Posts Tagged ‘supplement’

¿Qué Es Un Libro Género Perfecto?

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Well, I’ll tell you. A perfect genre book should be comprehensive; nobody who loves that genre should feel slighted by it. (This makes loose or enormous genres, like steampunk or fantasy, nearly impossible to do perfectly. Fortunately, they can still be done very well indeed, say by Bill Stoddard.) A perfect genre book should also be welcoming; nobody who doesn’t know that genre should feel mystified. (Ideally, even an utter genre newbie should have an idea for the game she’d like to play after reading it.) Both of these conditions argue for a certain narrowness of view: you may not be able to make any kind of usable genre book out of “road stories,” but Midnight Roads made a pretty good one out of “modern American haunted road stories.” But a useful genre book has to offer more than one story; ideally, the whole narrative cosmos should unfold out of its genre treatment like a fractal flower. And finally, the perfect genre book should be for a game system ideally suited to telling its sort of stories. A genre centered on long, dramatic, wild and wonderful fights should have rules for them.

Also, there should be awesome monsters.

All these considerations are on display in Lucha Libre HERO (263 black-and-white pages, $29.99), which is comprehensively compiled by two maniacal lucha fans, Darren Watts and Jason Walters, and seductively astonishing to an almost-complete lucha ignoramus (me). Mexico’s masked wrestling films (now you know) are part detective story, part horror, part martial arts adventure, part social commentary, part SF, and part smacking Aztec mummies around. Like a good Puebla mole, it is the blending of these disparate, even psychotronic, ingredients that makes the dish sublime. Not merely mad doctors and Aztec mummies, but Ape People, Blonde Martians, and lady vampires festoon this book, along with patented wrestling moves like “Freightliner,” “Extended Fight Scene,” and “No! Not My Laboratory!” Plus a history of Mexican wrestling, a full filmography, and a guide to Backlot Mexico City. And midgets. All lovingly (even slaveringly) detailed for HERO 5th Edition — a completely playable version of which, tuned for the squared circle, is included in the back. If ever there was a game system designed for brutal, knock-down, drag-out fights driving narrative turns and clinches, it’s HERO. (And but me no buts about HERO 6th Edition. If you’re able to play HERO, you’re able to swap the stats in this book out if you want.) In short, genre perfection, slam-bang fights, and Aztec mummies. All in One Book. Todos En Libro Uno.

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Pick Any Four Colors, As Long As They’re Gray

Monday, November 17th, 2008

One of the hardest wires to walk in RPG writing is designing a “genre setting.” Pure genre books (GURPS Horror, Fantasy Hero) are relatively easy; pure setting books (Ptolus, Delta Green) somewhat harder. But hardest of all are setting books intended to enforce a specific genre, be it four-color comics, Gothic horror, or post-holocaust robot-fighting. Sometimes (Champions, Ravenloft, GURPS Reign of Steel), it works. Sometimes (as in Forgotten Realms or the World of Darkness), you create a setting that accidentally creates a whole subgenre on its own. But often, you fall between the chairs; the setting is incomplete, and the genre is imperfectly modeled. We ran into this problem at Last Unicorn with the Star Trek roleplaying games: Our vision was that the Original Series books would cover swashbuckling adventure, the DS9 books would cover grim espionage-military stories, and the TNG books would give us scientifictional sense-of-wonder adventures. I think the end result, whatever its other virtues as Star Trek roleplaying, got about two-thirds of the way to genre emulation.

With the original Freedom City setting in Mutants & Masterminds, Steve Kenson built a respectable four-color universe. With Paragons (255-page full-color hardback, $39.95), Kenson and 13 other writers attempt the harder task of modeling the “superheroes in a ‘realistic’ world” subgenre. Often, this subgenre simply becomes another genre with superheroes: Heroes is family soap opera, The Authority is agitprop, Godlike is war story. Kenson’s approach is to offer all of those as possibilities; to create a book of options, a smorgasbord rather than a fixed menu. As with any smorgasbord, you’ll love some things, and like others rather less. The trouble, of course, is that if you pick all the options on offer – from geopolitics to postmodern fairy tales to extreme sports – you wind up back in a four-color universe again, but without the nobility and mythic resonance. Thus, to use the book “correctly” requires ignoring about 85% of it, which may seem wasteful to thrifty gamers. That said, some or all of the material on offer would work pretty well in a four-color campaign, especially a “muted” four-color world like Checkmate or the Ultimates. (Especially the Mass Combat rules, for single supers vs. battalions of normals.) Another possibility would be using Paragons for a series of short three- or four-session mini-campaigns, each in a different “real world with superheroes” variant. This, actually, could be a lot of fun, and the book offers ten such “series frameworks” to support you, one of which (“The Imaginauts”) could serve as the over-arching frame story for just such a serial reality exploration meta-campaign. In the final analysis, Paragons isn’t a genre setting book, or a subgenre setting book; it’s a subgenre setting cookbook, complete with ingredients. Bring your own fire.

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Baugh, Humbug!

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

By which I mean that the clever and humanistic game writer under discussion today isn’t Bruce (“Adventure!”) Baugh, but Benjamin (“not Bruce”) Baugh. What’s next? Jensen Achilli? Mike Forbeck? Dare I hint it, Kevin Hite? Is nothing sacred? And as if to further jangle my over-tired nerves, Benjamin Baugh’s Monsters and Other Childish Things (182-page black-and-white hardback, $29.99) from Arc Dream Publishing seems to believe that what Veronica Mars needed most was a crossover with Stanley And His Monster. Seriously. This is a game about youthful trauma (high school, middle school, or grade school) in which the youths have horrible monster companions who eat people. If you buy the premise – which I’m still not sure I do – the bit is terrific. The game runs on Greg Stolze’s One Roll Engine, as seen in Wild Talents, Reign, and NEMESIS, and when I say “runs,” I mean “runs.” There are ORE rules for making up monsters and story conflicts, along with the rules for putting dice into (and taking them out of) Relationships, dealing (and dealing with) Shocks or Scars (physical or emotional), and lots of monster abilities. If you like ORE, you’ll love this. There is simultaneously more and less GM material than I’d look for if I were running: there’s a ton of NPCs (child, monster, adult, and Other) that are either iconic or clichéd depending on your perspective, and a pretty good intro adventure, and two of the three other campaigns on offer provide strange variations on the theme. But the book doesn’t ever just come out and explain how to decide, most importantly, if your campaign setting should have secret monsters or public monsters. Calvin and Hobbes is a different story from Pokémon; Monsters seems to want to split the difference, and I still don’t know how.

Arc Dream goes out of its way to provide me some answers, though, in Ross Payton’s Curriculum of Conspiracy (55-page black-and-white softcover, $9.99) and Baugh’s own Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor (160-page black-and-white softcover, $24.99). The first is a perfectly sound “evil high school” setting that all fans of Buffy will recognize and love. It could use some more NPC students (but the ones from the corebook will do to get started), and it still tries to split the difference a bit, but the rest of the setting is supernatural enough that the thematic hiccups level out. (It forbids monsters on campus, which also helps.) Where Curriculum is good, however, Candlewick is magnificent. The monsters here are internal; the PCs (“Pathetic Children”) have Creepy Skills that leave them shunned and hated. Perhaps that’s why they’re orphans. Perhaps that’s why they’re at the Candlewick Orphanarium. The players don’t know; with Echoes instead of Relationships, the orphans remember their own pasts in play. The theme, mood, and rules of this setting hit all the targets head-on. By adding the surreal Lemony Snicket sensibility and dialing down the monsters, Baugh reaches an ideal sweet spot of campaign design. And the rules – such rules! We get a jaw-dropping set of mystery rules for battling the mystery as though it were a big, amorphous monster – and better yet, for writing it collaboratively in play! Too weird for you? Well, the “normal” mystery creation system is also quite nice (reminiscent of the town creation subsystem from Dogs in the Vineyard) and involves plenty of One-Rolls to rule the story neatly. The setting material is sheerly wonderful, borne along by Baugh’s pitch-perfect tone. Baugh’s writing in both books is pretty great, verging on brilliant with only the occasional sidestep to too-clever. Robert Mansperger’s art throughout is only a touch less good than that, and it’s nestled in Daniel Solis’ predictably excellent page designs in Candlewick and the Monsters corebook. Those two books are worth getting for Candlewick alone, if you have any interest in playing a game of country-house mystery, boarding-school strangeness, even small-town skullduggery.

Note: I originally credited Curriculum of Conspiracy to Benjamin Baugh, when, as Shane Ivey notes with remarkable politesse in comments below, it was written by Ross Payton. My apologies to Ross, although I’m not sure it’s an insult for someone to think you write like Benjamin Baugh. In short, publishers should put authors’ names on book covers.

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Broadswords & Bell Curves

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

The potential for irony abounds in any discussion of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, the first installment of which Steve Jackson Games released around Christmas of last year as a PDF original supplement on their e-store e23. To begin with, there’s the irony that after thirty years, we’re three-quarters of the way back around to The Fantasy Trip, Steve Jackson’s first multi-book simplification of Dungeons & Dragons. In fine epicyclic fashion, though, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is a multi-book simplification of GURPS for the purposes of playing games very much like Dungeons & Dragons. (Dungeons & Dragons, meanwhile, is moving around that same wheel, with its multi-book new edition a beautifully elegant, souped-up version of Blue-Book-era D&D “kick in the door and go” dungeon fantasy, likewise of thirty years ago.) But rather than reinvent GURPS for graph-paper delving, in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, GURPS Line Editor Sean “Dr. Kromm” Punch presents, rather, a set of comprehensive “house rules” for a GURPS game with the same goals that Tom Moldvay had in 1980. Which, it bears repeating, are the same goals possessed by an overwhelming proportion of the RPG player base – including me, one Sunday a month, given that I’m playing in a D&D 4e campaign.

Having addressed Genre, we move from the Universal to the RPSpecifics: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy comes in four books (so far). GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 1: Adventurers (31 pages, PDF, $7.95) is the basic “Player’s Handbook,” featuring GURPS templates for 11 “classes” (barbarian to wizard, although if you play a wizard, you’ll need GURPS Magic, too), a few rules fillips, and a bunch of delving gear in GURPS terms. Even the streamlined list of dungeon-focused skills holds 100-odd entries; the suggestion of further collapsing them into single-descriptor class skills (Over the Edge- or Risus-style) is welcome. (Had it been me, I might have tried doing the book with just the skills in GURPS Lite; as it is, players will still need access to the main GURPS Basic Set.) GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons (31 pages, PDF, $7.95) is the real winner, a “Dungeon Master’s Guide” to quick decision-making and sound rules calls in GURPS for most anything you want to do in a dungeon. Comprehensive, fair-minded, and clever, it’s the equal of the best GURPS genre books, but with a lot more crunch than most. It doesn’t quite achieve the plug-n-play utility of the original DMG, but then the current DMG doesn’t quite achieve that either. It doubles as an abbreviated “Monster Manual,” with 19 monsters from the standard (dire wolf) to the weird (ambulatory mushroom-men). No dragons, though. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 3: The Next Level (44 pages, PDF, $7.95) adds templates for 37 races optimized (like the “classes”) for dungeon-bashing, and some excellently focused rules and guidelines for character advancement and experience awards. It also adds 20 pages of lenses for “multi-class” characters, which seems a bit much of a muchness, although we get templates for Evil Clerics and Anti-Paladins (or “Unholy Warriors”), so that’s pretty good. Finally, GURPS Fantasy 4: Sages (17 pages, PDF, 4.95) adds two classes: Artificer and Sage, plus yet more multi-class lenses, plus some excellent rules for tomes and books. Again, had it been me, I would probably have released a “Dungeon Bestiary” instead, but it’s good for what it is.

What it is, or rather what all four are, is also an interesting sign-post on the road. To begin with, it’s a high-profile electronic product from a company that was among the first to embrace the Net (an argument can be made that the Daily Illuminator is the world’s oldest blog) but that has done relatively little electronic publishing (compared to other companies) until recently (e23 only started in 2005). More specifically, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is an emulator, a filter to put over GURPS to get a specific feel, one most typical of another game. Given GURPS’ origins as a gladiatorial combat game – and the overwhelming popularity of that play mode — it’s odd that such a filter has taken so long. According to the e23 “What’s Hot” page, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 1: Adventurers has sold 830 copies in a little over eight months: not bad for an e-book (it’s the third-best selling book ever at e23), but nonetheless perhaps indicative of: the way that assumptions about play style can shape marketing (“We don’t sell to people who play dungeon games”), the power (positive and negative) of branding (“GURPS isn’t for me and my dungeon game, it’s for Something Else”), and hopefully, the eventual erosion of such artificial distinctions in the more fluid world of the Web, where decisions to cross brand lines impose a lower cost on both the publisher and consumer.

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