should also always remember the Vorlon Saying from Babylon 5: There are three sides to every story: Your Side, Their Side, and The Truth. You don’t have to worry about the content of the other two when creating content for the character with The Grudge, but never forget that the other sides are out there. The character with the Grudge should be wrong occasionally, and that error should manifest in the form of trouble for the PCs who rely on his information.

Does anyone really believe that the American Government and Military conducted every single encounter during World War 2 with complete honor and integrity? Or the British? That expediency and internal politics never led to a compromising of principles?

Anyone who knows history, knows better. The incarceration of Japanese Americans is one shameful example, and one that has been demonstrated to have been in error of justice in subsequent years. There are those who still question the need to bomb Nagasaki; in light of what the Americans believed at the time, and of Japanese attempts to negotiate a settlement of the war on their own terms after Hiroshima, I think it can probably be justified, and any taint of lack of necessity counterbalanced by the comedy of errors and misjudgments that turned Pearl Harbor into a sneak attack.

The absence of a victory

I don’t want to belabor the point too much further, so I will simply cite three additional points of contemplation and leave the reader to muse on them for themselves.

• Consider modern US-UK relations – well, those before President Trump and Brexit became somewhat divisive elements in that relationship
  – with the outcome of the American War of Independence, in which Britain accepted that the War could not be won with the resources they had available, given the problems that they faced with their European neighbors of the time. It was that acceptance and a subsequent normalizing of relations that drew a line between that conflict, paving the way for the US to come to the aid of the Allies in the First World War.
• Contrast that with the relationship between India and Britain. The liberties granted to the East India Company were frankly exploitative, aimed at fostering the wealth of the Company at the expense of the locals while promoting the Imperialism of Britain in the era. British control was maintained through force and corruption until those were no longer tenable. That Britain gave much, in cultural and technological terms, to the Indians can’t be disputed; but the behavior of the British at the time can only be justified in the context of the morality of the era, and fails utterly by modern standards. Although grudgingly granted independence during the reformation of Empire into Commonwealth, and despite overtly good relations between the nations since, there are still Indians who hold an anti-British Grudge. This was the attitude expressed that initially inspired this article.
• And then, contrast both with the relations between Northern and Southern Ireland, whose history raises harsh and difficult questions. There were occasions during the twentieth Century when each side of the Northern Irish conflict behaved abominably, prompting the question, how far you entitled to go in abrogating your morality in order to secure “inalienable rights”? And, the inevitable followup question – was anything really gained, or did they simply take turns building a barrier to peaceful resolution of the conflict? I’m sure that if you were to ask, both sides would defend and justify their actions. Ultimately, it was a political process that ended the conflict – and I’m equally sure that there are those on both sides who still bear grudges against the other.

Adventuring Potential

All the benefits of giving an NPC a grudge arise even before we consider the potential for adventures to manifest from the background material in question. That potential takes four forms:

• Legacies,
• Acts Of Revenge,
• Unpopular Histories, and
• Outside Forces & Conspiracies.

Legacies

Somewhere, in a long-forgotten corner of the game world, there is a leftover from a past conflict that poses a threat to the modern world. This could be an unfinished doomsday weapon, or “forbidden” research, or any of half-a-dozen other possibilities. Used sparingly, this plot gimmick never gets tired.

Acts Of Revenge

It’s easy for a Grudge to lead a character to cross a line. Every time a line gets crossed, it gets easier to do so again. Inevitably, in some cases, minor acts of pettiness resulting from a Grudge lead to more substantial acts of revenge, and characters who – due to dissatisfaction with the outcome – want to reignite the old conflict. However justified the dissatisfaction might be, the result is unjustifiable acts of revenge. What’s more, dissatisfaction leaves a character or a population open to exploitation. That, in a nutshell, is the story of the European theater of World War II, when megalomania exploited justifiable dissatisfaction to rebuild national pride into an arrogance that permitted acts of extreme barbarism.

Unpopular Histories

At first glance, it might seem like there is nothing under this heading to really exploit in terms of adventure. Revealing or Discovering an unpopular truth might be intellectually interesting, but it rarely gets the gaming juices really flowing.

Look a little deeper. I dealt with this question in in The Veil of Secrecy: A truth about organizations in games without really digging into the implications.

An organization – be it a business or a government agency or an entire government – does something that they can’t admit to. They now have a secret. To protect that secret, they erect a cover story. In furtherance of that cover story, they do other things that they can’t admit to – bribes, intimidation, ruining reputations, disinformation, perhaps even murder. Now they have another secret to protect – and one with deeper personal ramifications for those involved. Should the secret come under threat, a violent countermeasure is almost inevitably justified in the minds of those involved.

There have been lots of movies and TV shows in which characters come under threat because their activities threaten a secret. Even good people can do so if they judge the myth to be more important than the reality. Threaten to undermine that myth, and you make yourself a target.

Of course, in most such stories, the main protagonists aren’t the ones threatening the secret, they are the ones trying to protect them from those with the secret. Which is generally easier to orchestrate, from a GM’s perspective.

Outside Forces & Conspiracies

Finally, the other side of the coin is also about the exposing of secrets – the discovery that a past conflict was orchestrated for their own purposes by a third party inevitably leads the person making that discovery into a position of hostility toward that third party. Of course, such a secret would not be easily discovered; you would have to be motivated to dig deeply for the breadcrumbs that make it seem like a conspiracy theory. Characters with a grudge are highly motivated….

PC Grudges

With such depth of characterization on offer, it can be a temptation to load one or more PCs down with a grudge. And the dividends are exactly the same as for an NPC.

I urge you to resist such temptation, except under unusual circumstances – not that I have any such in mind, but concede that it’s just possible there could be some.

The first problem with this tactic is that it takes that ?deferable and compromised? background research and makes the deadline immediate and ongoing. Because you will need to keep feeding content to the PC, you actually force the player to cede some measure of his control over his character. At the same time, from an outside perspective, you can give the impression to other players that you are playing favorites. And finally, you run the risk of overuse of the “Grudge” mechanism, something I warned of earlier.

There are simply too many minefields. If you can see a way to circumvent them, then this is worth considering – but that is going to be an isolated case, I think. PCs are better served, most of the time, being the neutral observers caught in the middle, and caring about the things that the player wants them to care about.

Some things are too good to waste on Player Characters. Grudges are one of them.

I get far more invitations to review products and Kickstarter campaigns and the like than I could ever hope to satisfy. Every few months I gather several of these together for a round-up set of mini-reviews. This time around, with Christmas Shopping on the immediate horizon, I have no less than 25 products to bring to your attention. Not all of these are new; some had simply escaped my gaze until now.

I have divided them into five sections. But be aware of the crossover value from one genre to another.

– THE CHARITY SECTION – I’m always proud of the way the RPG community responds to tragic events. Hurricane Harvey has brought out the usual standards of generosity. That said, I wish there was a relief bundle for the victims of the Indian floods (Harvey: 48 dead, India/Nepal/Bangladesh: 1600 dead) that I could link to, and of course, as I write this, Hurricane Irma is heading toward the East Coast, having already lashed Puerto Rico: 7 dead (so far) and this Category 5 hurricane is now the 5th strongest storm ever recorded, with winds of 297km/h (gusting to 360 km/h) (that’s 184.5 and 223.6 mph for those more familiar with the older scales).

1. Harvey Relief Bundle (Fainting Goat Games) The numbers speak for themselves in this bundle. $420.37 worth of products – 65 of them – for $25, with all proceeds going to hurricane relief. There are far too many products to list separately. Click on the link below and see for yourself what is included. .

2. Heroes For Harvey (Legendary Games) I’ve linked (further below) to a couple of other projects in the Legendary Games repertoire. This is a small bundle by them and their affiliated companies containing three products for $9.99 (normal value $22.57) with all proceeds going to disaster relief, especially those areas that are not the main focus of attention. You get Aetheric Heroes (10 Pathfinder Characters, 2 from each of the races within the Aethera Campaign Setting); Nautical Heroes (8 Piratical Characters, normal Pathfinder/D&D races); and Legendary Planet: Planetary Heroes (8 pre-generated characters for the Legendary Planet campaign/setting). .

3. D3 Adventures products (D3 Adventures) Jason Yarnell (owner at D3 Adventures) has a GoFundMe set up by his sister to help out all the damages and destruction caused by Hurricane Harvey. Jason himself is a regular contributor to charities and good causes, as a google search for “Jason Yarnell gofundme” will soon show. One way that you can support the cause is by buying a D3 Adventures product (Complete List from RPGNow). I’ve singled out four for special attention because they presented immediate appeal to me in the hopes that they will also appeal to readers.

3a. Extras! Cosmic Criminals (D3 Adventures) Five villains constructed using the Mutants & Masterminds rules designed to challenge “Galactic” heroes. These should translate readily into multiple genres and settings. for $2.49.

3b. Extras! Mystical Guardians (D3 Adventures) “When evil hides in the shadows and corrupts the souls of innocents, when it attacks the mind more than the body, when the threat is too insidious for normal adventurers, it is time for Mystical Guardians. The Planar Blooded have gathered to fight against dangers that normal adventurers are unable to oppose.” Used singly or as a group, these Mystical Guardians are rife with possibilities. For example, they might decide that part of the universe needs to be quarantined from a growing danger – with the PCs and their world/realm/plane on the wrong side of the quarantine line. Or they might be persuaded that the PCs pose a threat, thanks to the manipulations of an enemy (of either or both). The very concept of “threats too insidious for normal adventurers” is full of potential! The concepts are rich enough that they could be allies, enemies, or something even more dangerous in between the two extremes. I could use this in a Fantasy, 7th Sea/Pirates, or Superhero campaign, and possibly in a Pulp campaign. for $2.49.

3c. Quantum Collapse (D3 Adventures) “What if there were parallel universes endlessly stacked upon each other like pages in a book? What if there were millions of versions of you, spread out through the multiverse? What if someone figured out how to make you more powerful… by eliminating those parallel ‘yous’?” That’s the premise of The One starring Jet Li, but it is also the central concept of Quantum Collapse, a game setting based on the Mutants And Masterminds 3E rules architecture. As a GM with a campaign that integrates Parallel and Alternate Worlds, anything along these lines naturally sparks interest. This is a 78-page supplement priced at $14.95.It is available through .

3d. Extras! Quantum Collapse Issue 0 (D3 Adventures)* Something purely super-heroic in genre at first glance, this is a single character for Quantum Collapse – but when you are talking about parallel worlds, the term “Single character” takes on new meaning! ‘Hurricane’ is presented at five different power levels, and four separate parallel-world variations are also provided, along with contextual information on the worlds from which these alternatives derive. Extras! Quantum Collapse #0 costs $2.49 and is . However, it is also included in the Harvey Relief Bundle listed below.

4. RPG Creators Relief Fund The Roleplaying Game Creators Relief Fund (RCRF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization founded to provide financial assistance to tabletop roleplaying game creators suffering hardship due to medical emergencies, natural disasters, and other catastrophic situations. You can donate directly through their website (link above) or through DriveThruRPG.

. – THE UNIVERSAL SECTION –

5. The Gamemaster’s Worldbuilding Journal by Rick Hershey (Purple Duck Games) Purple Duck are one company whose products I wish I could promote more often, just because Mark Gedak seems to be such a stand-up guy. What can I say about this product? “…forms, documents, and sheets created to cover all aspects of world design”. Comes in 5 formats: Watermarked PDF (one copy of each form and print what you need when you need them) just $4.95; Hardcover book (standard) 840 pages in 10 chapters for $59.99; Hardcover book (premium) 1050 pages in 12 chapters for $100.99; and combinations, which have a small discount. The extra two chapters are designed to divide the world into 10 regions instead of the standard 8. The description also lists form-fillable PDF versions of each of the sheets and a compiled version with all the forms in a single PDF with listing this amongst the purchase options; my presumption is that these come with any of the PDF purchase options. Available from DriveThruRPG.

– THE FANTASY SECTION –

6. Kaigaku by Jacob DC Ross (Thunderegg Productions) Thunderegg very kindly sent me a review copy of the Premium Edition in hopes that I would be able to promote their RPG System. Unfortunately I never got the chance to delve into it in any depth. The system is available in two formats: the basic no-frills, no-art edition () which contains everything that you need to play, and the 72-page Premium Edition, which is currently discounted from $10 to just $5 for the PDF or $25 for the softcover, which adds 20 more schools, crafting rules, and lots more setting info, from this page at DriveThruRPG. Kaigaku is a retroclone that blends simple OSR rules and inspiration from famous samurai-themed games of the past; it can be used to play intense duels between bushi, wars of words among courtiers, ninja missions, and more. This is an active and growing RPG subcommunity, oriented around their Google+ community, which has already added four game supplements, each interesting in their own ways: Ryu: Schools that teach your characters powerful abilities. Kiseki: Stones charged with unimaginable power that Ascetics can harness. Kaigaku: An evocative setting inspired by Japan, China, Mongolia and Europe Duels: Rules for dramatic one-on-one ritual combat. Unless you choose the basic version (and the associated loss of content), I would strongly recommend shelling out for the physical book. Why? Because the page art is absolutely stunning – check out the screen-grab below. If you haven’t heard of the game before, now is the time to correct that hole in your RPG education!

7. Samurai Dice (Thunderegg Productions) Samurai Dice is “a brand new system that blends the fast-paced dice rolling of games such as Yahtzee and Farkle with tactical decision-making and a deep story”. The action takes place in the same world as Kaigaku (above). This is a FREE playtesting release of the Basic Rules in PDF format, a prelude to a Kickstarter campaign to fund production of both the Basic Edition and Story Edition, which will include Factions, Scenarios, and a couple of decks of cards that will modify the tale you tell with each game. When playtime was less restricted by the vagaries of public transport and busy modern lives, we used to set aside 45 minutes or so at the start of each day’s play for a quick card or board game, just to lubricate our imaginations, get the “fun juices” flowing, and engage in sociable behavior with people actually playing in some other game – there were usually three or four and sometimes as many as six or seven different games being played simultaneously when the ‘games club” (formally, The NSW Wargamers) was in full swing. This is exactly the sort of game that would have been a regular alongside favorites such as Grass, Blue Max, Naval War, and Hacker. If you’ve ever noticed that some of your players are more engaged and active in your second hour at the table, this could be your answer. Score your free copy from DriveThruRPG.

8. Demon Cults & Secret Societies by Jeff Lee (Kobold Press) For D&D 5e, this features 13 organizations that should readily translate to any fantasy game (and selected Pulp/Modern/Superhero campaigns, to boot). Each has its own agenda, details of their command structure (and the people currently occupying those roles), a selection of acolytes/soldiers and minions, adventure seeds, cultish plots, and schemes, and related artifacts, magic items, spells, and the occasional variant monster that makes each of these a unique proposition for inclusion anywhere that you can make them fit! Prices are $17.99 (PDF) or $39.99 (Print or Print-and-PDF) from the .

9. Tyranny and Manipulation (Purple Duck Games) “It happens with every experienced gaming group. As Game Master, you can’t put your players up against a creature of appropriate CR without hearing them accurately estimating its AC, hp, and special defenses. Throw a high CR monster at them and you might be serving them XP on a silver platter or guaranteeing a Total Party Kill. It isn’t your fault. It isn’t your players’ fault either. Invariably a group that plays together a long time learns the game better. You can accept this and watch your encounters get decimated. You can move on to a different game, kissing your shelf of gaming books and the money you invested in them goodbye for now. Or, you can break out the secret weapons.” “Featuring rules to change the landscape of every encounter, even your veteran players will be scrambling to keep up with your unpredictable challenges. Run encounters like never before using new base classes the Shepherd and Warmonger. Coordinate your assaults with the synergizing ruler and minion feats. Turn classic monsters into the unfamiliar threats with mutations. Unleash massive armies with the easy-to-use hordes template. All this and more…” …such as Two new base classes, Over 30 new archetypes, More than 75 new feats, including two new feat types, Over two dozen new spells, Mutations to literally remake classic monsters, Hazardous Environments, to turn your terrain into a whole new threat, A new template, Hordes, to make Combat with armies of enemies simpler than ever; and simplified versions of 17 base classes to cut down on prep time. $9.99 for 134 pages, available now at RPGNow.

10. Crisis Of The World Eater Complete (LPJ Design) This is a compilation of 4 linked adventures into one epic tale for the Pathfinder RPG. But I’ve linked not to the product but to a bundle that adds 4 more related adventures to the story, including a prequel, for just $22.99, or a little more than twice the compilation. How long the bundle will be available, I don’t know. Available from .

– THE “MODERN”/PULP SECTION-

11. Modern Adventures (Higher Grounds Publishing) – Kickstarter d20 Modern took the 3.x system and adapted it to a modern-day setting, but ultimately, all that you could use were sections of the 3.x core rules. This represents the other side of the coin of that concept – a modern-day adaption of the Pathfinder rules which includes principles for the modern-day descendants of the inhabitants of the Bestiary, with the implication being that virtually any Pathfinder supplement can be integrated into the setting. A troll serving behind the counter of the local 7-11? An Orcish Motorcycle Gang? Delving the Tomb Of Horrors with your heroes armed with Grenades and AK-47s? Or with Superpowers, with a little adaption on your part? “…everything you expect from a modern setting including computer hacking, firearms, vehicles and aircraft. You’ll also get all of the races such as Elves, Dwarves and Gnomes in addition to some new, never-before-seen races available for play.” I can’t speak to how lavish the interior art will be, but can state that the publishers have been quite generous in including art in the press kit. The book cover is shown above, and one of the interior images, below. This is a Kickstarter campaign with 18 days to go as I write this, which has so far acquired pledges of $1850 toward their $2000 goal. That says to me that it is almost certain to achieve it’s funding goals. What’s more, fulfillment will be by DriveThruRPG, which really minimizes the risks involved (assuming that the funding goals are achieved). Personally, I would love to see them achieve the $20,000 stretch goal, unlocking a supplemental volume with 23 conspiracies. This would be of value to any GM (the amount of value might vary with genre). It’s definitely worth checking out.

12. 1930s American Surnames (dicegeeks.com) This 3-page PDF contains two d100 lists, one of common surnames and one of uncommon. This is the sort of thing that every modern GM needs to have up their sleeves for emergency usage, especially if you have trouble naming NPCs on the fly. And the best news of all: It’s free from RPGNow. You won’t find a better bargain.

– THE SCI-FI/SUPERHERO SECTION –

13. Popular American Names for Near Future Settings (dicegeeks.com) …Except for this one, which does the same thing for modern / near future characters – for the same price! Contains Eight d100 tables, including the 200 most popular male and female christian names in both 2000 and 2017. There is a surprising amount of drift in this, something that fascinates me every time I stumble across an analysis of it. .

14. Stargates (Legendary Games) “From local system portals to intergalactic wormholes, you’ll find within a detailed system for defining not just the basics like direction and range but mysterious manifestations of transmaterialization energies, the dangers of activating dormant or damaged gateways, including malfunctions like biomutation, psychic backlash, and temporal displacement!” What appeals most to me is that there is content that makes it possible to distinguish between different types of interstellar connection – everything from arcane portals to Psychic Bridges. For the Interstellar RPG, 5e – but it’s as close to genre-universal as you’re likely to get, and would be well worth the effort of adaption. Stargates costs $5.99 for the PDF or $11.99 for the softcover (or $13.99 for both), available now from DriveThruRPG for both D&D 5e and Pathfinder game systems.

15. Alien Bestiary (Legendary Games) – Kickstarter One GM I know has been trying to merge sci-fi and fantasy genres in his games for at least 30 years, largely by using psionics as his bridge between magic and physics. Some of his blends have been more successful than others, to be honest, but anyone who signs up for one of his campaigns (regardless of genre-of-record) knows that aliens and monsters, psionics and sorcery, long-lost tech and a rich and complex background (often only superficially understood in-game, something he achieves by giving the players only superficial understanding of the ‘true history’ of the setting) will all be on the table at some points. Legendary Worlds treads similar thematic territory, infusing fantasy elements into a futuristic game setting using either Pathfinder or D&D 5e rules systems as the vehicle. The product line is spreading tentacles in multiple directions – “…as part of our continued partnership with Robert Brookes and the gang at Encounter Table Publishing, fans of the awe-inspiring Aethera Campaign Setting will also find dozen more exciting additions to their space-faring saga, from the invading Taur and Aether-touched Infused to the Organic Symbionts, living machine Phalanx, and, of course, the magnificently malevolent Kytons!” Personally, my interest in this volume would be infusing its contents into a superhero or sci-fi setting such as my Dr Who campaign. I already have plans to incorporate the aforementioned Kytons into the latter, inspired by the art shown above (at least, I assumed that the art was of a Kyton – it isn’t, it’s a “Bil’djooli Shock Trooper”, by Lance Red – the Kytons are more like “The Puppet Masters” by Robert A Heinlein). At more than 200 pages, and having achieved their funding goal of $10,000 and stretch goals every $2000 thereafter (pledges stand at $15,217 as I write, with 24 days to go), this is a Kickstarter that will succeed and can only get better value-for-money. Make no mistake, there are ideas here that can be infused into any Sci-Fi/Superhero campaign, and most Fantasy campaigns to boot. This is definitely a product to consider!

16. Legendary Planet: To Worlds Unknown (Legendary Games) This is the first of a series of 7 linked adventures to carry a party of adventurers from 1st to 20th level, which I discovered through links included in the press release for the Alien Bestiary, above. A 100-page PDF ($17.99) or 102-page print volume ($24.99) (or buy both for the discounted price of $29.99), this initially seems like quite a high-priced purchase. But it was the full listing of the contents that persuaded me to list it: “To Worlds Unknown,” a Starfinder Roleplaying Game adventure for 1st to 5th-level characters by Jim Groves A “Planetary Bestiary” by Jim Groves and Thurston Hillman, featuring the ferocious Bahgra, the mysterious Elali, the cruel Jagladine, the savage Klaven slave-soldiers and Klaven warbeasts, and the terrifying Tauslek and Tauslek Matriarch. A collection of “Alien Treasures” by Jim Groves and Jeff Lee, including mundane and magical items from deathbloom nectar to the rejuvenation vine and skystrider harness. A gazetteer of the planet Argosa, “World at the Crossroads,” by Jim Groves, Jonathan H. Keith, and Andrew Christian. A detailed examine of the 20 deities of the “Planetary Pantheons” by Sean K. Reynolds. A downloadable PDF art and map folio, featuring unkeyed player-friendly maps and more. And last but not least, “The Treasure Within,” the first chapter in a 7-part short story by award-winning author Chris A. Jackson. The DriveThruRPG product page also lists the other 6 parts in the series – unlinked, but making it easy to search for them. When you do, you will find that the price and extras list for the other products are similar – #2, “The Scavenged Codex”, includes the second chapter in that sci-fi novella, for example. There is content within the series for both Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres. I’ve linked to the Pathfinder version above, but there are also versions for D&D 5e and Starfinder.

17. Tome Of Aliens (Frog God Games) Space is incredibly vast. Such huge volumes need filling with aliens in any Sci-fi / Superhero RPG; you can never have too many options at your disposal! That’s the purpose of this 48-page supplement – to provide you with 60 more options with which to discombobulate your players. Without look at the actual descriptions, to be fair, there are some that I would not expect to use very often, such as the altogether-too-cutesy “Electric Boogaloo”, and some that I might well want to rename prior to use, like the Liquid-Crystal Dwarf. But there are others that are quite frankly tantalizing. The PDF is priced at $9.95 through RPGNow.

18. Further Vistas: Stars & Systems (Draken Games) If you need a lot of aliens to inhabit Deep Space, you need even more planets. The current estimate is that there are 100 Billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and every discovery of new astronomical weirdness in this area increases the range of possibilities. If you look at an old Sci-Fi RPG, they will tend to divide planetary populations into two types – gas giants and rocky planets. We now know that to have been an utter failure of the collective imaginations of astronomers and sci-fi authors alike. Check out this list of the 25 strangest alien worlds that have been discovered so far, or this similar list of ten weirdies and have your imagination stretched! Throw in the effects of intelligence – terraforming this and exploiting that – and the potential for uniqueness goes way up. To begin expanding your horizons sufficiently to “explore” the modern galaxy, you need all the help you can get. And that’s what makes this 45-page PDF so attractive a proposition. For only $2.95, you get 25 star systems (that’s 25 down and still tens of billions to go, according to NASA). .

19. Infinite Space: Hazards: Stellar & Xenobiological (LPJ Design) Something that I am working hard to achieve in my Superhero campaign at the moment is transitioning perceptions of the (misnamed) “Astral Plane” (more correctly: “Buffer Space”) from something that can be crossed at will, or that need only be endured, into a full environment, complete with distinct regions, quirks, unique environmental hazards, and its own residents – if not its own ecosystem. A lot of players seem to have a similar attitude to space travel, I’ve found – the hazards (vacuum, radiation, potential wildlife, aliens, etc) are “all known and can be anticipated”. This status quo simply won’t do! Enter this game supplement. Six pages long and costing $1.49 through RPGNow, it provides sixteen interstellar threats with which to smack your PCs in their complacency. A must for any superhero or sci-fi campaign involving space travel!

20. Star Maps – Volume 1 (Fat Goblin Games) 20 hex-gridded maps in space with black holes, inky void, planets, asteroids, stars, galaxies, nebulas, and more. Each map is layed out in portrait format (wider across than tall) measuring 12.25″ tall and 18.25″ wide with 1″ hexes. Note that this is no mere PDF, these are the physical maps in printed form – all twenty – for the reduced price of $12.95. Purchase through RPGNow.

21. Epic Races: Racial Abilities Androids (Fat Goblin Games) Hands up, every GM who has ever discovered a blind spot in their imaginations, be honest. Yeah, that’s what I thought – most of us have experienced the odd occasion when everything we can think of has been done before. Sometimes, this writer’s block is just temporary, and we get through it on our own, perhaps after a period of extemporizing and delay. Sometimes, we need a spark from someone else’s imagination to kick our own creativity into play. And, sometimes, there’s no time to wait, and you need to use someone else’s creation as though it were your own – at the same time, finding something that your players haven’t seen before. Some products are better suited to such applications than others. This work may be designed for the Starfinder game system, but it promises to be an example of this type of inspirational resource. It has only one rating – but that one is 5 stars. It may be short, but it won’t put too deep a hole in your wallet at $1.99, so if artificial life (possibly including Golems, Warforged, and similar fantasy analogues) is a factor within your game world, this might just be a worthy investment. Available now through RPGNow.

22. Starship Deck Plans (Frog God Games) Starship Deck Plans take forever to draw up. I know, I’ve done it the hard way. And I decided then and there, “never again – not if I can help it!” That means sourcing deck plans, when I need them, from somewhere else, or abstracting the whole concept. So supplements like this two-page product are perpetually on my shopping list. That said, $9.99 is not cheap – not for something of this length. And it’s a PDF, meaning that you have to print it yourself. Normally, the combination of those factors would leave this product out in the cold. But there’s one final factor to be considered – the cartographer is Alyssa Faden, and much of her work is absolutely brilliant – check out her Facebook page, or the Pathfinder supplement she co-authored Castles Of The Inner Sea (Used $7.27, New from $10) at Amazon for proof. Starship Deck Plans is .

Wrap-up Twenty-five products – or ninety-odd if you itemize the bundles. There should be something there for just about everyone. I recommend the Hurricane Relief bundle, the free products, and at least one of the paid products, as the optimum mixture for supporting both the charitable efforts of the industry and the industry itself, but the choice is up to you. Absolutely everything on this list appeals to me in one way or another, so I have high hopes that every reader will discover something worthwhile!

‘Watching Time’ courtesy freeimages.com / Richard Dudley

Every GM experiences deadlines and deadline stress. There comes a point at which you have to be ready to play, whether you are or not, and whether you feel adequately prepared or not. In learning how to cope with that situation, you also learn how to manage – at least somewhat – the many analogous situations that you will encounter in real life, whether that being a work-related presentation, a speech, or committing to a regular publication schedule.

Quite often, the only solution open to you is to go with whatever you have on hand and hope to polish up the rough spots as you go. That’s where the standards of the individual, and their levels of self-confidence, are on display in their rawest state. What one person feels is an inadequate level of prep may be perfectly satisfactory to someone else.

What I have found as a result of the diversity of campaigns and genres that I have GM’d is that we each have multiple such standards, whether we realize it or not. I can be completely comfortable in a D&D session having performed prep that wouldn’t begin to cut the mustard in my Zenith-3 (superhero) campaign, which is a Swiss watch of precision in comparison. The Zener Gate campaign that I’ve been developing off-and-on is intended to be as close to zero prep as I come. And my Dr Who campaign requires still more effort in some areas than the Zenith-3 campaign, while in others it is more at the D&D-session standard.

Which shows that, in fact, there are a whole array of standards at play that are sometimes collated into a general statement of prep, and that different GMing styles (because that’s the primary non-genre distinction between those campaigns) affect different aspects of the prep array in different ways – heightening sensitivity in some areas and diminishing it in others.

If I were to be asked what my top three pieces of advice to new GMs would be, it’s the following:

1. Don’t over-prep to the point that spontaneity is lost or causes prep to be wasted time; keep things loose.
2. Don’t under-prep in the areas that are weak, especially if they are critical to the GMing style that you have adopted; prep smart, not more, target your weak areas, and prioritize what time you have.
3. Become aware of the correlation between GMing style and prep requirements and alter the first to accommodate the realities imposed by your current situation on the second.

Today’s post is an example of the last of those pieces of advice. I had definite plans for what I wanted to do today, but real life has compromised my capacity to adequately execute those plans. Nothing important, no personal disasters – just a shortage of enough time to adequately prepare and compose the article that I wanted to write.

When that happens, you have four choices:

1. Do the best you can to execute what you had planned, knowing that it won’t be up to your usual standards;
2. Do something else that requires less prep;
3. Shift the deadline, if at all possible;
4. Roll out something that you have “on standby” for just this sort of occasion.

The last of these is always my first preference, while the second-last one tends to be my last resort. I have – once, in more than thirty years as a GM – had to admit that I wasn’t ready to run, and could we please do something else this week? I have also – two or three times – pulled out a canned module or adventure from the internet and said, ‘Okay, this week is a “what if” adventure completely divorced from ongoing reality within the campaign, a “fill-in issue” as it were’.

It must also be said that the options available aren’t quite as black-and-white as the above list suggests. It is sometimes possible to find a compromise between two or more choices.

Which is where today’s article re-enters the discussion. It is a blending of options 2 and 3 – what I had intended to write today will now appear on Thursday evening, Australian time. And, instead of compromising quality (option 1) by doing an inadequate job today, I am instead talking about deadlines and deadline stress, a subject that has absolutely no relation to the intended subject.

Having ameliorated the proximate cause of deadline stress, does that mean that you no longer suffer from the effects? Absolutely not – these prevent further “damage”, but don’t undo the mental and emotional impact of such stress experienced in the past, or while agonizing over the best plan of action to choose in response to whatever situation has impacted on your plans and intentions.

You can tell how much as I love doing Campaign Mastery from the fact that in almost 9 years, there have been only two occasions when I’ve completely missed posting, and another couple of occasions when I’ve done what I’m doing here today. That’s nine years of weekly (to mid-2012) or twice-weekly (4 1/4 years)) articles. 744 of the articles published here (not counting this one) have my by-line.

That’s nine years without a break in the publishing schedule. With most jobs, you get at least two and more often four weeks off, a year, to recharge your batteries. My former partner in the site, Johnn Four, has started taking a month off each year to avoid burnout and discharge the accumulated deadline stress. Most of my campaigns are on a schedule that gives a month off somewhere in the December-January period (because people are busy doing other things).

Nevertheless, there are times when it feels more like a job than a fun activity. That’s when the deadline stress is really starting to bite.

It probably doesn’t help that I have started sidelining intended content simply because there didn’t seem to be enough time available to write the article – I have a long list of post ideas that are simply not on the agenda at the moment for that reason, and that reason alone. Never fear – I have a plan to start tackling those as part of the 10th anniversary buildup, starting just a few months away, a plan that also has the side-benefit of giving me even more free time. Potentially enough that aside from an hour or two of housekeeping each day, I will be able to build up enough material in advance of publication that I will even be able to start taking the occasional fortnight’s holiday without stressing about it for months in advance.

There will be more news on that front in a couple of months – stay tuned!

In the meantime, though, I have other means of de-stressing.

The first is GMing – which may sound paradoxical. After all, I started by pointing out that every GM feels deadline stress for the same reasons that a blogger with a regular schedule does. But the fact remains that actually GMing (as opposed to doing prep) can be a great relief simply because of the fun that you have.

Mindless computer games – my favorite games in this respect are Bubble Shooter, and Mega Miner, and Mad Virus. I’ve also had a great time playing the Into Space series (Into Space!, Into Space 2. Into Space 3: Xmas Story), Galaxy Seige 3, and GrandPrix Management.

Non-documentary Television – I can relax by watching shows that I find entertaining more than interesting. My choices range from VS Arashi to Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. to the various incarnations of NCIS.

I also used to be able to count reading favorite fiction in this category, but failing eyesight has made this more problematic lately. With new reading glasses in tow, I hope that I can now return to that method of stress relief!

Am I the most highly-stressed of people? Absolutely not! There are a lot of people out there doing it a lot tougher than I am, which is one reason why I give to charities what I can when I can. Things used to be a lot worse for me, which is why I don’t often complain!

So, what would my advice be to anyone else out there suffering from deadline stress? Try one of the above activities – but be aware that they are all time-consuming, and therefore inherently compound deadline stress even as they are relieving it. If that’s not enough, you may need to look at reducing your commitments, or taking a break for a month or so.

Everyone is different, feels and reacts to deadline stress differently, and hence requires a different combination of “therapeutic releases”. Your best answer might not even appear on my list!

The best and only substantive answer I can provide is to try all of these, and anything else that you enjoy, in moderation, and see what works best for you and in what proportions.

Reality deadlines don’t have to be a killer burden. If you suffer from deadline stress, no matter how moderately, do something about it – because it will only grow worse if you don’t.

Taiwanese markets image from freeimages.com / Kate Jim

In November 2016,. Campaign Mastery hosted the Blog Carnival with the subject being Everyday Lives. Today I have a new technique for integrating the everyday lives of your PCs into the campaign that is virtually effortless, has virtually zero impact on game-play, and yet makes the life of the PC affected more substantially real.

Where is he going / What is he doing

Every encounter, and the opening scenes of almost every adventure, are all intersection points between the mundane reality of the PC’s life within the game world and the “interesting stuff”. All to often, players are asked what their characters are doing (when there is nothing for them to do) or are told they are in some neutral situation (“You are on the road between A and B” or “You are relaxing in the Tavern”).

These are wasted opportunities. The player may know the PC, but he doesn’t know the game world, so his responses to such questions are either going to serve to enhance the PC, or justify such enhancement in the future (“I’m studying X” or “I’m doing my daily workout” or similar), or deal with established campaign elements (“I’m trying to get the cook to use more spice in his cooking” or “I’m trying to get [Another PC or an NPC] to make a bet with me”).

The person who knows the campaign world best, and who is responsible for integrating the lives of the PCs into that world, is the GM. These responses are parts of the everyday lives of the PCs that quite often add nothing to the campaign, overall.

Instead, the GM can use these as opportunities to enlarge the scope of the private lives of each PC, not by making an event a ‘feature attraction’, but simply by mentioning an act within the ordinary life of the PC as something that has just happened, is about to happen, or that the PC is traveling to/from.

It’s that simple.

Instead of making a vanilla statement about where the PC is and what they are doing, or soliciting a decision from the person who knows the least about the subject, you tell them where the character is going or what he is doing.

The Six Delivery Methods

There are six options:

• PC has just discovered the need to do something
• PC is en route to do something
• PC is about to do something
• PC is in the middle of doing something
• PC has just done something
• PC is en route after doing something.

The “do/doing” is critical. It takes the problem (whatever it is) out of the realm of a problem to be solved by the player and puts it into the category of a solved problem, a piece of color, not of plot-substance..

Distancing the event from significance

The next part of the recipe is equally important. It takes the form of the next word in the sentence, a word that completely rules out the trivia of the background event as important, and makes it just a delivery vehicle, a mechanism to get the character into the real action of the plot. That word is “when”.

[The PC] has just discovered the need to [do something] when…
[The PC] is about to [do something] when…

…and then you describe the start of the significant event, the one that actually matters in terms of plot.

The Benefits

This technique gives the world around the PC realism and depth, establishes the principle that what happens in play is just the high points of the life of the PC, and employs the balance of that life to tell the players a little about the world and the way the character fits into it. It also supplements the main events in the character’s lives with a light exploration of the more mundane aspects of that life, and in particular how the character fits into the society around them.

This is akin to imparting background by stealth, in easily-digested chunks.

Almost-Effortless

It’s incredibly easy (most of the time) to generate content with which to populate these little touches of ordinary life. All you need to is maintain an awareness of what happens to you in your day-to-day life (and those of the others around you) and translate them into analogous situations within the context of the genre and game setting.

Examples might include getting caught without an umbrella, needing to sew up a rip in your shirt, running out of milk, finding that a bottle of wine has become vinegary, feeling unexpectedly peckish, noticing that something brass is tarnished and needs polishing, being late, having a toothache, doing your grocery shopping, a payment being late, discovering a forgotten bill just before it’s due (or just after), witnessing an accident, visiting a friend (healthy), visiting a sick friend, changing a light bulb, dealing with a leaky faucet, checking your mail….

Perhaps equally important is that by keeping these elements small and of minimal significance, you also limit the effort required to perform these translations. In fact, as they accumulate, and the local culture becomes more sharply focused in your mind, it gets easier and easier.

From time to time, you will become aware of situations that exist within the game environment and which have no mundane analogue in our experience. These are often cultural elements inspired by a human culture other than the one that surrounds the players and GM. These are the social and background elements that you need to give greater prominence within an adventure, because they are more defining of the differences between the game environment and the culture experienced by the games participants, and will require more time to understand and integrate.

Dynamic Introductory Scenes

An extension of the logic behind these principles reveals another truth: whenever a PC enters a situation, like a new town, the scene should never be static. Instead, it should highlight the daily existence of the inhabitants by showing them doing things. The more those activities highlight the unique aspects of the encounter setting, the better.

However, simply adding these descriptive elements to what you already have to convey is not a good idea. It’s easy to over-saturate your narrative by including too much. Instead, focus on the activities and locations that can be integrated into, or implied by, what you do describe.

The cooking of freshly-caught fish by one market stall implies a fisherman, who might well be the vendor. The cooking of fresh fish into a dozen different dishes by a dozen different providers implies that a fishing industry makes its home there. That brings to mind wharves, and boats, and nets, and retailers/craftsmen specializing in these fields. Add an anchor to the decorations of the local inn, and you provide confirmation – there is no real need to even mention the implied details.

At the same time, eschew broad and generic phrases like “fishing village”; you want to emphasize whatever it is that makes this particular example different to all the other such that dot the coastline.

Details that imply content, people doing things that imply vitality and activity and not a place simply waiting passively for the PCs to ride in like some Potemkin village, a point or two of distinctiveness, and letting the minds of the players fill in the rest, can accomplish as much for creating a vibrant setting as five or ten times as much narrative.

That is the operational principle behind Stealth Narrative: Imputed info in your game and a key objective of my six-part series The Secrets Of Stylish Narrative.

The Occasional Spotlight On Mundanity

Of course, if you want to occasionally focus more closely on these ordinary-life events in order to “ground” the PCs and contrast with the high-adventure existence they normally lead, these give everybody the foundations upon which to do so.

It’s not often that you find a technique that imparts such huge benefits for so little effort. I think it deserves some serious thought by every GM reading this, and hopefully I have motivated you to give the subject the attention that it deserves in your own game.

Image courtesy freeimages.com / Janine Chance

With this item, I continue the practice of offering shorter articles to start the week. Usually, this is to make room for a longer article later (and from time to time, the sequence has been temporarily inverted), but for much of the next year, that’s the plan. This week, though, it’s not for that reason – I have an optometrist’s appointment mid-week that will eat into the time that would normally be dedicated to producing that longer article. Prudence dictates that I make this a “light” week. Whether or not my writer’s instincts will tell Prudence to go fly a kite remains to be seen…

For a long time, I’ve been a supporter of the carrot-and-stick approach to encouraging good play. I tolerate a certain amount of side chatter and the occasional excursion into out-of-game conversation, and I tolerate absence or lateness when the player has a good reason.

When such behavior reaches the point of becoming a problem, rewards are likely to be reduced as a punishment – I favor XP awards for this as they can directly target the character of the player responsible without others being unduly affected by “splash”, but if there’s a magic item or equivalent that’s been placed to specifically target and benefit the character whose player is involved, it might instead be reduced in effectiveness, either temporarily (requiring the player to inconvenience the character to lift the ‘penalty’) or permanently.

By the same token, however, for more than 30 years I’ve been handing out bonus XP for good play – be it good role-play, or clever tactics, or for the player doing something that helps me run a good game. My players know all this and have come to expect it – especially since rewards are far more frequent than punishments.

This weekend’s table side-chatter carried with it a new idea. It’s not my idea (not completely), but I’m stealing it and filing off the serial numbers! That notion: an in-game reward for doing a good job as a player instead of extra XP.

What’s Wrong With Extra XP?

Extra XP make a great reward because they are something that the player cares about. They are quick and easy to hand out, and they can make a real difference to the character. They encourage consistent patterns of good behavior because they accumulate. So, what’s wrong with them?

Players care about them – and not getting them when you think they are justified can arouse ill-will. They are easy to hand out, which encourages the GM to hand them out frivolously, rather than being earned by achieving a consistent standard of good behavior. They can make a real difference to the character, and they can accumulate – which means that, over time, the benefits obtained will tend to grow exponentially.

So what’s the alternative?

Three things come to mind:

1. In-game kudos and high-fives from NPCs whose opinions matter to the PC.
2. Recognition from the PC’s NPC-peers. In-game popular support from “ordinary people”.
3. Tokens that are redeemable for in-game advantages but that must be used by a certain date or they get converted to XP.

Of these, the last of the three is more powerful, and more flexible. You can either hand out different tokens that offer specific benefits, or you can establish a “price list” and use the tokens as a form of metagame currency. The first permits greater control, but is more work, the latter is easier on the GM’s workload.

An Expiry Date?

The notion of an expiry date is an important point to note. A physical token made of cardboard is easily lost, but also easy to write a date on, and easily replaced after use. A physical token made of plastic can be marked with a permanent marker, though such markings can still wear off (it depends on the combination of markers and the plastic the tokens are made of). Both these options also require the player to spend time sorting and counting his accumulated “rewards” at the start of each game session. Getting a character to write something on their character sheet means that the character sheet will eventually wear out (this section is likely to see a lot of “traffic”) but is also more flexible.

These are all problems that can be solved. I recommend using a choice that has a low financial impact on the GM, minimizes the chances of tokens getting lost, and that has a low overhead in terms of additional work for all involved.

Why have one at all? I have seen (and used) similar systems in the past, and what happens is that players tend to hoard them until they have a whole lot – enough to give them an overwhelming advantage. A use-by date forces players to expend them regularly, keeping them manageable as rewards.

I have a suggested solution: instead of a calendar date, use a relative date – “expiry in N game sessions”. The more you want to reward a character, the longer the time frame you attach – instead of increasing the size of the reward. Use tokens that will pack flat.

You know those plastic sheets that are designed to hold cards from CCGs? They tend to be cheap per sheet. There are usually nine pockets per sheet, sometimes there might be 12. Those are more than big enough for this purpose. Here’s how it might work:

Before play, this player has tokens in five groups: 3, 2, 2, 3, and 1. Note that this GM is color coding his tokens to help everyone keep it straight (the fact that it makes it easier to explain to readers is a bonus – at least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it).

When setting up for play, the player takes the tokens out of the first pocket and puts them in front of him as a reminder that they have to be used today or they will covert to a token amount of additional XP at the end of the game session. He takes the tokens from pocket 2 and moves them into pocket 1, from pocket 3 into pocket 2, from 4 into 3, and from 5 into 4. Because of the color-coding, the GM can see at a glance if anyone’s failed to convert tokens to xp at the end of the last session because their colors will be different to everyone else’s – perhaps they had to leave in a hurry to catch the bus (it happens) or forgotten (it happens) or missed the session.

At the end of play, this player has expended two of the three that had to be consumed, leaving one to be redeemed for XP. He had a good day, earning a new blue token (must be redeemed next session, indicating a short-term reward), a new yellow token (must be redeemed in 4 sessions time) indicating a long-term reward, and a new red token (must be redeemed in 5 game sessions).

As part of his process for packing up at the end of play, he puts the new tokens he has received into their respective pockets – which match the colors of the tokens already in those pockets. The evenness with which his resulting token reserve is distributed is too even to be a coincidence (3, 2, 3, 2, 1) and indicates that the GM has his eye on what players have already received when he chooses what reward to hand out.

Of course, if the player experienced a very bad day, or chose to buy a bigger reward, his token collection might have been decimated as shown in the illustration above. In addition to the three tokens that had to be used on this particular day, he has used two of the tokens that did not expire until next game session (leaving him just the one that he earned in the course of the day’s play), one of the tokens that had a lifespan of 2 game sessions remaining (leaving one), and one of the tokens with a remaining lifespan of 3 game sessions. That’s a total of 7 tokens expended, leaving him 1, 1, 2, 2, and 1, respectively.

How long should a cycle be? I’ve used 5 as an illustration, but you could choose three, or four, or six – it’s all a question of how many different tokens you have. This solution means that there’s no need to mark or replace the tokens at all – they are constantly being recycled.

Types Of In-Game Reward

What could you spend tokens on? Well, that’s up to the GM. For the rest of this article, I’ve listed (and discussed) as many types of in-game reward as I can think of, and a suggested price in tokens.

Here’s the list of rewards I’ve come up with:

1. Partial Map (with potential inaccuracies) or equivalent
2. Partial Map or equivalent without inaccuracies
3. A Clue
4. +5 to a roll (before you roll)
5. +1 to a roll (after you roll)
6. -5 to a roll (before the GM rolls)
7. -1 to a roll (after the GM rolls)
8. Re-roll a failed non-combat roll
9. Re-roll a failed combat roll
10. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PC, specifically, for one encounter
11. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PC, specifically, for one full game session
12. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PC’s class orrace for one full game session
13. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PCs (as a group) for one encounter
14. Kudos from and a lasting improvement in attitude towards the PC on the part of one specific NPC
15. 10% off the purchase price of one mundane item one-time-only, for this particular PC only
16. 10% off the prices of one particular merchant, one-time-only, for this particular PC only
17. A more generous valuation of one particular item being sold by this PC (amount up to the GM, but average should be +10%)
18. A more generous valuation of all items being sold by this PC (amount up to the GM, but average should be +10%), one-time-only
19. Placement
    of a specifically-desired magic item in a place and location that the PC can obtain it
20. XP (the default)

That’s a solid list of 20 possible rewards, by my count. None of them are particularly game-breaking unless the price is too low or the GM is too generous in his distribution of reward tokens. I’ll discuss that a little later.

1. Partial Map (with potential inaccuracies) or equivalent

The PC gets a map (as described) or a verbal description of one particular room in a dungeon. The closer to the entrance that room is, the more likely the description or map is to be accurate, but the GM doesn’t have to tell the player how close the room in question is – the player still has to recognize it. I suggest a hierarchy, such as 1. completely accurate – 2. a few minor inaccuracies – 3. an important detail wrong – 4. an important detail and a couple of unimportant details incorrect – 5. information is mostly close to the truth but nothing is quite right – 6. not even close to accurate. Count one door or length of passage as “1”.

This information (or mis-information!) may be from personal experience, or it may be from Scrying or some other similar technique, or from a friend of a friend, or myth/legend/rumor or whatever. It might have been totally accurate at one time. Those are all up to the GM depending on the context of the situation.

Recommended Price: 1 token.

2. Partial Map or equivalent without inaccuracies

As above, but without inaccuracies – anything actually said is correct. This simply strips out the inaccuracies from the above and only reports the factually-correct information. This can be difficult for the GM to explain, in-game, so it is harder to earn.

Recommended Price: 3 tokens.

3. A Clue

If the PCs are stumped, it is expected that the GM will help them out in order to keep the game moving, because sitting around doing nothing is boring.

Making this option available changes the paradigm. Instead of a clue to keep the game moving (for free), the GM is free to use some other action to keep action happening when the game starts to get boring – a wandering monster, for example, or a PC “hears something” (sparking paranoia) or whatever. ANYTHING except actually helping the PCs do something that the players should be capable of doing on their own.

But, if one of the players chooses to expend reward tokens, an appropriate PC gets a clue or a hint. Which PC is appropriate depends on the problem that has the PCs stumped – it might be the cleric, if it’s a religious puzzle, or the fighter if it’s a physical challenge, or the smartest person in the party if it’s logic puzzle.

This also guarantees that the GM won’t make the clue too cryptic – it should be possible to get from the clue to the solution reasonably – though it doesn’t and shouldn’t make it too easy, either.

I’ve had a reasonable amount of success promising to answer 5 yes-or-no questions truthfully as a ‘clue’.

Recommended Price: 1 token.

4. +5 to a roll (before you roll)

Some game systems permit you to “take a ten” or “take a twenty” under certain circumstances, but force you to roll the hard way the rest of the time. This option falls somewhere in between – in effect, the player is cashing in his reward to get a better shot at a successful roll. Note that whether or not the +5 is actually needed doesn’t matter – the token still gets expended. The GM may permit multiple tokens to be played or may cap this at one, or anything in between, as he sees fit.

Nor does the player paying the token have to be the owner of the PC making the roll.

What this does is ensure that when one of those rolls comes up that the PCs absolutely have to succeed in, they have the means to shade their chances in their favor. And that this potential can be frittered away taking the lazy option when failure is not going to be the end of the world!

Recommended Price: 1 token.

5. +1 to a roll (immediately after you roll)

On the other hand, once a roll is made, the GM should be much harder to convince, because the player already knows whether or not they have succeeded.

This has three applications, from the players’ perspective: they can avoid a fumble or critical miss (i.e. turn a natural 1 into a 2); they can ameliorate the frustration of just missing a failed roll; or they can turn a 19 into a 20 (or system equivalents, of course).

I often feel that the PCs need to have an edge that enables them to win most fair fights; it’s only a question of the degree of difficulty involved (no-one ever promised that it should be easy!) This option provides the PCs with just such an edge while still keeping it constrained and controlled within reasonable limits.

Recommended Price: 1 token.

6. -5 to a roll (before the GM rolls)

This is a more defensive option. The player who is buying this reward is betting that the modifier will make the difference, or is desperate enough that it’s worth any price to improve the odds. I strongly recommend that GMs cap the number of tokens that can be expended in this way on any single roll to one, or at most, 2. But if you do want to make it more open-ended, reduce the size of this reward to +4 or +3 (and the size of 4 above, to match).

Recommended Price: 1 token.

7. -1 to a roll (immediately after the GM rolls)

The obvious alternative or variation on 5, above. I have to admit that I thought long and hard about making this a -2 instead of a -1, and am STILL of two minds on the question. A minus 1 will avoid a critical success (a 20 becomes a 19), and turn an only-just success into a failure or a near-fumble into a fumble, but those are very limited circumstances. Doubling the scope for this to make a difference is a substantial improvement in utility.

If your objective is to keep the ‘economy’ of tokens turning over, don’t cap this; if you trust yourself not to be excessively generous, I suggest a cap of 1 or 2 tokens.

Recommended Price: 1 token.

8. Re-roll a failed non-combat roll

“Psst, Hey kid, want to buy yourself a second bite of the cherry?” The lower the level of the PCs, the more comfortable I would be having this choice on the table. That’s because the greater the chance of success, the greater the value of a re-roll.

If you only succeed on eighteen or better (on d20) (or three or less on d20, it’s the same thing), a second roll doesn’t improve your chances very much – 3/20ths of 17/20ths, or 12.75%. Overall, your chance is only 27.75%, or slightly less than one in four. I’d be completely comfortable with that sort of improvement.

If your chances are 50-50, you get twice as much gain – 10/20ths of 10/20ths, or 25%, which takes your overall chance of success to 75%. Look at it the other way – your chances of failing have just halved. That’s starting to get to my squeal point.

Every improvement from there only ramps things up. If you succeed on 14 or less, the improvement is 14/20ths of 6/20ths – which is only 21% – but that becomes significant when added to the base 70% chance, taking your overall likelihood of success to 91%. From a roughly one-in-three chance of failing, it’s become one in 10, or better than three times as unlikely. By now, we’re well past my squeal point.

So I would limit the heck out of this option. ONE re-roll, only, and only when most of the rolls by the party are 50-50 or less (in D&D/Pathfinder terms, until about 5th-8th level). This option may NOT be combined with any of the other ones on offer – specifically, the +5 or +1 to the die roll. And even then, to accurately reflect the utility, I would up the price, as shown below.

Recommended Price: 2 tokens.

9. Re-roll a failed combat roll

Everything that I’ve just said counts double or triple when we’re talking about combat rolls, because these can literally be the difference between life-and-death. The price should reflect that innate value, and be high enough that you would only contemplate this if you were absolutely desperate..

Recommended Price: 3 tokens.

10. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PC, specifically, for one encounter

From “burn him at the stake” to “lock him up”; from “lock him up” to “fox touring the hen-house”; from “extreme paranoia” to “grudging tolerance”, to “polite acceptance” to “warm welcome” to “long-lost brother”. Or whatever other gradated structure you use.

As a general rule of thumb, such shifts in attitude resulting from the expenditure of multiple tokens decline back to the base at the rate of 1 step per encounter, or per game day, whichever comes first. So spending four tokens might take a hostile reception to a polite if cool welcome for one encounter, to deep suspicion and second thoughts on a second encounter, to feeling manipulated and betrayed on the third, and back to the base “extreme prejudice” level on the fourth.

This is a foot in the door – but unless the PC works hard to take advantage of the opportunity to better his relations, it’s a fleeting advantage. Rewards should never take the place of good roleplay.

Recommended Price: 1 token per step.

11. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PC, specifically, for one full game session

As above, but the decay rate is weekly or by game session, whichever comes first.

Recommended Price: 2 tokens per step.

12. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PC’s class orrace for one full game session

This is about creating a local exception to a generalized attitude. Decay assumes that the PC is unable to live up to the expectations of the locals. I keep thinking about the attitudes toward the Dwarves in Lake-town in “The Hobbit” as the perfect example.

Recommended Price: 3 tokens per step.

13. +1 step to the common attitude towards the PCs (as a group) for one encounter

The locals have heard good things about the Party (whether they are true or not is another matter). This overrides any prejudices they may have – for a while – as per 10, above. “Most [fill-in-the-blanks] are uncouth scum who would do [something horrible] to us if they could, but we’ve heard that you’re different.” Again, if the PCs fail to do something significant to cement relations, the goodwill quickly evaporates, and even those who the locals might get along with (or have no prejudice toward) will suffer, tarred with the same brush.

Recommended Price: 2 tokens per step.

14. Kudos from and a lasting improvement in attitude towards the PC on the part of one specific NPC

This can only be accessed after performing a deed of which the NPC approves, and is a means by which the player can enhance/leverage the resulting goodwill.

Recommended Price: 3 tokens per step.

15. 10% off the purchase price of one mundane item one-time-only, for this particular PC only

The GM should have a reasonably liberal interpretation of “one item” – if something is usually bought in sets, or in quantities, the discount applies to one set or one transaction. The discount may not show up immediately; this commits the GM to “arranging” circumstances under which the discount will be offered. The scale if circumstantial change depends on the scale of the transaction and the size of the discount that has to be justified.

Recommended Price: 1 token, plus 1 token each 2nd additional step. So 10% costs one, 20% costs 1 plus 1 equals 2, 30% costs 2 plus one, plus one, or 4, and so on,
The sequence is: 1 (10%), 2 (20%), 4 (30%), 6 (40%), 10 (50%), 14 (60%), 20 (70%), 26 (80%), 34 (90%), 42 (100%, i.e. free).

These somewhat brutal increases at high level are intended to keep these benefits within reasonable (and rational) bounds. The GM is perfectly entitled to interpret circumstances that emerge during play as providing one or more additional “steps” of discounting.

16. 10% off the prices of one particular merchant, one-time-only, for this particular PC only

As above regarding in-game interpretation.

Recommended Price: 2 tokens, plus 1 token each additional step.
The sequence is: 2 (10%), 5 (20%), 9 (30%), 14 (40%), 20 (50%), 27 (60%), 35 (70%), 44 (80%), 54 (90%), 65 (100%, i.e. “take whatever you need”).

17. A more generous valuation of one particular item being sold by this PC (amount up to the GM, but average should be +10%)

Only one level of this benefit per item. This is justified as the buyer already having a customer in mind who will pay him a premium for the item, or something similar. When dealing in a more mundane item, something has put him in a good mood.

Recommended Price: 1 token per significant digit of base valuation in gp. So a 5,000gp item needs 4 tokens to get the +10% benefit.

0-9gp: 1 token for 10%
10-99 gp: 2 tokens for 10%
100-999 gp: 3 tokens for 10%
1000-9999 gp: 4 tokens for 10%
10,000 – 99,999 gp: 5 tokens for 10%
and so on, but I doubt more will be needed. Which is convenient because these are all reasonably workable with mental arithmetic.

18. A more generous valuation of all items being sold by this PC (amount up to the GM, see below), one-time-only

This should usually be interpreted as an attempt to forge a lasting trading relationship with the PC. The NPC might do so out of avarice (expecting to do a lot more business with the PC in the future) or might have some ulterior motive (“you owe me a favor”). The GM is free to place any other interpretation on the situation that seems appropriate, but something is motivating the NPC to deal with the PC on more generous terms than most would get.

Recommended Price: 1 token, plus 1 token per significant digit of base valuation in gp of the total. So 5,000gp worth of items needs 5 tokens to get the +10% benefit (see above for what I mean by significant digits).

However, the player should not be told the total number of tokens required; instead, divide the number offered by the PC by the required amount and multiply by 10%. So if the player only expends three reward tokens when four are required to get the full 10%, he gets 3/4 of 10% or +7.5% overall. If the player had expended five tokens when only three were required, that’s one-and-two-thirds of 10%, or about 16.7%.

19. Placement of a specifically-desired magic item in a place and location that the PC can obtain it

This isn’t meant to guarantee that the PC will obtain the item, but does guarantee the opportunity to acquire the item. The GM should add it to whatever treasure he has emplaced and add additional defenses appropriate to the increase in value of the total. It certainly does not guarantee that the item won’t be used against the PC!

Recommended Price: 2 tokens plus 1 token per significant digit of the valuation, -2 for one-use items, -1 for a charged item with 5+d10% of the base charges.

So, Potions & Scrolls:
0-9gp: 2+1-2=1 token
10-99 gp: 2+2-2= 2 tokens
100-999 gp: 2+3-2= 3 tokens
1000-9999 gp: 4 tokens
10,000 – 99,999 gp: 5 tokens

Wands (5-15% charged [round up]):
0-9gp: 2 tokens
10-99 gp: 3 tokens
100-999 gp: 4 tokens
1000-9999 gp: 5 tokens
10,000 – 99,999 gp: 6 tokens
100k – 999k gp: 7 tokens

Armors, Weapons, etc:
0-9gp: 3 tokens*
10-99 gp: 4 tokens**
100-999 gp: 5 tokens***
1000-9999 gp: 6 tokens****
10,000 – 99,999 gp: 7 tokens*****
100k – 999k gp: 8 tokens*****
* few if any items will be this cheap, this entry is only for the sake of completeness
** you might get some mundane/masterworked items in this price range
*** too cheap for magic, but most mundane items will be in this range
**** the realistic minimum for low-level magic items
***** most magic items will be in the 7-8 token range.

20. XP (the default)

Some players respond particularly poorly to falling just short of acquiring their next level. Aside from ensuring that tokens keep circulating, this offers such players a way past the hump. The actual value per token goes up with the number of tokens being redeemed for XP:

1 token: 100XP
2 tokens: 150XP
3 tokens: 200XP
4 tokens: 250XP
5 tokens: 300XP
6+ tokens: 400XP + 20XP per token over 5

Unlike most of the other rewards, the PC doesn’t have to do anything to receive this XP. He is considered to have done whatever-it-is that justifies the extra back when he received the token.

So, a character who cashes in three tokens would get 3×200=600XP extra.

A character who cashes in five tokens would get 5×300=1500 XP extra.

A character who cashes in ten tokens would get 10x(400+100)= 5000 XP extra.

If your game system doesn’t use the D&D scale or similar for XP, you may need to adapt this.

Sidebar

Assuming characters earn up to 3 tokens per game session on average – and I’ll get into reward levels in a moment – this sets up an interesting dynamic in which a character may choose to tap into his non-expiring reserve to obtain a bigger XP payout, and hence an additional level sooner – but in the process, sacrifices the benefits / security blanket of having those untapped rewards on hand. This may actually handicap the character for a while, relative to another, more patient, character. This effectively simulates a situation in which the character has to take a little time to fully assimilate the things he’s just learned how to do (the level increase and any level abilities that go with it). Suggest to the player that he roleplay it that way :)

Earning Rewards

The number of reward tokens you hand out is critical. A brilliant idea or making the whole table laugh might be worth 1 token. Roleplaying especially well in a single encounter might be worth 2 tokens, and so on, but my recommendation is to vary the lifespan rather than the payout. The longer a token will survive, the more tokens the character can accumulate in total.

Or you can do what I did in the pictured example, and blend the two strategies for even more flexibility – one short-lived token for something small, a long-lived token for something more significant, a very long-lived token and a short-lived token for something even more substantial.

Or, option number four, you could state that the first reward in a game session has a 1-session expiry date, the second has a two, the third has a three, and so on.

What this system, in its variations, is all about is rewarding and encouraging certain behavior at the gaming table, and especially in in-game terms. The scale of the reward should reflect how much you want to encourage that behavior.

What is your minimum standard – the level that gives you no rewards beyond those mandated within the rules? Is it being polite and engaged? Is it being so in-character that when the personality dictates it, you will put your PC at a disadvantage? Is it deliberately failing at a task (because the character is almost hopeless at it) rather than rolling? Is it having a brilliant insight into the in-game situation? Is it getting the GM out of tight spot or a plot hole that he didn’t see coming?

I would argue that everything listed above after the “polite and engaged” should be actively encouraged by the GM.

And hey, if you’re concerned about game balance, this system gives you the perfect excuse to skimp a little in other areas. Don’t dole out magic items like candy; provide them at a rate that is reasonable in terms of the campaign that you are running, and let characters earn ‘extras’ through rewards. Anticipate that a character will get 100xp or more per game session from roleplaying and reduce the other awards that you dole out, accordingly.

I’m not saying that I recommend you do so, just that this is an option that is on the table for you to consider.

One final piece of
advice (or two)

Avoid playing favorites. Every player/PC combination is different, and requires judging by its own standards; some characters are more robust or complex than others. Some players are natural or skilled min-maxers who should be held to a higher standard than others.

It’s even more important, though, to avoid giving the appearance of playing favorites, because that’s more easily done (even by a good and fair GM) than actually playing favorites. If you take control over the rewards system into your own hands, even to this limited degree, you expose yourself to allegations of bias, even if they are unwarranted, unless you are scrupulous in your approach.

The benefits of providing rewards that can be meta-gamed in the ways that I have described for an in-game benefit are that you give the player flexibility in the form that their reward takes – it’s whatever they need most at the time. That gives players a greater sense of control over the campaign, even as it protects from the unexpectedly good (or bad) roll or decision. This system protects the players from bad GM decisions as much as it protects the GM from excessive generosity (i.e. Monty Haulism) and other errors. It grants great rewards to those who earn them, but the GM retains control over the awards, and it can even make the GM’s job easier because he has more flexibility in his ability to challenge the players.

The notions described have clear merit. Is that merit sufficient justification for house rules that alter your game in the fairly fundamental ways described? It’s certainly worth considering!

I couldn’t decide which image to use to illustrate this article, so I’m giving you both of them!

It’s one of the easiest techniques to follow – you simply copy a character or a plotline from some other source, be it Television, a Movie, or a literary source. If you’re particular clever, you might go so far as to rename the character.

There are a number of reasons why a GM might be attracted to this. The character or story might be a personal favorite, or it might just seem absolutely perfect for the campaign’s current needs. Or there might be an irresistible pun or witticism involved.

Resist that urge.

What most people don’t realize is that such derivative interpretations fall flat seven times in ten – and explode in your face most of the rest of the time.

Not convinced? Okay, let’s run through why this happens. Then I’ll show you how to pull the fangs of this particular dragon.

Irresistible Humor

A joke of any sort is transitory. If you’re lucky, it might still be funny the second or third time. Sooner or later, though, it will become a millstone around the neck of the character or situation introduced purely for the comedic value of the media/literary in-joke, dragging your campaign down with it.

Tribute Characters

There’s a reason why a character appeals, and it’s rare to actually capture that with the character; the reason they are beloved is because of the situations they find themselves in, and how the character reacts to those situations, and how the character interacts with the other characters around him. Usually, these are carefully crafted to show the character in his ‘best’ light.

So when you clone the character, what happens? He finds himself in different situations, requiring a different reaction; he finds himself surrounded by other characters, and so the interactions with those characters are different. In a nutshell, the context doesn’t translate with the character, leaving him looking like a pale imitation of the original instead of the vibrant homage that you expected.

Cloned Plotlines

A plot develops as a consequence of the stimulus of the characters engaged in it. Different characters will react differently, have different capabilities and different priorities. In particular, the PCs are not going to the same as the protagonists in the source material.

Quite often, the plot requires characters to overlook the one correct explanation for what is going on, to experience particular lapses in logic, or to make particular assumptions that shape their thought processes and actions. None of these are likely to be replicated by the PCs, and so the plot will evolve in a different direction to the original. Long before you get to the parts of the source that motivated you to create the derivative plot, it’s on a completely different course.

Making matters worse, you have often been so busy adapting and collating the plot that you expect to occur that you haven’t done prep for what actually happens, forcing you to scramble to react to the situation. And when you do that, your first instinct is to try and force the plot “back into shape”. The tracks are laid and the PCs forced aboard the plot train before you know it, all in the most blatant form possible.

Or, if you have avoided these pitfalls, you run afoul of the fact that plots are designed for particular characters – and your characters are different. The coalescence of this reality is that your plot is unlikely to suit your characters as well as the lovingly polished narrative in the source – and that leaves your efforts less satisfying than the original was.

Clone plotlines are one pit-trap after another for the GM to fall into.

The right way to do it

There are solutions to all these problems, a right way to do it that either solves or avoids these problems, and a number of others that I haven’t mentioned.

The right way to incorporate a joke or witticism

Have you ever noticed that people are more prone to laugh at a joke if they have already been laughing? It’s the difference between a “cold room” and a room that’s been “warmed up”.

The other time that humor is most likely to hit the mark is when it’s a relief, a release.

So tell your joke as an aside, use it as mood inspiration, and let the players and yourself find your own joke amongst in-game events. But either soften the ground up in advance with other humor, or go in the exact opposite direction.

Throw a little slapstick at an NPC. Tell a joke or two. Show a humerous cartoon or meme around. Make your target audience receptive, then use your joke as a launchpad. “My first thought was to make Darwin Orwell a character like [name] for the joke value – can you imagine what he would say/do if he were in this situation?” – then tell your joke.

This gets the ‘audience’ receptive, incorporates the humor that you wanted to use, and gets full value for it – without contaminating your in-game situation.

The right way to make a homage to a favorite character

At the very end of 2015 (I can hardly believe it was so long ago), I offered details of a villain named Mortus, who was a homage to the comics version of Marvel’s Thanos, a character that has been lurking about the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a while now, and who is set to figure prominently in the forthcoming Avengers: Infinity War.

Having railed against derivative characters, how could I countenance such a creation, let alone laud it as a success?

First, because this wasn’t a cheap knock-off, or second-rate pale shadow of the original; instead, I took the central concepts of the original character and constructed a new character that embodied those key themes in a new context.

Next, the adventure in which he appeared was one designed to highlight this new character. He did things that the original source character would not have done because the source character had completely different motives and ambitions. In terms of personality, the two were as different as dumplings and steel girders, and the adventure served to showcase the character who was actually in-play, and not the one that had inspired him.

The best homages are those which permit you to do something original, and which let the new character evolve in his own direction.

Compare Thanos with Mortus in detail, and understand the process that created one from the inspiration provided by the other.

The right way to draw inspiration from a situation or plotline

There is a novel of the thriller genre called ‘The President’s Plane Is Missing‘ by Robert J. Serling. There is another, ‘The Red President‘ (link is to the Amazon page for the book which has more and better reviews than anywhere else).

At one point in the last Zenith-3 campaign – about nine years ago, I guess – I attempted to combine these into a single adventure, with the plane crash merely a cover to conceal what was being done to the President.

In theory, it should have worked. In practice, it was a near-disaster, with the PCs exposing one plot hole after another, most of them stemming from the fact that they did not follow the script that the protagonists in the novels worked from. They thought of things sooner, and thought of options that the novel didn’t mention.

In the end, the plan was so riddled with holes that to salvage credibility for the bigger picture, I had to make this a plot by a crazed zealot within the KGB who usurped official resources for his own ends, rather than a state-sanctioned operation. And get out of it as quickly as possible.

So my criticism of derived plots stems from first-hand misadventure. Sometimes, things work out to a better outcome than this experience, but you can never be sure of that outcome until after you have nailed your colors to the mast.

But I learned from that experience, and from a couple of more successful attempts. The key is to select the one or two central premises, settings, or scenes that capture the appeal of the source material, translate them into your genre if necessary, and build a new adventure around them, throwing away everything else, which embeds these sources of inspiration into the context of your campaign and characters.

If that sounds an awful lot like the approach recommended for characters, it should. That’s because it works.

By way of example, let’s take a story that most people will recognize, Star Wars, and start adapting it to a D&D/Pathfinder setting.

The central plot of Star Wars has two elements: “Farmboy against an Evil Empire” and “Farmboy discovers unsuspected mystic powers”. We can work with both of those, but first we have to confront a major issue: our Farmboy isn’t the star of the show, the PCs are. At best, he will be a prominent NPC.

I am rejecting out-of-hand the idea of making “The Farmboy” one of the PCs for a long list of reasons, including (but not limited to):

• It isn’t something the player intended for his character;
• It adds an ongoing thread to the campaign rather than the standalone adventure we were aiming for;
• It unfairly singles out one PC over the others; and
• It takes control of the narrative out of the hands of the GM and places it in the hands of a player, who may not be on-board with it.

However, if there’s a PC who fits the cliche – high charisma, young, etc – it might be amusing to have someone mistake him for the Farmboy. In fact, that might be a good way to first put the plotline on the PCs radar. Something to bear in mind as I proceed.

The question of how the PCs will fit into this situation will fundamentally shape the plotline. But I have to admit that right now, nothing is coming to mind.

So let’s move on to the next element – the Evil Empire, which poses a whole new set of challenges. Empires are big; they tend to dominate the political landscape in every direction. It doesn’t make sense for one to suddenly be revealed that the PCs have never heard of before. To be able to integrate it into an existing campaign without having it dominate that campaign from that point forward, we need to scale it down while remaining true to the premise of “one against the odds” – and knowing the we will need to violate that premise when the PCs become involved.

In fact, let’s scale it all the way down to become a tiny hole-in-the-wall kingdom, the sort of forgotten political relic that might be omitted from maps. But in a younger age, it was in fact the seat of a mighty Empire. We could further suggest that centuries after the greater political structure fell, it was annexed by a neighboring ‘upstart’ kingdom, though it retained enough power and influence internally to be granted an unprecedented level of independence. This guarantees that it won’t be shown on any modern maps, and will be forgotten by all but the scholars and the locals. But it also means that they have a few artifacts and historical remnants of the power of the Old Empire.

So, what happened to it, to cause it’s fall? And why is it now considered an Evil Empire? There are lots of possible answers, but one lept immediately to my mind, and it’s representative of the point that I’ve been trying to make in this section.

Perhaps they grew powerful enough to invade one of the circles of Hell, smug in their moral certitude and drunk on power. It became the height of fashion for the aristocracy to display their power by parading captured devils on leashes wherever they went. The devils seemed so totally cowed that they endured this without protest, a point not lost on the Empire’s neighbors and subjects. But all the while, the Devils were whispering in the ears of that aristocracy, and the aristocracy become cruel, despotic, jealous, and protective of privilege.

Seemingly overnight, internal conflicts sprang up like weeds, great family going to war with great family, and the Empire shredded itself to pieces, becoming a long-forgotten footnote of history.

This does a number of things for the GM. It raises the stakes of what the Old Empire’s leftovers could represent, power-wise, though they no longer have the numbers to dominate. Should anyone with more might and ambition uncover their secrets – even just some of them – a mighty army might become a nigh-invincible military force. Certainly, within their domain, trouble and bloodshed would be around every corner, just waiting to be unleashed. The remnants of several of the old Great Houses would linger, still despotic and intent on pursuing petty rivalries and long-forgotten insults. Civil Wars between this family and that would be an annual recreation, and alliances would come and go like the tides. Betrayal and scheming would be second nature.

All of which makes it seem pretty evil as a place, and helps explain why the Kingdom which has (nominally) conquered it keeps the place at arm’s length whenever possible, rather than getting entangled in their endless rivalries and feuds.

We’re still looking for a way to get the PCs involved, but this characterization of the Empire not only provides a foundation for our Farmboy having unsuspected powers, it suggests that there might be some legacy artifact from long ago that the PCs need in order to deal with a more modern evil. It all also speaks to Priests and Elite troops have strange and exotic weapons – effectively translating Darth Vader and Lightsabers in the in-game context. But we don’t want such powerful weapons running riot through the campaign, so make them dependent on some forgotten power source within what’s left of the Empire – go beyond it’s borders, and they stop working. In fact, the area in which they work would be the practical definition of the “Imperial Boundaries” – cross this line and you enter a world of hurt, but it’s all bottled up and the secrets have been lost.

At this point, the plot is beginning to take shape. Part 1: The PCs are confronted with some Evil, discover a Devilish connection, find the Devil in question to have overwhelming power, but learn of a potential weapon against him or her in an isolated and long-forgotten corner of an old Kingdom. Part 2: Rumors, Myths, and Legends delivered en route as they search for the old Kingdom prepare them for what they will face. As their quest unfolds, they become entangled in one plot after another as various factions attempt to use them for their own ends. Part 3: Finally, they get a lead on what might be the artifact they seek, in the keeping of the lost heir to another of the great houses – our Farmboy. It turns out not to be what they wanted, but it awakens his inherited powers and he sets out to rescue his childhood sweetheart, who was sold to another of the great families to settle a debt between them. The PCs can either aid the Farmboy or not, as they see fit, but either way, his quest will further complicate theirs. Part Four: In the course of his Personal Quest, the Farmboy learns the location of the item the PCs are looking for, and promises it to them in exchange for their aid in rescuing his Princess from the citadel in which she is held. They succeed, get their reward, and in Part 5, use it to undo the Evil that sent them on this quest in the first place.

A nice touch would be to relate the original Evil to the War in some fashion, making the whole thing more self-contained and internally-referential. We would need a seer or scholar of some sort to set the PCs on the path.

This certainly has the right “epic qualities” to be a homage to Star Wars, and I’ve even been able to stir in some direct references – the elite forces and the “Lightsabers”, and make them critical elements in sustaining the credibility of the situation rather than undermining it. We can even have a Darth Vader -analogue for the High Priest of the Family (led by a Moff Tarkin -analogue) who have the Princess, and the Citadel can obviously be a tip of the hat to the Death Star – it just needs a big weapon on top that forces an approach using stealth and guile!

But, at the same time, this has a completely different plot, one that’s integrated fully with the genre, game setting, and milieu. It’s an in-context homage to Star Wars, not an attempt to simply retell the Star Wars story in a fantasy setting. It has plenty of scope for the PCs to steer the plotline as they see fit. And finally, it transforms familiarity with the source material into an asset, rather than a liability.

It avoids all the pitfalls of a derivative storyline to deliver something that tips it’s (metaphoric) hat to the source material while delivering something unique and appropriate to the genre.

And it shows the right way to take an external plot and add it to your own RPG stew.

Sometimes, you want to hit your players with a problem that can be solved only with action of the most violent kind. In D&D, a monster that presents a kill-or-be-killed situation; in a superhero game, a violent threat that has to be stopped before innocents are harmed.

But it’s never a good idea to do the same thing all the time, and it can be equally entertaining to occasionally hit the players with a threat that can’t be overcome by such obvious means.

Most GMs use more intelligent and definitively evil creatures for the purpose, and once again, great fun can be had that way. There is something cathartic about roleplaying an irredeemably evil enemy every now and then.

But, that too can run thin and become predictable if overused. So, from time to time (if not more frequently), GMs will tend to drop in morally ambiguous characters as enemies.

Between these options, any half-decent GM can weave a campaign full of adventures and encounters. What more do you need?

The problem with Good enemies

Variety is the spice of life. The more alternatives you have to inspire you and complicate the lives of the PCs, the better. And there is little that complicates those lives more than a good opponent.

Unfortunately, as most GMs will know if they have followed this line of thought on their own and attempted it, Good characters as enemies often fall flat. The PCs invite them round for a chat (or drop in to visit) and patiently explain the flaw in their thinking, draw up articles of alliance, sing a couple of choruses of Kum-bay-ah, and everyone goes home.

The obvious ways around this is to make the good-oriented characters so obsessed with their path that they will not be deterred, or so long-lived or super-intelligent that the enemy can claim that the PCs are too limited to see the big picture.

It doesn’t work.

If the enemies are so obsessed that they have accepted the maxim “the end justifies the means”, sooner or later they will cross the line and cease being Good. If the GM tries the “can’t see the big picture” solution, it smells of railroading the plot to place the PCs in a quandary, and that never ends well.

But now, I think I have a solution. The constraints involved mean that it can’t be used frequently, but as the occasional really-curly problem to throw at the PCs, it should function superbly. I’m putting good characters back on the enemies list for us all.

Five Principles

To make good characters work as enemies, four principles have to be adhered to with ironclad logic and impeccable assumption foundations.

1. A Noble Cause
2. An Imperative Demand
3. A Conflict
4. Fastidious Limitations
5. The PCs have to be right, too

A Noble Cause

The Good characters must be attempting to do something that is morally defensible from their point of view and, while they may be free to admit that other perspectives might also have validity, there must be nothing inherently incorrect about their position.

This is an essential because it prevents either side from talking the other side around. It needs to be a question of one side valuing something more than the other, and being willing to sacrifice something else to achieve that cause – with the PCs valuing the something else more highly. The conflict between the PCs and the Enemy has to be a manifestation of two ethical principles in conflict.

What’s more, the Enemy needs to believe passionately in their cause, and feel righteous about their support for it.

An Imperative Demand

The cause must be urgent, imperative even. Any sort of delay while a “more perfect” or “more tolerable” solution is devised must be intolerable, even discussion in place of action must be unacceptable.

If these constraints are not in place, the Enemy can be persuaded to seek “another way” as a means of resolving the conflict.

A Conflict

The Cause – whatever it is – must conflict with something the PCs want, take for granted, and/or believe in.

This makes them enemies at worst, collaterally impacted at best. It ensures that the PCs have “skin in the game”, and can’t accept the notion of putting the problem in the “too hard” basket.

Fastidious Limitations

It’s tempting to try and exploit the notion of obsession, and “the ends justify the means”. The problem is that this logic is too easily derailed, or will inevitably lead (as noted earlier) to the Enemy crossing a moral boundary once too often, or once too far.

No, the Enemy has to be a Good Guy and act like one. He has to scrupulously follow the tenets of his alignment, and better yet, to have an inflexible and iron-clad code of honor that constrains his actions.

This ties the hands of the PCs as much as it does the enemy. This will be a very polite and civil disagreement, which may cause violent conflict between them – but, after each such conflict, the victor will bind the wounds of the vanquished and express remorse for the lengths that the “misguided” PCs have forced him to. If they stoop too low in their opposition, they should be the ones facing alignment violation penalties.

It also permits the Enemy to sometimes act as a Frenemy, something that I discussed in the course of the recent two-part article, Ally, Enemy, Resource, and Opportunist: The four major NPC Roles (Part 1, Part 2) – and yes, this article was, in part, the inspiration behind that one.

Another element of this restriction is that the Enemy must recognize that his actions will be mispercieved by “the shortsighted”, even by good people, and be willing to oppose them if necessary, without stooping to anything morally unsavory.

Both sides must be right

The PCs have to be just as morally, ethically, and logically correct in opposing what the enemy is trying to do – from their point of view.

This recipe produces an honest disagreement between two groups more alike than they are different, one that justifies and demands a limited degree of violence and mayhem between them of a particularly genteel variety – one with polite warnings, care to minimize the harm to non-combatants and bystanders, binding of defeated enemy’s wounds, and a certain level of mutual respect and regret.

An example

In The Anatomy Of Evil: What Makes a Good Villain?, I told readers (briefly) about Ullar-Omega, the central villain from the Zenith-3 campaign that preceded the current one, and why he was a “Cool” villain. I didn’t go into his motives, because those were irrelevant to the point being made in that article.

Well, they are relevant to this one, so here goes: There were three characters (two NPCs and one ex-PC) who had, in the epic conclusion of the previous incarnation of the superhero campaign, acquired the power and the mandate to “reinvent the multiverse”, being elevated to something beyond mere “godhood”.

To Ullar-Omega, this not only made them responsible for every misery experienced by anyone in the re-created multiverse, it fundamentally denied them liberty and free will, something that he found intolerable. This, of course, is one of the oldest questions of religious doctrine – if God is omnipotent and omniscient and Good, why does he subject so many people to pain and malice and evil? Blaming the Devil merely undermines that omnipotence. The standard reply, that the “Divine Plan” is beyond mortal understanding, never seems adequate. What’s more, they were self-appointed to their positions.

He decided to do something about it, by forcing the Three Powers to abdicate and relinquish their power. He also decided that, since they lacked free will, it was acceptable to sacrifice the lives and ‘pseudo-liberties’ of everyone on his particular parallel-earth to that end, and so set out to conquer the world, transform the citizenry into living weapons, and forcibly ‘recruit’ them to the cause. What matters the fate of one world, even one universe, if it liberates an infinite number of others?

As a side-note, it was recently discovered by the PCs in the current campaign that the Three Powers were never as omnipotent as they made themselves out to be. Ullar-Omega was a lot closer to succeeding than they thought, and those limitations also made it clear that everything they created was done a lot more deliberately than previously thought, giving him more moral credibility than he already had.

This was a clash of principles, as described above – in fact, of the same principle, in the one case applied collectively to everyone in existence, and in the other, to a specific population on the premise that the whole was the sum of its constituent parts.

“Limited Freedom” is a non-sequetor; you are either free, or you are not. Freedom does not mean that there are no consequences to be faced deriving from your choices; it does mean that you are morally responsible for those choices, and need to accept that and “own” those actions. Those are the moral dimensions on which the epic adventure was founded. It doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree with that statement; these were the judgments of the NPC, and they put him in direct conflict with the PCs – in both cases, for idealistic motives.

Alignment and It’s Violation

A lot of people will simply skip over this section. That’s fine, but if you bear with me, you might find it worthwhile.

Alignment has a very chequered history in D&D. Many game systems don’t have it, or anything like it. Others have a set of implicit alignment standards while never actually coming out and
explicitly defining or codifying things – the Hero System, for example. I’ve always found the 9-alignment model presented in AD&D to be pretty useful, but capable of all sorts of abuse.

D&D 5e pays lip service here and there to alignment but then does its’ best to ignore the subject in terms of game mechanics. Pathfinder, of course, retains the core of the 3.x rules for alignment.

Back in 2009, Campaign Mastery ran a five-part series (Focussing On Alignment) starting with a guest article that proposed eliminating alignment altogether. It remains a controversial subject.

In theory, the GM is supposed to track decisions and actions for every character and determine what alignment shift, if any, they represent. Too much drift one way or another, and the character might end up changing alignment. Yeah, right, like the GM has nothing better to do with his time and attention. But set that aside for a moment.

If alignment matters, then there should be consequences for actions that fall outside your alignment, especially if those reach the point of actually changing that alignment through an accumulation of misaligned deeds. That seems fairly obvious and logical, but it’s also the rub – penalizing your players for exercising their free will is not all that good a choice.

At the same time, there are a couple of character classes in which devotion to a cause is part of the bedrock definition of the archetypes. Paladins come to mind, and Clerics, and yes, Druids.

In 5e, Paladins have very little tolerance for deviation; part of the deal is that they are supposed to get smacked down, hard, for any violation. Clerics and Druids get no penalties at all. In Pathfinder, there are general penalties for consistent alignment violations sufficient to change a character’s alignment, and deviations by Clerics or Paladins attract additional and immediate penalties. Druids… tend to get overlooked.

There has to be a better way, and I think I’ve figured one out. To make this work, you will need 12 tiddlywink-style counters or cardboard chits for each PC – three black (for evil), three white (for good), three in a third color (for lawfulness), and 3 in a fourth (for chaos) (actually, technically, you need five of each per PC but in practical terms three should be sufficient.

The Alignment Baseline

When a character starts play, the GM should assess their alignment and stated ambitions and ensure that the character “fits” within the designated alignment, specifically warning the player of any potentials for alignment violation that can be foreseen.

The Alignment Total

A character’s alignment total is always 6. If a character has less than 6 tokens, the balance represents “neutrality”. So a character with 3 good tokens and 2 lawfulness tokens has one invisible, intangible, “neutrality” token.

Starting Tokens

Characters start with two tokens from each of their primary alignment traits (good vs evil, law vs chaos). Priests and Druids may start with an additional token from one of their alignment traits IF THEY CHOOSE TO. Paladins and the like MUST start with an additional token from EACH of their alignment traits.

The Alignment Test

At the end of each game session or adventure, or after a particularly noteworthy action (in the GM’s eyes), he should ask himself, “is the character’s overall behavior in keeping with the character’s stated alignment?” If yes, nothing changes, carry on. If no, then the GM may choose to award one (or even two tokens for extreme deeds). If more than one token is issued, they need not be of the same type.

Each black token cancels out a white token (the player hands both back to the GM), and vice-versa. Similarly, each law token cancels out a chaos token.

If a player ever has more than 6 tokens after such canceling out, he must hand back the excess – so a player with 5 good tokens and 3 law tokens (total of eight) would have to hand two back to the GM. One must be a ‘good’ token, because that’s what he has the most of, while the other could be of either type.

Priests & Druids

These are somewhat more sensitive to alignment shifts and receive one extra token when any are awarded – so, instead of one, they get two; instead of two, they get three. These need not be all of the same color – you might get two good tokens and a chaos token.

Paladins and other extremists

These are even more sensitive to alignment and receive two extra tokens when any are awarded – instead of one, they get three; instead of two, they get four.

Alignment drift

So long as the character has one token from each of his alignment traits, he is within alignment. If he loses one, he is subject to alignment drift and is facing an imminent alignment shift. For ordinary people, that doesn’t matter too much (but it does matter, see below).

For priests, they may suffer some form of Divine Rebuke; suggested rebukes include 1d6 of unhealable HP damage for the day, loss of access to the highest level of spell for a day, loss of access to one spell slot of each level for a day, +1 to all casting times for a day, and so on. An act of contrition (a small donation or quick prayer begging forgiveness) nullifies the rebuke – for a day – but will not be enough for two days in a row. The tokens represent the divine goodwill that the character has amassed. The goal is not to punish or harm the character, it is to warn them – so if the character is in a particularly dangerous situation in which he might need his spells, some other form of punishment would be chosen.

Paladins and the like are less tolerant. They get no warnings; instead, the character loses access to all his Paladin special abilities until he redeems himself, though an act of contrition may restore them for a short period of time. The goal is to reform the character,not kill him.

Alignment Shift

If a character achieves a net balance of one token opposed to his defined alignment, his alignment has temporarily shifted. This brings no direct penalties to most characters, though it does leave them vulnerable to appropriate “Detect” spells and Divinations. But it opens the door for forces aligned in the opposite direction to attempt a “permanent conversion to the cause”; the GM is required to put thoughts of opportunities into the character’s head by suggesting possible acts contrary to his written alignment. Nothing so crude as “it would be easy to pocket the gold” or “a fancy trinket catches your eye”; be a little more subtle about it. “The merchant makes a mistake in your favor when giving you your change, do you want to keep the extra silver?” or “You really need to know whatever the innkeeper is trying to hide, but you may need to force him to come clean”. The goal is to represent a temptation to the PC.

Things aren’t so rosy for Priests. A double-rebuke, and of the more serious options offered above, a messenger or symbolic event of some sort to remind the priest of the power of his faith / his god, and the nearest Priest in good standing will be advised that one of his brothers or sisters needs “counseling”. An act of contrition is no longer sufficient, a sacrifice of some substance is required to lift the cloud over the priest’s head each day. This will take at least an hour of the Priest’s time, or cost 10 GP per character level.

Things are even less sanguine for extremists. The head of their order is notified that one of his subjects (for lack of a better, more inclusive, term) has betrayed his oaths, and a “corrections officer” is dispatched to remedy the matter with an appropriate punishment – and with the authority to strip the character of his class, should he be unrepentant.

Permanent Shifts

Two tokens contrary to the listed alignment causes a permanent alignment shift. The character earns the enmity of former friends and adherents of the deity with which they were formerly associated, while those who once would have been enemies seem to recognize a kindred spirit – one to be taken with a grain of suspicion, of course. Opportunities and invitations will begin to crawl out of the woodwork, so it’s not all bad news. The alignment on the character sheet is updated.

Priests who undergo a permanent alignment shift have two choices: a major sacrifice (1000 GPs per character level) or a week of his time spent repenting and performing appropriate deeds while reflecting upon his sins may grant him the opportunity to redeem himself in his deity’s eyes, but in the meantime, he has his full compliment of hit points and spells – but all of these have a twist of some sort that indicates that some other deity or being is trying to woo him by providing the power for them. Former colleagues and friends may be outwardly hostile, or may attempt to provide the opportunity for redemption, depending on their personalities. Once a month, the character’s former deity may send a “reminder” that he has earned the displeasure of the deity, and over time that may turn to enmity.

Paladins and other extremists don’t have to wait. They are supposed to be paragons of their calling (whatever it may be) and they have not only dishonored that calling, they have dishonored all those who pursue it. They will be actively hunted by their former order, traps will be baited for him, prices put on his head (and lesser prices for information on his whereabouts and activities). But he is neither alone, nor powerless; paragons of the opposing virtue will seek him out and offer to “convert” the character’s levels, while deities who used to oppose him will seek to encourage this conversion by granting him some of the appropriate class powers – with appropriate twists, of course.

Why these proposals are improvements

They require minimal work by the GM, and – for the most part – involve no penalties to the character of great substance. They leave the player free to roleplay his character as he sees fit – everything that happens to him occurs as a result of an outside force. They stimulate roleplay instead of stifling it.

Emotional Impact

If you employ a Good villain in the manner described in this article, expect to touch a lot of nerves in your players. By taking away the moral simplicity with which they are usually presented and making the enemy someone to be respected, even admired, at the same time as you oppose him or her, you challenge the moral authority and principles by which the players live their lives, usually without giving such matters deep thought. This can’t help but raise emotions. This, in turn, attaches significance to the adventure in their minds.

Works of fiction can explore deep moral and philosophical questions, even when they only touch on them superficially and by proxy. The very best fiction makes us think, even makes us better people, even while it entertains, and without preaching.

It can be enough to be able to ask the questions; you don’t have to have all the answers, those are for each individual to find for themselves. And introducing a Good-aligned implacable enemy can’t help but asks questions of the PCs and, by proxy, the players who operate them – what moral choices are justified? What is worth fighting for? What do you value, and why?

Interesting questions that lead to interesting times, whether it be in life, or in the relatively safe confines of an RPG, and that can only enhance the entertainment value – and force the players to think about their characters actions and choices. That’s not a bad thing at all.

One task that confronts every GM is giving characters a personality. There have been a number of articles on the subject here at Campaign Mastery and I have no doubt that there will be many more.

I tend to think of characters as coming in three different kinds or tiers: Feature Characters, Secondary Characters, and Walk-on characters. These roughly correspond to Stars, Supporting Cast, and Extras.

A GM’s creative requirements should vary according to the scrutiny a character will receive in the course of play: Stars get the most attention in-game and appear more often, or in more significant roles, and need to be constructed to the highest standard – PC-equivalents or better. Supporting cast occupy important and usually recurring roles but in a secondary capacity. They don’t need as much richness of detail as a star, but need to stand up to repeated scrutiny without seeming superficial. Supporting cast can be the easiest to create, or the most difficult; they need only the most superficial creative effort, but it’s easy to make them cliches or caricatures. Giving them personality, making them seem to be real people, can be quite difficult without investing excessive efforts.

This article will look at some of many different techniques that I use for the creation of NPCs of all types while focusing on just one. This technique consists of a core process that occurs in three distinct stages that dig successively deeper into the personality, it’s nuances, and how it will be expressed in-game.

Walk-ons complete phase 1 and then branch off into a “final polish” that readies them for game play. That final polish consists of selected activities from the later phases, and a number of activities that only happen in “final polish”.

Secondary characters continue the process through to the end of phase 2 and then branch off into their own finishing process that again readies the character to appear in-game. That finishing process has a lot in common with the walk-ons “final polish”.

Stars go through the whole process, all three stages, and then get a few final touch-ups in their own “finishing school” that readies them for use in play.

Phase 1: Distinctiveness

1.1 Hook

I always try to start with a “hook” or central concept. I call it a “hook” because whenever I go fishing for new ideas or more detail, it’s always to the hook that I turn.

Hooks can be

1. an ethnicity,
2. a religious or pseudo-scientific belief,
3. an occupation,
4. a socioeconomic position,
5. a name,
6. an appearance,
7. a choice of clothing,
8. a personality trait,
9. a political position or cause,
10. an attitude,
11. a relationship,
12. trappings or environment,
13. or a mode of expression / speech pattern.

In some genres, there are more options – paranormal abilities or personal magic items or a distinctive weapon choice or what-not. Not is this list exhaustive – you can (and will) always find more items to add to it.

The hook is something that is (or will be) distinctive about the character. It follows that some options may not always be available – if the character is not expected to ever be in a position to speak, a distinctive vocal pattern is fairly useless as a hook. But most of these will be readily obvious to a PC at a glance, or in the most superficial interaction.

The circumstances under which the character is to appear will dictate two or three of the above, and that normally rules them out of consideration for being the hook – what you want is something that will distinguish this example from everyone else in the role. Though you can deliberately choose one of those “mandated” items and cast against type, making that aspect of the character the hook. Unless doing so deliberately, though, it’s better to pick something different to a “mandated” item.

Example: Almost every village has a “leader” of some sort. The titles can vary, but should be consistent over a culture. This dictates the occupation of the NPC and restricts his socioeconomic position, and probably defines his ethnicity to boot. Unless deliberately going against type – a human “Mayor” to an Elvish community – you are better off picking something else off the list as the hook for this character.

1.2 Avoid, Embrace, or Undercut the Cliches

This is a critical decision.

“Avoid” simply means doing something other than the cliche. A scientist who looks like a nerd? Cliche. A nerd who is a highly-successful track-and-field performer? Distinctive. A Tolkienesque Elf who spends his time obsessively playing a fantasy football league instead of composing poetry? Distinctive.

“Embrace” means that you take the cliche on board as part of the description of this character because you have thought of something original to do with it. That probably won’t happen often, but I always ask myself the question at this point to keep my gray cells ticking over on the question. Every now and then, a “yes” happens.

“Undercut” means embracing the cliche and showing it to be a hindrance to the successful performance of the character in the cliched role – again, this only happens when you have a specific idea in mind. A military scientist who looks like a geek and who is less successful in his role because the military bully him? That undercuts the cliche of “geek”. A geek who is a military scientist because he revels in combat, is gung-ho and bloodthirsty? That uses one cliche (the bloodthirsty military type) to undercut the “geek scientist” cliche and results in a very distinctive character.

Most of the time, “Avoid” will be your choice.

Before you can make that choice, however, you need to mentally identify all the applicable cliches so that you know what you are choosing between. So mentally list the applicable cliches, and for each, ask the question: avoid, embrace, or undercut?

Note that it is unusual to embrace or undercut more than one cliche at once.

1.3 Avoid repetition

The other thing to avoid is repeating yourself (unless you choose to do so deliberately, for some reason, of course – “every cop in the city has a partner who is petite, brown-haired, and mousy” for example). That means quickly running your eye over the last half-dozen or so examples of the same role that you have generated, and making sure not to do the same thing again.

1.4 Bait The Hook

Given what you now know about the character, he, she, or it is almost ready to exit the process and head into polish (if it’s a walk-on). But not quite yet – first you need to make the characterization a little more internally consistent and justified. You do that by picking two more items off the list – three, if there was a relatively low degree of “mandated definition” – and filling them with “logical implications” from the hook or expressions/representations of the hook.

That’s sometimes not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes the hook doesn’t lend itself to being expressed in very many ways, all of which are already defined for this character. But it will usually be manageable with a little effort.

For example, if your hook is “Scottish red-head”, you might put something that invokes Scotland on the walls of the NPCs environment – a poster of the Scottish football team, or a beauty poster from a hair-die manufacturer, and you might choose to have the character wearing leather boots embossed with a tartan pattern, or wearing a tartan scarf.

These are all ways of expressing the individual uniqueness of the character in other ways that are internally consistent with that uniqueness.

Polishing a Walk-On

1.5 Name

Unless appearing only within a mob/crowd scene, the character needs a name if they don’t have one already. This might be a nickname, it might be christian name only, or title and surname only.

Try to derive one from the hook first, from any socioeconomic or ethnic definition second, and from any other source only if those let you down.

1.6 A story to tell

Every character needs a story or anecdote at the ready for any social interaction that might take place. This should be something personal, but it might be something recent or something historic. It need not be relevant to anything beyond the character, and it’s often better when it doesn’t have any further relevance. It might be “My daughter is running a fever and I’m worried about her” or “there’s a new coffee shop in town and I can’t wait to try it” or “I once visited Africa and was distressed over the hunting of elephants to near-extinction” or “I was born to money and abandoned it to feel relevance in my life”. As you can see from these examples, it should be something short – it’s a conversation-starter for the character.

At least one element that you have defined needs to reflect this story in some way – if necessary, define another one to the extent of incorporating the story. That might be a photograph of the daughter on the character’s desk, or a cheap-and-nasty coffee urn on a side table or a WWF pin worn (perhaps incongruously given the rest of the clothing choices).

1.7 Something to care about

Every character needs a cause or event of some sort to care about, something that will push them to exceed authority or normal limits. This can be something trivial, like always paying their bills on time, or a social commentary, like being distressed by falling standards of customer service, or whatever. If this can derive from the hook, do so, but I usually find it more valuable to make it something that puts spin or context on the hook.

1.8 Key PC relations

Every PC has one or more distinctive attributes – ethnicity, class or profession, reputation, fame, wealth, history,
prominence, religion. Any one of these might interact with the hook to produce a positive or negative reaction to that particular PC on the part of the character (though it’s equally possible that none of them will). I make sure that I have identified any “buttons” that will be triggered by a particular PC’s presence, or the reason for the PC interacting with the NPC, in advance, and may even script a couple of sound-bites in advance.

1.9 Document it all

The final step is to compile these decisions, and any associated notes, into a single coherent paragraph for quick reference. Remember, this is a walk-on role; the character is not expected to ever recur. The process and polishing has given them just enough distinctiveness to make them seem to be a person and not a cardboard cut-out. At best, they have enough depth to survive a single conversation with a PC, and/or a couple of in-passing encounters (the secretary of a more important NPC who will make multiple appearances in the adventure, for example). The process should have taken seconds. The extent of your notes and the depth of your prep should reflect this; be quick, be efficient.

But always remember that strange things have a habit of occurring when players get involved; it is entirely possible that the role will becoming a recurring one. Your notes and prep need to be substantial enough that you can recapture the character if that occurs, so don’t skimp too much.

The absence of completion

But wait – that’s all? Surely, you need to make sure that you have a description of the character / know where they live / know who the character’s immediate family are / whatever?

Actually, no. By giving the NPC enough color to be an individual, and making sure that this gets conveyed to the players, their imaginations will do the rest. If they ask for something you haven’t prepped, derive it from the hook if you can, from the cliches and your decision with respect to them if the hook isn’t enough, and from everything else you know about the character in the third place. But – given the relative “importance” of a walk-on – you will rarely be asked for more.

If, however, you are, pay close attention to the scene and the interaction with the PC, because it might be that the player is interested in making the character a recurring element within the game – they scratch some itch that the PC has, or has some mutual interests with the PC or whatever. There is a foundation for something more, and you need to identify what that is and how you are going to build on it if you choose to (or the player asks you too).

This was supposed to be one long article but exhaustion caught up with me – so I have split it into three. In the next part, I’ll continue to build on the process with Stage 2 and Supporting characters polish!