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| Image from chess set here |
One of the entries in the trinkets and treasure table is a direct reference to HP Lovecraft’s The Temple.
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Shot and Splinters, Useful Tables 2
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
CRASH//CART After Action Report and Review
I had the opportunity to play a one shot of the indy game CRASH//CART and I had a blast, even though the group and I had some critiques of the system.
CRASH//CART is about a group of paramedics and their flying emergency medical vehicle trying to save patients while working for a for-profit corporation, all in a cyberpunk world. If you are familiar with Cyberpunk 2020, think of Trauma Team International. If Shadowrun is more of your jam, consider Doc Wagon or CrashCart or one of the other corporate medical services.
CRASH//CART was created by Galen Pejeau and is hosted on itch.
A Blades in the Dark based game, CRASH//CART uses a modified deck of cards instead of dice to resolve actions taken in game. I’ll get into the mechanics more later. Right now, suffice to say that this was my first exposure to the CRASH//CART mechanics as a player and my first encounter playing with a Blades in the Dark system. I had read Blades in the Dark in the past, but reading a system and actually playtesting it are two utterly different experiences as you all know.
Let’s get to how my character, “Action” Jackson (no last name) came to be. I was playing with one other player and a Game Master. This is significant because CRASH//CART recommends 3-5 players on the itch page. Since we were less than the recommended number of players (page 22 of the pdf recommends four characters), we followed the playbook prioritization of Medic, Pilot, Orderly and Mechanic. My compatriot chose the Medic and I selected Pilot.
Summarizing character creation a bit, as a Pilot I started off with one dot each in the Actions Evading and Fraternizing; and I was given four more dots to distribute among my Actions as I saw fit. Since I didn’t have a full understanding of the system, I chose to put one point in Scuffling (since my character had a Vice of Violence), and a point each into Moving and Hacking. I put the last point in Evading since I assumed that was the “Get the Fuck Out of Dodge” skill. In retrospect I likely should have put that second point from Evasion into Moving, since Moving was used far more often; but on the other hand, Evading did come into play in a couple of clutch moments.
The Adventure
Speaking of adventure, our GM started with an abrupt emergency call for a PLATINUM level client. We only knew that they were in medical distress. Oh, and also they were a clone. Welcome to the world of Cyberpunk. The address we were given landed us in an extremely posh estate on the coast with a lavish view of the now-toxic sea. There were floor to ceiling glass doors and one of them had been smashed to pieces. The Medic played it wisely and sent one of our shiny and new Pathfinder Drones into the house through the broken door. The commotion was on the second floor. Our PLATINUM level client was on his back trying (and failing) to fend off a much hairier and more muscular naked person on him who was trying to gouge his eyes out. Standing there ineffectually and shouting at the assailant to stop were…two more clones? Yep, something very odd was happening in this house, but that didn’t matter; we had a PLATINUM level client to save!
Our Pathfinder Drone circled the assailant and yelled at him to stop, as the Medic and I jumped out of the EMV with important gear. The Smart Gurney exited the vehicle autonomously and trundled along behind us. As the Pathfinder Drone got closer to the assailant the hairy man turned around and we got a good look at his face before he backhanded the drone to the floor. Yes, you guessed it, the muscular naked hairy man was yet another clone, with the same facial features as our PLATINUM level client, who by the way was writhing around in his own blood and screaming as one eye was not so gently removed from his face. Squick.
As a side note, in CRASH//CART, all playbooks have a list of equipment for each character. The equipment by default is kept in the EMV. When you exit the vehicle and enter a scene each player may take only two pieces of equipment from their equipment list. One of the pieces of equipment I took was Fine Buzzknuckles. They were “impact resistant gauntlet[s] with embedded taser leads and capable of delivering multiple 1,200 volt shocks,” according to the book. When the medic and I raced into the manor and up the stairs, I was smiling. Those Buzzknuckles were just charging up.
The Medic, professional as ever, quickly introduced himself to the two ineffectual clones (turns out one of them had placed the call for an ambulance) while I dove at the muscular fiend with Buzzknuckles blazing. I tackled the hairy clone and the electrical discharge sent him slamming into the far wall. The Medic convinced the two ineffectual clones to help restrain the hairy one (You! Grab an arm. You! Grab the other arm and hold him down!). I got off our mangled PLATINUM level client’s body and joined the melee to subdue the now angry hairy man. The Medic jumped on our client’s body and immediately began emergency services as he now saw a deep gash along the clone’s stomach, likely caused by a knife or maybe even a shard of glass from the now broken glass door downstairs.
The mystery of all these bloody shenanigans would have to remain unsolved for us. We had a client that had to get to a hospital, and the sooner we got there, the sooner we got paid. Wrestling with the hairy muscular clone was hard, even with assistance from his two brother clones. Frantically, I looked around for something heavy and expensive. Luck was with me and I found a crystal brandy snifter. Smash!
The hairy and now alcohol smelling clone slumped to the ground at about the time the Smart Gurney chimed amicably and arrived. The Medic and I carefully slid the PLATINUM level client’s groaning body onto the gurney and then we turned and ran out of the manor house. Was there a story the clones were going to relate? Was this some sort of clone’s twisted homicide/suicide plot against himself? Don’t know; doesn’t matter. We had our patient secure in the EMV and began flying towards the hospital. That was until we got a call from the Leland.
What the hell is a Leland? You know them. Everybody knows them on an EMT team. A Leland is that person who is a repeat caller to an EMT squad. They always seem to be in trouble and they are a fixture of the sector where the EMT team works. The Medic’s player had an interesting twist on the Leland. They suggested that the Leland was an owner of a night owl dive diner who acted as sort of a den mother to people from the street. She wasn’t calling for herself, she would call for medical services for her patrons repeatedly, thus she got the Leland nickname. The Medic added additional details by saying his character would go to the Leland’s watering hole after his shift so he had a motivation to keep her happy.
As the Medic was treating the gut wound of the PLATINUM level clone client, I gently touched down in the middle of the city where the Leland was flagging us down and clearing a path to her diner for the Smart Gurney to trundle along. Our new patient, “Dennis”, a youngish man, had overdosed on something and was having seizures. At least that is what we were told when we saw Dennis covered in some strange blue goo emanating from his mouth and hardening enough to prevent us from removing him from the floor. What the hell was this situation? As I chatted up the Leland to gather more information (using the Fraternizing action), the Medic was using his background as a former medical scientist to Diagnose what this hard blue goo was. A solid success gave the Medic the information that the blue goo was actually experimental medical nanobots that had been given to some soldiers during the last war. Dennis was evidently a war veteran that had taken some drug that caused this adverse reaction, and he needed help now. The problem was he was stuck to the floor. Fortunately, the Medic had taken a Laser Cutter from his kit on the EMV and while I was telling the Leland “I’m sure your building insurance will cover this, honest”, the Medic cut a Dennis shaped hole in the linoleum.
The Smart Gurney chimed and cheerily trafficked Dennis into the EMV where I hurriedly prepared for takeoff. Because there was a problem. Our PLATINUM level client was groaning because his stomach was expanding with the gut wound, and I’m not a doctor I’m just a pilot but I knew we had to get our patients to the hospital fast. The EMV was careening through the wild blue yonder when we got two signatures on our radar. The Medic was using his Microsurgical Rig (designed for brain surgery but it should work on a gut wound in a pinch, right?) on our clone patient when over the radio came the demand “Turn over the criminal to us or we open fire”. Two corporate black helicopters were on our tail.
Mere minutes away from the hospital landing pad I turned on the radio, said “No” not knowing or caring who was the criminal; and immediately took evasive action, jinking and swerving the EMV to avoid their missiles from locking on (keep in mind I had two points in Evasion). Well, these daredevil antics made my compatriot the Medic less happy as he struggled with using his brain surgery rig to try to close the worsening gut wound. The GM ruled that my shenanigans, though successful in shaking off the weapons lock, banged the patients around in the interior of the EMV and they both took a point of damage as a result. Not even bothering to say “sorry” I managed to land on the hospital landing zone (thanks to our trusty Smart Gearbox) and the corporate helicopters decided to peel off. Now the patients were the hospitals’ problem. We cheered and momentarily celebrated another shift completed in the absolute chaos of the CRASH//CART world.
Now I do want to point out I usually play characters more empathetic to NPCs, however the world and the design of the game really focuses the players on the EMT job and getting the patients to medical care as quickly as possible. So, I would have loved to delve into the mystery of the clones or been more careful with the patients that I frantically flew to the hospital, but the message from the game was clear. That simply wasn’t our job. Look at the omnipresent Dispatch, Patient, Destination tracker under the EMV schematic. Our objective was to deliver as many patients to the hospital as possible while being under budget. And yes, that is gritty and horrific the way cyberpunk can be at times.
During Downtime for the shift (which I will explain in more detail later), I decided to indulge in my vice of Violence and go pick a fight at a bar a decent walk away from the EMV’s refueling area to Blow Off Some Steam. Fortunately, this action reduced my 8 stress to 2. Feeling chipper, if a bit sore and bruised, I got back to the corporate canteen where the Medic was just waking up (as he had spent both downtime actions to Catch Some Z’s). We were ready to go for another run.
The Medic and I suited up, locked in to the EMV, and received a distress call from a GOLD level client. The client had made the call from her motorbike, screaming down the Interstate-10 with a biker gang in close pursuit. There was only one tiny little problem. The client was legally dead.
Normally I didn’t think our policies covered dead people, but based on the call and context of the situation I was rapidly coming to a disquieting conclusion. Our client was likely a Shadowrunner, fleeing a botched job. I brought our EMV to a position above the client’s motorbike, matching her speed as she tore down the highway. The bikers behind her were shooting and occasionally hitting their target. Unable to directly talk with the fleeing client for technical reasons, our Medic had the bright idea of using one of our Pathfinder Drones to hover around our client and announce the fact that we were here to help.
The drone flew down and circled our client’s head, beeping and booping happily. Watching the video feed, we caught a disturbing bit of audio. Our client was speaking with two voices. Uncertain of what to do or what state our client was in, things suddenly became clear. We heard the client yelling in one unmistakably blended voice, “Get them off of me!”
Then I said something you never want to hear from your Pilot, let alone your EMT. “I’m going to try something stupid,” I said to the GM, grinning. I pulled two black face cards. A critical success. What I had done was to use my two points in Evasion to fly dangerously low between the bikers and the client and to kick up dust with my rotors to give the client time and distance away from the pursuers. It worked like a charm. The bikers shot their guns up in the air and booed unhappily as they peeled off. Then we saw the second wave of antagonists. Three police vehicles.
Disheartened but not exactly surprised (after all, this was cyberpunk), I attempted another risky maneuver; but this time everything hinged on our Medic. I flew radically low to the ground so the Medic could hop out of the EMV and grab the Shadowrunner client as she came to a screeching stop with the motorbike and nearly passed out into his arms. Still flying, the EMV was hovering off the highway by inches when the Medic, our hero, fireman-carried the bleeding client and jumped into the back of the EMV where the Smart Gurney was waiting, chirping invitingly.
But it didn’t stop the police from pursuing us. The Medic was screaming at me from inside the medbay that the client was bleeding out due to bullet holes. To complicate things, some asshole had coated the bullets in some form of acid so they were melting through the Medic’s metal tools. Our client was none too happy with the fact that she was dying, and was very vocal about it.
In the eye of this shit-maelstrom, the police were demanding that I land and hand over the “criminal”. They punctuated this by shooting some glue ball into one of the rotors, gunking up the works and forcing me to compensate for the EMV pulling to the side. Things were going to shit and fast. I sat down for a hot second and tried to strategize with my Medic. His suggestion was just to stall for time, to comply with the police request while he patched up the patient, and then spring a little trick on the cops.
Won over by my Medic’s argument, I terminated evasive action and ever so slowly brought the EMV down for a landing on the interstate. Why is that you Officer Bob? I recognize your voice from this cop bar I frequent … I began attempting to Fraternize with the enemy. The Medic got the patient stable to some degree, or at least to a less leaking state. But bullshit can only last so long. The cops came to a full stop, surrounding our EMV on the highway and slowly started to wander up to our vehicle. Hey, only half of the cops had guns drawn on us when they approached. I consider that a success!
As I slowly got out of the cockpit and went to meet and greet our pursuers, I asked for the Warrant for our patient while our Medic was in the back, furiously hacking the computer. Why? Do you remember the fourth upgrade, the Skeleton Key? As I was talking to the head police officer in charge, our Medic deployed the Skeleton Key to back hack the channel the cops opened to send us the Warrant so we could scramble the cop’s connection to the Warrant database. “Are you sure your Warrant is up to date officer?” I said. “It’s all blank…” Just as the cops were decrying their computer glitch, something happened that invalidated CrashCart’s warranty.
The client, on some very good happy drugs, had had enough of this bullshit, jumped out of the gurney, ran into an unoccupied cop vehicle and hightailed it out of there before we could all blink. “Well, I think that’s the end of the shift,” I mused, smoking an illegal cigarette and looking at our once-client fly off into the yellow-red Pacific coast sunset. Another police vehicle tried to lift off and ended up crashing into a local Wendys. The smoke enhanced that beautiful reddening sunset between the palm trees. Synthwave was pounding from the EMV’s speakers as the dejected police officer threw his cap on the ground and said that that was yet another toll runner that they’d never be able to catch.
Roll credits.
System Description
Before we get into a description of the CRASH//CART system, let me describe the software we used for our game’s online setup. Character sheets were hosted for players on the Fari App. Our GM had generously provided a character sheet for CRASH//CART in a json format that we updated and edited with information from the playbooks. The gameplay space with the deck of cards and tokens, which you can see in the pictures above, was provided by PlayingCards.io. PlayingCards.io was very intuitive to use as a player. We could draw cards from the deck, flip the cards, shuffle and keep cards apart from the deck in our hand in the bar below the graphic of the EMV.
The basic system of CRASH//CART is based on Forged in the Dark mechanics. However, a major difference is that you pull from a preconstructed deck of cards to resolve actions rather than rolling dice. The preconstructed deck is created as follows: Add a black ace through six plus the face cards of both the clubs and the spades to the deck. Next, add the ace through nine for both red suits. Finally, include one joker. Aces are not considered face cards in this game. They count as a draw of “one”.
To summarize a bit, when you are carrying out an Action, your GM tells you your Position (Cautious, Risky or Desperate) and you draw a number of cards governed by the number of dots you have in a particular action. A mixed success is drawing at least one black card. A black face card gives you a full success and drawing multiple black face cards is considered a critical success. Now here is the trick. If you drew a black face card you may put it in your Cache. All other black cards (mixed successes) end up in your Trash. Red cards drawn go into the Discard pile. When the Joker is drawn, you set it aside and draw another card. A drawn Joker adds a complication to the story. Also, all cards remaining in the deck and in the Discard pile (only red cards) are shuffled into a new deck.
Since each player puts successes (black cards) that they drew from the deck into either the Cache or Trash, as play progresses, successes (black cards) become more and more rare to draw. Also the rate of drawing a Joker increases. All of this is by design. As the author says on page 2 of the book, “The deck runs down as the players take actions, gradually diminishing their future odds of success. The players have opportunities to partially refill the deck during their downtime, but each successive run on a shift will get more and more difficult.” This “diminishing successes” mechanic ensures that the pressure is kept on the Crash Cart players throughout the game (as the author says the GM should do on page 39).
There are several mechanisms to enhance a player’s odds of success (if there are any successes left in the deck). First, the player may push themselves at the cost of two stress to draw an extra card. Also, the player not acting may acquire two stress if they have at least “one dot in the relevant action” to allow the acting player to draw one card. A note about stress, if you ever reach the maximum of 10 stress, you are essentially out of the game as you can no longer interact with the deck in a given scene.
In the game we played, our GM ruled that if you could justify using a skill you had as contributing to the primary player’s task, regardless of the skill name, then you could obtain two stress and allow the primary player to draw an extra card. I thought this was a flexible interpretation of the rules that made the game as a whole flow faster.
In addition, in order to draw an additional card, any player may ask the GM for a Devil’s Bargain. A Devil’s Bargain is an exchange; the player will lose something concrete or suffer some narratively interesting disadvantage in exchange for the opportunity to draw one more card.
So, as you can see, the maximum number of cards you can draw on any one action is 3 (Push self, Help from another player, Devil’s Bargain) plus the number of dots you have in a particular action.
System Criticism
The trouble our group found with the rules came near the end of the second shift. Specifically, when we ran into the diminishing successes mechanic for the final few Action Draws in the game; the fact that the players were able to estimate that there were only one or two successes (black cards) in the deck, and that we had about the same chance to draw one of the black cards as to draw the Joker, killed any sense of anticipation as to what was going to happen for those final rounds. For us at the table, the forgone conclusion of failure made the last bit of the game boring.
Now given that our opinion is that the diminishing successes mechanic leads to a boring conclusion, were there mechanics in game that could have mitigated the diminishing successes mechanic, for example replenishing the deck with successes (black cards)? The answer is yes. Let’s look at each of these success replenishment mechanics in turn.
First of all, let’s look at Downtime. During Downtime after a shift, you have two downtime actions. If you want the opportunity to replenish the deck with some successes (black cards), you can spend both downtime actions to Catch Some Z’s, which allows you to return half of a player’s combined trash and cache to the deck. However, since Catch Some Z’s takes both downtime actions, this prevents you from doing anything else in this phase.
During our Downtime, in between getting the clone and overdosing patient to the hospital and before encountering the fleeing Shadowrunner, my character had acquired 8 stress. As previously stated, a player that gets to 10 stress cannot interact with the deck, so it was imperative that I reduce the stress with whatever downtime actions I could. Fortunately, there was the downtime action Blow Off Some Steam, which takes one downtime action, essentially allowing a player to potentially reduce their stress.
The problem is that I only could carry out the Blow Off Some Steam action to make myself potentially useful in the next coming shift, or ignore my character’s issues and return half of the successes I drew to the deck and hope that my fellow player could capitalize off of them without me, assuming I would take another two stress hit somewhere in the new shift.
I think a more workable option for Downtime, would be for the Catch Some Z’s action to cost one downtime action and recycle maybe one-fourth or one-third of a player’s combined trash and cache to the deck.
In addition to downtime actions, if players choose a particular ability from their ability list during character creation, they may have the opportunity to replenish the deck with successes during the game. The Abilities Shortcut Queen (Pilot), Queen of Borrowed Time (Medic), Hustle Queen (Orderly) and Queen of the Grid (Mechanic) all allow a player to discard a Queen from their Cache to allow another player to recycle their Trash (non-face black cards) into the deck, thus increasing the chances of success for successive action pulls. My fellow player and I did not choose any of these starting abilities because we had limited exposure to the system when we started playing and didn’t quite have the system mastery of CRASH//CART under our belts at the time.
Another factor that the GM brought up was that he could have massaged the card economy by calling for more Fortune Draws during the game. Fortune Draws are used to establish the condition of some situation in game. Mechanically someone, maybe a player, draws a number of cards equal to the dots in their relevant action, plus and minus a number of cards depending on the circumstances of the situation the GM gives you. An example in the book is that a player is trying to establish the nature of a landing zone as the EMV approaches. This could be a Moving Action, so prepare to draw a number of cards equal to the dots you have in Moving. If this is a milk run for the players, add a card. If the opponent has the Edge or they have had no briefing whatsoever, subtract a card. Then draw the final number of cards. As per normal, a black card will give you a partial success and a black face card gives a full effect or success.
Now this is different. After the draw and the result has been determined, you get to shuffle the deck. This means that Fortune Draws do not hinder future successes, unlike normal Action draws, and therefore do not change the balance of the deck. If the intention of Fortune Draws is to have the player keep success cards in their Cache or Trash, this is not indicated. Thus, we are assuming that all pulled cards get to be recycled into the deck.
Suggestions for New Players/GMs and Final Thoughts
Upon discussion with my GM, we recommend the following suggestions for players and GMs new to CRASH//CART:
- (Players) At least one player should take one Ability at character creation that restocks the deck with black cards.
- (GM) Be mindful of the length of clocks. You'll always have at least three clocks: retrieving the patient, delivering the patient, and dealing with their primary aliment. Keep most clocks at 4 or 6 segments.
- (GM) Understand that Clocks aren't necessarily advanced by card draws. Actions in the fiction can just cause Clocks to advance.
- (GM) Be mindful about the distinction between Action draws and Fortune draws. Many Action draws can justifiably be Fortune draws.
- (GM) Helping Other Players. Allow any other player to justify using a skill, and taking two stress to give the acting player the option to draw one more card during an Action.
Ultimately, I did enjoy the game of CRASH//CART, but there are issues with some of the systems. If you don’t enjoy the fact that at some point before your shift ending there may be a high or total rate of failure given any action you attempt, you are going to have a bad time. Granted, our group was one to two members below the recommended minimum, but I don’t see how that could have affected our main issues with the mechanics. I bought CRASH//CART after our game, and though we definitely feel another editing pass to the pdf would be very much appreciated and we had our quibbles with the rules, we had fun.
Special thanks to Staggered Amusement Machine for introducing me to CRASH//CART, being the GM, revisions, additions and discussions. Additional thanks to Anonymous who played the Medic and for discussions about the system.
Resources
Here is a link to the CRASH__CART.fari.json character sheet designed and hosted by Staggered Amusement Machine.
How to use the CRASH__CART.fari.json character sheet:
Download the CRASH__CART.fari.json file from the link.
Goto the fari.app website
On the fari.app website, click on My Binder on the upper left
Click on the Characters folder
Import the CRASH__CART.fari.json file
Click on the CRASH//CART Template
To modify the character sheet, make sure the “Advanced” button is toggled to the right
Enjoy
Edit: The CRASH//CART character sheets are publicly available on the Fari.App now.
Go to My Binder -> Characters -> New, then on the character sheet click the Templates dropdown and search for "CRASH CART" or find Nightjar games.
All character playbooks and the EMV sheet can be found there.
Saturday, August 12, 2023
Shot and Splinters, Useful Tables
Shot and Splinters is a naval OSR
hexcrawl set in the middle of the Napoleonic era, at about 1801. Players will have the opportunity to raid the
French coast of Brittany and engage in all sorts of nautical misadventures with
the other nations warships and merchants plying their trade in the area.
The main rules are very brief, in the OSR style and character creation only takes up a couple of pages. Tom Mecredy considers his creation to be a hack of the very well regarded OSR hexcrawl Wolves upon the Coast by Luke Gearing. The DNA from Gearing’s epic Wolves upon the Coast shines through Shot and Splinters. For example, in Wolves upon the Coast, each character rolls for three characteristics only: Strength, Agility and Constitution. In Shot and Splinters, each character rolls for four characteristics: Authority, Brawn, Dexterity and Intellect. Since players will be associated with or on a ship for the majority of the adventures in Shot and Splinters, it makes sense for Authority to be added as a characteristic. Authority measures respect and reputation among the crew. In a similar vein, since players may engage in intellectual activities like navigation, having Intellect as a characteristic allows the GM to abstract to dice rolls certain elements of ship maintenance.
In preparation for running Shot and Splinters I did some research about the Napoleonic era. I am not a history buff, but I found the world of 1801 to be a rich and cosmopolitan place. Inspired by this I decided to make a d30 table with interesting travelers that players could encounter on Brittany or off its coast. I attempted to fill the table with an international motley of entries so that each encounter would be unique. Also, since bandits abound in Shot and Splinters, I made a short 1d6 table to add some color to those encounters, giving some of the bandits an interesting background. I may expand on this latter table in the future.
In poking about the world of Shot and Splinters and 1801, I found the following sources to be helpful:
- Galvanism
- Brittany
- Jonathan North’s writings about Napoleonic history
- In addition, one of the characters on the interesting travelers table is a De la Poer. Read HP Lovecraft’s Rats in the Walls to get that reference. I just couldn’t help myself!
Tuesday, August 8, 2023
Delta Green After Action Report. Enemy of the Tribes, Part 1
Four men stood under the harsh illumination of a halogen light as they contemplated the ice cream card. There were three blank spaces remaining. “I wonder if they have jimmies,” said one. “They’re called sprinkles in New Mexico,” responded the other absently as he threw the empty wallet on a nearby table, thumbing through the IDs of PFC Paul Clark. “I could go for some vanilla right about now,” said the third, his back to a clear jar colored cherry red with the biological stains of parts of Paul Clark and Paul Clark himself (mostly at least) silently staring up on a slab with a Y-shaped incision on his chest. “We are missing something important,” remarked the fourth, holding up the card, “Who gets the free ice cream here?”
Silent cogitation and the shuffling of wingtips greeted this comment.
--recollections of Jim Coake
I am playing Jim Coake, an FBI Agent involved in investigating Middle Eastern artifact smuggling around Iraq, in TopHat’s Delta Green campaign. The campaign will be focused on the published Delta Green scenario Iconoclasts, with additions of other adventures as TopHat sees fit. For example, our first adventure was titled Enemy of the Tribes, a shotgun scenario written by David Tormsen, found here.
We did not know the title of the adventure going into it.
Along with myself, there are three other players with the following characters:
FBI Agent Gabriel Almeida, a hulking man who is very physically capable and a keen investigator.
Doc Taylor is the gung-ho enlisted Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman. He has interfaced with SEAL teams before, but has had bad experiences.
William ‘Big Bill’ Chester, a paramilitary operations officer with a specialization on electronics, and the most senior Delta Green agent in the group.
The four of us reported to Albuquerque, New Mexico where our case officer, Army Colonel Gwin, met us in a nondescript hotel conference room. The name of the game was an unnatural murder and we had to cover it up and solve it. Manilla folders were opened, papers were rifled through, and open laptops were swiveled. The victim was one Private First Class Paul Clark, recently returned from overseas where he had served multiple tours in Iraq. He was dead, and not in the nice way. Evidently PFC Clark had been torn to shreds in his Albuquerque home, 30 minutes after he had placed a 911 call rambling about “insurgents” and “exfiltration” before a single gunshot punctuated the call and the phone hit the ground.
Big Bill and Doc Taylor listened to the 911 call carefully. It was unusual, at least in more than one way. PFC Clark seemed lucid and adhering strictly to military doctrine when he made the call and was barking orders at the 911 operator. Whatever stress he had been put under; Clark was operating tactically as an experienced Army veteran. Before he died, at least.
Gwin provided our cover. We were a military police investigative body experienced in counter-terrorism and on the case for a “revenge killing”. At that time, we had no idea how accurate that was.
In the nondescript black van that was to be our second home during the investigation, we reviewed documents and threw theories back and forth as we drove to the morgue to talk to the medical examiner. We learned that PFC Clark lived alone and had divorced his wife rather shortly after returning stateside. Not all together uncommon, but a detail niggled at our brains. What if he knew what was coming for him?
With that detail in our minds, we pushed open the double doors of the cold and sterile morgue with the ME in tow. It was bad. Even Big Bill had to take a seat at the sight of Clark in different locations and containers. Bill had seen plenty of shit in Iraq. A body shouldn’t look like that unless an IED got it, and that wasn’t supposed to happen in America (failed San Check). It wasn’t an IED that caused this though…maybe some sort of animal?
We started correlating our contents. Clark was in two major pieces: upper and bottom half. Most of the wounds were prior to Clark’s death, some were postmortem. The actual cause of death was shock and blood loss. The upper body told us an interesting story. There were defensive wounds that look like he fended off edged and blunt weapons. The bottom half…well it was a mess. The right leg looked of all things like it had been gnawed. The left leg and meat had been removed with a cleaver. The remainder of the left leg, it was sort of not there. It had been pulverized into a human stain; it was collected in a glass jar, crimson and cherry red.
We got to work. Agents Coake and Almeida dove right into DNA collection and forensics examination. The right leg had teeth marks on it all right. Weird ones though, like the teeth of some primate. The top of the body was definitely assaulted with knives but the strange thing was there was sand in the wounds. Like if PFC Clark had been stabbed then rolled around in sand. Someone suggested a sandblaster was used, but that was a head scratcher too. We knew whatever this was appeared to use tools, but a sandblaster? The teeth marks suggested to everyone cannibalism or at least consumption of the body. Parts of Clark were missing after all.
Further investigation indicated Clark had been intentionally stripped by bladed implements before being whatevered to death. This suggested multiple murderers but how many? And were they more animals or humans? It just didn’t make sense. At least we found out Clark had a beer in him before his demise. Couldn’t imagine going out like that sober.
Then it hit us. There was, well a scent for lack of a better word. Maybe funk. Yeah, that works. The corpse didn’t smell of decay, it smelled of urine and less savory things. It was pervasive, annoying and we could smell it through our masks.
Done with the funk, we gathered around Big Bill who had wisely chosen a spot far away from the body. He was examining Clark’s wallet and his phone. We found three contacts in Clark’s phone: a Kirkman, Lacroix and Jackson. Kirkman had been called a few days ago for five minutes. Big Bill found it pinged to Germany though the area code was local to New Mexico. The other two numbers, Lacroix and Jackson had not been called. They were just programmed in. Then out came the ice cream card from the wallet like a rabbit out of a hat. We stared at it for a while, the humanity of what happened brought into focus for a moment.
The four of us collapsed into the black van. Windows rolled down; cigarettes were shared with impunity. Except for Big Bill. He said smoking was a nasty habit and grabbed some dip. We were on to the crime scene.
Clark had a house on the outskirts of Albuquerque. Well, that was too nice. It was in the sticks. We identified it by the windows being smashed in and the good old yellow do-not-cross tape, cordoning it off late at night, flapping forlornly in the breeze. As we approached, all four of us looked to each other and nodded. We could smell it. It was worse inside. A musky piss scent, same as what we encountered on the body in the morgue but fouler. We put on our masks and went to work.
PFC Clark didn’t go down without a fight. We knew there was an M-16, bagged from evidence, and it appeared that Clark shot out his backyard glass door, aiming at something. There were footprints or bootprints, lots of them, inside where the body had been found. Blood was everywhere. Fortunately, it was dried at this point. It was clear there was a violent struggle with multiple attackers. Maybe five to ten guys? Sand was also present in the scene, which was weird. But it wasn’t the strangest thing.
There were bones strewn about in a circle where the corpse had been found. A bit of forensic know-how revealed they were a mix of canine and human. They looked for all the world to have been scrimshawed with petroglyphs that made Jim think of the indigenous peoples of the American South West. At least that sort of made sense, given New Mexico.
We collected DNA evidence from the shattered glass and from shattered dishes in the kitchen. Someone had slammed someone else’s head into the dishes. A cleaver was found thrown under the refrigerator. This was clearly the or one of the murder weapons used to cut up Clarke’s leg. That indicated tool use. What type of weird creature had primate-like teeth, attacked to eat you and carried a cleaver? What exactly were we into?
Jim also found the source of the stench. There was oily residue all over the kitchen walls. It was tagged and bagged and sent to our Delta Green supervisors.
Doc Taylor and Big Bill explored the rest of the house while Gabriel and Jim fussed about the kitchen and circle of bones. PFC Clark was evidently aware of his condition. Doc Taylor opened the bathroom and was assaulted with a near opposite scent from the nasty funk in the kitchen. Bottles, potions, lotions and soaps were stacked in the bathroom. Big Bill found some paperwork. PFC Clark had been honorably discharged for “undisclosed medical considerations”. “He smelled like ass,” Bill translated dryly. Medical notes indicated Clark had been suffering from this funk since he served overseas. He had been treated for skin lesions and some sort of “bromhidrosis”. Poor guy couldn’t catch a break. Divorce papers with one Karen Clark were arranged neatly on the coffee table. No reason was cited, but we knew why.
 |
| Credit: magnificentophat |
Photographs were taken of the bones from every angle. No stone unturned you know. On a closer look one of the pictographs didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit with the Southwest angle. No, it looked like a carving straight out of the Middle East, Jim said. One that was associated with…pre-Islamic mythology. Specifical ghuls.
Bandying about ideas about extreme body odor and things that go bump in the night, the group followed the mess of sandy footprints outside. Then things got serious. There was evidence of a dog. Nice things you know? Dog house, dog bowl with water, squeaky toys. But no big Newfoundland like was written up in the police report.
Suspicious, we walked the perimeter. We found the remains of a short fight. God, thankfully it was short. The attackers had killed and eaten the dog, likely before Clark was murdered. It was bizarre though. What kind of attackers lick up the blood? Or was it sucked up like a vampire?
Chupacabra, Gabriel said. No one argued.
Sunday, July 16, 2023
Color symbolism in Laird Barron’s stories
Laird Barron is a writer of weird fiction, a supernatural horror author, and in my view, one of the most terrifying modern heirs of H.P. Lovecraft. Don’t take my word for it though. Barron has won the 2007 and 2010 Shirley Jackson Award for his collections The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation and Other Stories.
Interested? Some of his fiction is free online here. I highly recommend “Shiva, Open Your Eye” and “The Forest”.
A while ago I wrote a forum post about how Larid Barron uses color symbolism in his stories. My thoughts below directly reference Barron’s stories and sometimes include MASSIVE SPOILERS.
Sigil of the Old Leech by Cody Tilson from The cover and back of The Croning by Laird Barron
Red is most often associated with the totally unnatural. Recall that the pinhole of madness shines with a RED light.
Evidence:
"Jaws of Saturn"
The protagonist observes the Warlock Phil Wary:
"Afternoon bled into red evening and the stars emerged in the silver of sky through the window behind the couch. Franco was in a state of partial delirium when Carol knocked on the door. Mr. Wary smoothed his shaggy hair and quickly donned a smoking jacket. Carol came in, severe and rushed as usual. He took her coat and fixed drinks and Franco slowly strangled, his view curtailed by the angle of the closet door. "
...
"In due course, Mr. Wary shut off the record player and the apartment fell quiet but for Carol's breathing. He said, "Come my dear. Come with me," and took Carol's hand and led her, as if she were sleepwalking, to a blank span of the wall. Mr Wary brushed aside a strip of brittle paper and revealed what Franco took to be a dark water stain, until Carol pressed her eye against it and he realized the stain was actually a peephole. A peephole to where though? That particular wall didn't abut another apartment--it was an outer wall overlooking the rear square and beyond the square, a ravine."
...
" "Your turn," he said upon turning his attention to Franco. He unclasped the belt and led him to the wall, its peeling flap of ancient paper. The peephole oozed a red glow.....
"Vastation"
The peephole
"During my explorations, I discovered a barred door behind a rack of jars and pots. On the other side was a tiny cell full of scrolls. These scrolls were scriven with astronomical diagrams and writing I couldn't decipher. The walls were thick stone and a plug of wood was inset at eye level. I worked the cork free, amazed at the soft, red light that spilled forth. I finally summoned the courage to press my eye against the peephole.
I suspect if a doctor were to give me a CAT scan, to follow the optic nerve deep into its fleshy backstop, he'd see the blood-red peephole imprinted in my cerebral cortex, and through the hole, Darkness, the quaking mass at the center of everything where a sonorous wheedling choir of strings and lutes, flutes and cymbals crashes and shrieks and echoes from the abyss, the foot of the throne of an idiot god."
Red light here is directly referencing Azathoth.
"Hallucigenia"
Before the main character encounters the cursed barn with the unnatural therein, there is red and yellow imagery.
"The crumbling grade almost tripped him. At the bottom, remnants of a fence--rotted posts, snares of wire. Barbs dug a red zigzag in his calf. He cursed, lumbered into the grass. It rose coarse and brown, slapped his legs and buttocks. A dry breeze awoke and the yellow dandelion blooms swayed toward him"
"The Broadsword"
After the protagonists harrowing ordeal with the Children there is this passage:
“It is always hot as hell down here,” Hopkins the custodian said. He perched on a tall box, his grimy coveralls and grimy face lighted by the red glow that flared from the furnace window. “There’s a metaphor for ya. Me stoking the boiler in Hell.”
...
"“ Finish it off. I’ve got three more hid in my crib, yonder.” He gestured into the gloom. “Mr. 119, isn’t it? Yeah, Mr. 119. You been to hell, now ain’t you? You’re hurtin’ for certain.” Pershing drank, choking as the liquor burned away the rust and foulness. He gasped and managed to ask, “What day is it?” Hopkins held his arm near the furnace grate and checked his watch. “Thursday, 2: 15 p.m., and all is well. Not really, but nobody knows the trouble we see, do they?” Thursday afternoon? He’d been with them for seventy-two hours, give or take. Had anyone noticed? He dropped the bottle and it clinked and rolled away. He gained his feet and followed the sooty wall toward the stairs. Behind him, Hopkins started singing “Black Hole Sun.” "
Hopkins appears to stand at the exit between the unnatural Children's world and the real world of the Broadsword hotel. Reverse psychopomp if you will.
"Six, Six, Six"
At the end where the main character is exposed to the unnatural there is the following line
"The family patriarch stood, dressed in a black robe with the cowl thrown back. He was flushed and beaming with paternal joy. His left hand rested upon his son’s head. Her husband made a labored sawing motion and the feet twitched and danced, slapping against the floorboards. The room blurred in and out of focus and began to slide toward the crimson edge of her vision. She made a small sound and the trio glanced toward the stairs. They seemed surprised to see her."
Red and black are often associated with each other, and with the unnatural in Barron's stories.
Evidence:
"The Broadsword"
"He imagined lost caverns and inverted forests of roosting bats, a primordial river that tumbled through midnight grottos until it plunged so deep the stygian black acquired a red nimbus, a vast throbbing heart of brimstone and magma. Beyond the falls, abyssal winds howled and shrieked and called his name."
"Six, Six, Six"
Please see the above Six Six Six quote and note that "black robe" and "flushed" are in adjacent sentences.
"Figures, distorted by the shuddering frames, skulked between the boles of the trees, capered as the light downshifted to red, then black, and when the panel brightened, beneath a conical hat a white, lunatic face with strips of flesh peeled to chipped bone leered at her, twisting a stork neck to get a better view. She screamed even as the ghoulish visage rippled and morphed into a hillock amidst a sea of long grass beneath a too-full moon. More figures loped and gamboled toward the foreground; tall, yet stooped, garbed in cowls and robes, sinewy arms raised in an apish manner."
"The Forest"
"He inhaled to scream and jerked awake, twisted in the sheets and sweating. Red light poured through the thin curtains. Nadine sat in the shadows (ie color black) at the foot of his bed. Her hair was loose and her skin reflected the ruddy light. He thought of the goddess Kali shrunk to mortal dimensions."
"Vastation"
Before murdering the potter and encountering the peephole
"The sun lowered and flatted into a bloody line, a scored vein delineating the vast black shell of the land. When the potter squatted to demonstrate an intricacy of a mechanism of his spinning wheel I raised a short, stout plank and swung it edgewise across the base of his skull"
----
Anyway, Barron uses a lot of consistent color imagery in all three collections (The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, Occultation, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All) to foreshadow the pretense of the unnatural.
I'm not going to cite examples here, but there is similar evidence that the colors blue and green represent normalcy, while the colors yellow and orange represent a warning transitional location or state between reality and the unnatural.
So does Barron simply follow the ROYGBIV spectrum? I don't think so. Violet is more than once associated with "unnatural" passages but I'm not sure exactly what the symbolism is or if there is any.
Also in the Nanashi Novella, the color symbolism other than his consistent use of red/black as unnatural is different than in previous work. I have yet to figure that out.
Tuesday, June 20, 2023
Six Ages I: Ride Like the Wind. After Action Report 1
What type of game is Six Ages: Ride like the Wind? In short, Six Ages is a clan management game in a Bronze Age mythological world where the action revolves around stealing neighbor’s cows and solving Choose Your Own Adventure-like events where mundane and magical problems vex your people.
However, that’s not all. Six Ages is not standard fantasy. Or even standard Bronze Age fantasy. No, Six Ages is set in Glorantha, a world created by the practicing shaman Greg Stafford, in which belief in Gods and magical interaction keeps the fabric of the world together. What does that mean? Kill the Sun God and the literal sun goes out. The world becomes very cold. Stafford had been writing about Glorantha since 1966, so the world is rich in detail and mythology.
This also means that Six Ages is not your standard management game. For example, Six Ages starts with a short illustrated questionnaire that defines your clan, it’s practices, and which Gods it reveres more than the others. This questionnaire is more than just roleplaying. It defines what your ancestors did. If you choose to make decisions with your clan that diverge from your ancestor’s customs, the ancestor spirits will become mad at you and you will suffer a penalty to the amount of magic you can raise yearly. And it’s my understanding that loss of magic is just one of the consequences.
Without further ado, here is an after action report of several in game years of decisions made with my clan. These reports all contain spoilers for the in-game events, so be forewarned.
Report 1: In my last adventures with Six Ages, things have gotten crazy. This picture is from an early raid of another clan where we were victorious. They (the Old Eagles) have since raided us in revenge and I need more Swords warriors, and the clan is low on food, and lampreys from the sky just ate my Duck Spirit, oh god.
Since then, it has been a struggle. When we once started with upwards of 700 cows, we now have around 400 cows. Magic has been drying up; where once it was 10 points of Magic produced every Sacred Time, we are down to 7 produced annually, which is quite limiting. We tried performing a ritual of our Sun God with a strapping promising 19-year-old with excellent combat...and he got frozen solid and broken into ice shards by Cold Sun. We are often raided as many as three times a year and I'm having a hard time keeping my number of Swords fighters around 17 because they keep dying. To prevent the clan from starving year after year I've had to sell off two of our clan's treasures, a non-renewable resource. No one will form new trading caravans with us. But, dear reader, all is not lost.
A few years back, children were born with the power of Elmal the Sun. They could literally throw fireballs. We treated the three carefully, welcoming them into the tribe and turning the other way when they accidently burned down a tent. One of them has now become a man and is available to be put into a position of leadership on our clan circle. He is Renowned in combat which is what we desperately need as we are surrounded on three sides by enemies, all eager for our cows and our blood.
Will the young one become our savior? We'll find out next time...
Report 3: Another Six Ages report! So last time, I was struggling with a downward spiral of losing cows left and right, a lack of food, my Swords (elite fighters) dying, and 3 raids a year against me by enemy clans.
Friends, we’ve turned the clan around and I have to thank two parties: the decisions made by the stream crowd, and our 19-year-old clan member Yatakan with Renowned skill in Combat who, according to the in-game events, throws fireballs. Yeah.
As a reminder, I started with around 750 cows, last time I reported in the clan only had 300-400 cows. Now the people have 643 cows and climbing thanks to Yatakan lead herd raids. And that’s not all. In the past year we have had six major raids. We were threatened by the Alkothi, the Demon People. We sent them packing. The Porganosi, a clan of the Ram Peoples (Orlanthi), threatened us. We took them down. Our ancestral enemy the Trolls showed up. Yatakan took two trolls down in hand-to-hand combat to save one of our nobles (NPC character). While we were recovering from that, the Flame Singers clan teamed up with the Sa-Gorini clan to crush us. Our Raven shaman (Trickster) summoned a Wasp spirit to sting the Sa-Gorini into fleeing the battlefields and then our carefully allocated combat tactics carried the day against the Flame Singers.
Was that it? No. The Andayling clan (Ram people) kidnapped 9 members of our clan. We tracked them down thanks to a divination revealed by the God Elmal and liberated our people. Yatakan the God child is truly amazing.
Report 4: A Six Ages report! Or Everyone Loves Yatakan. In the last "episode" we were slowly regaining momentum and wealth (643 cows) thanks to Yatakan, our warleader with Renowned in Combat who was beating raids against us right, left, and center.
Yatakan remains the crown jewel in the clan, but there were a couple of close calls.
We were raided by the Yellowhill tribe. They brought over 100 fighters and we were outnumbered. Yatakan was nervous about this so we dedicated some clan magic to the fight. During the battle, Orala, our healer, saw Yatakan sustain a terrible blow. This made me really concerned because I had never seen Yatakan become injured before. After some discussion, the streamer clan council decided to send an armed escort with Orala to Yatakan's side. Fortunately, Orala revived Yatakan. For us this was the most important outcome even though the dastardly Yellowhill tribe won the battle and looted our cows.
Later Yatakan was challenged to a duel by Murus, a lion warrior of the distant Ergeshite nomads. Anyway, we took a risk, and Yatakan's might was tested by the lion warrior's magic claws. Yatakan became injured (was away from the clan circle for one season) but he triumphed over Murus, nearly decapitating him.
We devoted many points of Magic to Ayvutu and sacrificed 30 cows. She was turned into a block of ice and shattered by our enemy Cold Sun in the Godrealm. Another 22 year old has been lost to the Gods.
Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind. Stories of Cows and Cupidity. It is fun.
Monday, June 12, 2023
Review of MAJESTIC-13
I’ve completed reading the 144 pages of the MAJESTIC 13 wargame pdf, and this is my summary review. MAJESTIC 13 was written by Adam Loper and Vincent Venturella of Snarling Badger Studios. Previous offerings by the authors include Reign in Hell and Space Station Zero. Just by reading through it, MAJESTIC 13 comes across as a very focused, very clear wargame.
Your average randomly generated, solo, vs or coop skirmish game of MAJESTIC 13 consists of each player fielding a team of 5 individuals who are armed to take down one of 26 different alien variants. Since your team of 5 gangs up on an alien, each member of your team can only activate ONCE per combat round, while the alien can activate up to 3 times per combat round.
MAJESTIC 13's inception was not with Roswell, but with an earlier alien crashlanding which occurred in 1941 Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Because the military was busy with a World War at the time, 13 civilian factions were founded that reverse engineered weapons from alien tech and currently sponsor MAJESTIC 13 teams. Your team of 5 can be from one of the 13 factions. These factions draw their origins from what group of people discovered the alien who crash-landed in 1941 because he was trying to escape from a greater more dangerous invading alien power called simply "The FORCE". It was also found that this “naturalized” alien can hybridize with humans, so the children of that union are where one of the 13 factions gets its identity (The Naturalized).
The MAJESTIC 13 Factions range from a US government psychic research organization (Psight-Ops) to reverse engineered weapons wielding tech-bros (Silicon Syndicate) to an in-universe version of Anonymous with reasons and resource to fight the alien menace (Dispersed).
In addition to choosing a faction, your unit of five gets to choose an Advantage to further distinguish the team. Your team could be well connected and get bonuses on the post-game Bureaucracy roll, or they could have additional weapons and training, or be the elite of humanity with chemical enhancements, psionics or skin enhanced with alien technology.
Along with a faction and advantage, your team also gets to chose a base which can be expanded with new suites of bonuses (Upgrades) available to requisition after your team has undergone a mission in the field. Base building is not just stacking bonuses though. As your team becomes more veteran, aliens from FORCE can and will assault your base, so choose your expansions wisely!
Mission Flow and Random Generation
Next up is the Mission Flow for a typical randomly generated MAJESTIC 13 game.
All randomly generated missions last five turns of play. Meaning you and your MAJESTIC 13 team of five have five turns and up to five activations (per unit) total to annihilate the alien menace.
Creating the mission calls for 7 rolls, usually randomized on a provided table. You will roll for Geography, Terrain, Enemy, Bureaucracy (not to be confused with the post-mission Bureaucracy roll), and Secondary Objective. Once you have completed the Team and Enemy Setup phases, you will roll for FUBAR events and may make a Call for Aid roll. All these rolls will be detailed below.
In the Geography roll the result can be either Wilderness or Urban. Both options change the FUBAR and the Call for Aid rolls to a small degree.
The Terrain roll is informed by the Geography roll. There are random tables provided for generating quarters of the board for both Wilderness and Urban areas. The Urban random table will generate an area that is denser than the Wilderness random table, some of the time.
In the Enemy roll, you determine which of the 26 unique alien enemies detailed in the book you are fighting to the death.
The Bureaucracy roll section states, “A great plan never survives contact with the enemy; most of the time it will never even make it to the battlefield.” MAJESTIC 13 is a decentralized, bureaucratic organization where miscommunication, missing intelligence and slow responses can affect the combat situation in the field. Generally, a Bureaucracy roll (2d20) result is a hinderance to alien killing operations but occasionally it can be a benefit.
The Secondary Objectives roll are where the factions in MAJESTIC 13 have individual priorities that rear their ugly heads. This is a 1d6 roll that can require the MAJESTIC 13 team to scout the field or collect specific items. Your squad may get additional benefits from completing Secondary Objectives.
At this point the players are instructed to complete the Team and Enemy Setup phases.
Next, during play, make a FUBAR roll. A FUBAR roll occurs at the start of each round. This roll is the chance that something will go very wrong. A FUBAR roll is initially an escalating roll. Specifically, at the start of every turn roll a 1d6 and add the turn’s number to the dice’s rolled value. If the result is a 6 or higher, then roll 1d20 for a FUBAR Event. There is however the rare chance (19-20 on a FUBAR Event roll) that the player gets a benefit of Long-Range Support, i.e., a sniper fires from offscreen on one of your non-Hidden targets.
The Call for Aid is an optional roll where the player contacts their team’s faction. A team may spend an action during their activation to attempt a Call for Aid. The Call for Aid roll is similar to the FUBAR roll. The roll is a 1d6 modified positively by the number of turns the current turn is in. If the Call for Aid roll is successful (i.e., 6 or higher), you may choose one of the Call for Aid listed effects to occur immediately. These effects include: Drone Strike, Medical Drop, Robotic Back-Up, or Evacuation.
After achieving certain ratings (i.e., experience, detailed below in Post-Game Awards) by completing randomized missions, your team’s subsequent mission will be a bespoke Special Mission. This reflects FORCE taking note of your team in increasingly dangerous ways. These Special Missions are often ambushes, surprise scenarios or feature overwhelming forces that your team must survive through. The enemies your team faces in Special Missions are members of FORCE and yes, they are tough, for they include special tweaks to their enemy AI.
During missions, combat and other checks are made by rolling d20. Damage usually utilizes d6s. Of the six stats, two of them, Dexterity and Fortitude, can be used to shake off conditions that aliens can apply like Poisoned, Stunned, Restrained and Blinded.
Post-Game Processes
After your Mission, whether it is randomly generated or scripted from the MAJESTIC 13 book, there are four steps, called collectively the Post-Game Processes, you must undergo.
The Post-Game Processes consist of the following steps: Injuries, Death and Cloning; Advancement; Awards; and Bureaucracy (not to be confused with the Bureaucracy roll made when creating a mission from random tables as described above).
The first step after your mission, win or lose, is to catalogue injuries and deaths; and then go to the cloning vats if any member of your team has perished.
If any member of your team has been put Out of Action and Removed from Play, roll 3d6 on the Injury and Death Effect table. The result of that table can give your unit a Permanent Injury, an All Clear, an alien Symbiote, Death or something far worse.
If any of your team is Dead, you can bring them back (with full health and without a scratch or sort-of-kinda ok) with a successful 2d6 roll at the Cloning Results table.
The second step in the Post-Game is processing an unit’s individual experience gains and Advancing any appropriate team member.
The third step is to apply Awards to the team. This is where your team increases it’s Rating that can trigger Special Missions. The Team’s Rating is essentially it’s experience level. A Team Rating of 10 or higher signifies that the team is in “Phase 2” which increases the quality of gear the team members can select AND increase the lethality and abilities of the random aliens the team will fight.
At the end of the Awards phase, your team may requisition up to two additional pieces of equipment and one base upgrade.
Step 4 is called Bureaucracy but I think it should have been renamed “Requisition” for clarity. The Bureaucracy roll in this phase is 1d6 plus up to four +1 modifiers. For each six or higher your roll for each piece of equipment you requested in the previous Awards step, you get one of the items you have requested on your list. To acquire a base upgrade requested, the roll must be 5 or higher.
Comparison to Other Wargames
After my readthrough of MAJESTIC 13, I have to say I like the idea and simplicity of sticking to 5 men teams. Upon reflection, however, on a different X-COM-like wargame called Insurgent Earth, I like the campaign system and survival mechanics featured in that product as well. Overall, I’ve concluded both products are worth owning because they tackle similar core themes with great diversity in mechanics and systems.
Insurgent Earth is a wargame written by Patrick Todoroff of Zona Alfa, Exploit Zero, and Nightwatch wargames fame. I’ve read and played Zona Alfa; a character creation recommendation and after-action report start here.
Unsurprisingly, Zona Alfa and Insurgent Earth share a degree of game design DNA, for example with grenade rules and stats, but for the large part Insurgent Earth has a significant fraction of new mechanics specifically, with the campaign system.
In Insurgent Earth, alien fighters are partisans, not funded by mysterious and bureaucratic factions like in MAJESTIC 13. As such, in Insurgent Earth players need to find salvage like food, medical, chemical and electronic components to feed or supply their fighters with wartime gear. The Insurgent Earth salvage system is reminiscent of finding necessary supplies for your zombie fighters in Last Days.
Layered on top of the salvage system, is the ability to craft and upgrade your alien fighter’s gear with salvaged elements (for mundane but powerful equipment) and extracted Xeno-Tech to enhance your weapons and armor. This campaign style allocation of resources, makes Insurgent Earth feel (at least according to my reading) like much more of a scrounging skirmish firefight than MAJESTIC 13’s roll and hope for the best, request for resources Bureaucracy rolls in the Post Game.
I must remark though, that I am impressed by what MAJESTIC 13 brings to the table. The sheer variety of alien enemies (26, wow) and the number of scripted missions (6) adds a lot of diversity to the randomly generated conflicts.
I also think that MAJESTIC 13’s decision to allow the player to clone dead team members was a good one because, as the book says, missions are supposed to be lethal and exciting. Constantly having to bring up new squad members (like in the XCOM video games) adds a treadmill to the action which could make the whole mission cycle feel like a slog. I am glad the Designer Notes state that getting team members “back on the field for the next mission” was a design goal because it eliminates the possibility of that slog.
Lastly, I really enjoyed the short fiction (less than a page!) intro story for MAJESTIC 13. It could have been ripped from the pages of Delta Green, particularly the ending. Nice job, Adam Loper and Vincent Venturella.
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