Author Archives: mxyzplk

The OGL: It’s Not Just d20

Posted on May 22, 2011 | 4 comments

Hey, so I keep seeing people confused about the Open Game License. My Open Gaming for Dummies article helps dispel some of that but let’s come out and get one thing clear – it’s not “just for D&D” or just d20-derived games. Open gaming is strong and diverse.

The OGL is just a license.  It’s like the open source Apache, GPL, or MIT licenses in that it can be applied by anyone – though it was written by WotC originally, it’s not owned by them and has no relation to what games can be released under it.

Guess what all game systems are open under the OGL license?

  • The Action! system (from Gold Rush Games)
  • Traveller (Mongoose’s version)
  • Runequest (Mongoose’s version)
  • The d6 system (from West End Games’ Star Wars and Ghostbusters)
  • Fudge and its newer more popular variant FATE and derivatives thereof, like ICONS

And many more, including many many d20 variants from Anime d20 to Mutants & Masterminds.  I’m not sure there’s a comprehensive list – here’s a couple that are old and out of date. But that’s like, a big share of the systems people have played over the decades.

And of course this doesn’t mention other open games published under other licenses, like Eclipse Phase is published under Creative Commons.

Really, publishers, is there a reason NOT to open license your system?  Because face it, your system kinda sucks.  They all do. Your best bet is to get it in the hands of as many people as possible so they’ll get interested and buy your products. If GURPS got open licensed, for example, maybe someone under 30 would play it.

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D&D Lair Assault: 4e Wallows In Its Own Filth

Posted on May 21, 2011 | 26 comments

The description of the new WotC Organized Play program made me throw up in my mouth a little.

I keep hoping 4e might come back from the brink.  Mike Mearls keeps posting “Ah yes, the good things we are starting to remember from older D&D editions” posts on his blog. Maybe D&D isn’t degenerating into a tactical minis game forever after all, I think.

And then they just up and announce it’s a tactical minis game. No really, go read the link.  The new OP is “tailored to groups of players who enjoy solving tactical puzzles, optimizing characters, and using rules to their advantage.” You come and minmax character builds and run them through a tactical simulation. If you die, it’s back to the save point and try again. Again, really, “Adventuring groups will often attempt a challenge several times before solving it.” The “D&D Fortune Cards are a required and integral part” isn’t even in the top 10 disturbing things about this.

Frankly, Organized Play is behind a lot of the bad stuff that started to corrupt 3e. It breeds a certain mindset and playstyle with very tightly constrained encounter difficulties, point buy min maxing, etc. that ends up corrupting the expectations of players. Now they are, as the kids today say, “Sticking it in and breaking it off” as far as that’s concerned.

I wonder how the people that always object to saying that 4e is becoming exactly like a computer game can even begin to continue to say that with a straight face now.

I mean, I don’t mind wargaming. I remember a lively game of Stargrunt II I played at a Gen Con.  But WotC needs to start a separate tactical game line and stop making everyone think that it is a roleplaying game. It just breeds more “It’s only about the kill” goons that inhabit local game tables, Internet forums, and eventually the ranks of adventure and supplement authors.

P.S.  If this is  your first visit here and you just don’t understand WHY…  I’m not gonna bother to link you to the past posts that explain how 4e is different from roleplaying games, etc.; if you can’t type “4e” into the search box above if you really want to find out, then you fall below the minimum INT required to care about whether you understand what’s going on…

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Games That Really Disappointed Me

Posted on May 21, 2011 | 19 comments

A thread on TheRPGSite about “Games You Really Wanted To Like But Couldn’t” struck a chord with me.  Here’s some of the games I really, really wanted to like but was sadly crushed by. Chime in with yours!

Rune. After Feng Shui, which I loved with an intense love, I was really looking forward to Robin Laws’ next game, and Vikings are cool, so it seemed like a shoo-in. Then when I got it, it was a weird budget-driven thing that I couldn’t even begin to attempt to run. You can’t put in a trap, you have to take the trap out of the budget for opposing elements…  Spreadsheet time! To create a Rune adventure you’d have to do days of prep and math, there is no “winging it.” A warning shot of what has mostly gone wrong with RPGs since in many ways. Recently I saw the 2e clone Myth & Magic trying to put in an “XP budget” thing in their scenario building and it gave me post-traumatic stress disorder flashbacks to Rune, I said “Rip that out POST HASTE boys!”

Savage Worlds. With Savage Worlds there isn’t enough meat there unless the GM is willing to be off-the-cuffing stuff, and ours wasn’t. “I’m sorry, that seems like a valid Strength trick but the game only defines Smarts and Agility tricks.” “Oh well then this system is boring as all get out as written.” Also probably the GM’s style is to blame, he’d just suddenly take 15 minutes to build a big HeroClix battle mat and put the exact same generic goblin and dwarf minis down on it (we never fought dwarves or goblins, they were just stand-ins) and look at us and say “What do you want to do?” “To what? Where are we? What do those goblins represent? Are they attacking us or something?” But we gave it two campaigns. Once the final one ended with us getting killed by the traditional SW “guy you can’t hit ever except on super lucky dice explosions” we boycotted.

With FATE, I’ve tried Spirit of the Century and Dresden Files. Spirit of the Century was just too big.  411 pages for a “pick-up” RPG?  There was no way to bootstrap a group into playing it.  With Dresden Files, it wasn’t really the core mechanics that got us. Well, maybe it was. I just remember the wizard continually outshining other people in their specialty, and then us taking an egregiously long time to cast some detection spell. “Do we have enough juju to make it work? No? OK, we put in… Some grass, because he was on grass when he was abducted! Still not enough? We put in… A phone book with his name in it! How about now?” We stole Aspects and just added them to our Pathfinder characters in some campaigns, that works well enough. Might give FATE a try in another circumstance, but it’s operating at “two strikes.”

D&D 4e, because I actually liked D&D in Basic, 1e, 2e, and 3e; then 4e took a big steaming dump on everything the game stood for.

M&M 2e and Spycraft 2e. I loved 1e of both, and I was fine with upgrading and bought the books for both new editions sight unseen. And with both, they took a fine RPG and ladled on big levels of complexity and made it read like an encyclopedia full of definitions and not a game. They were completely un-charming and in both cases after reading some, even with my previous understanding from the earlier edition, I didn’t really want to power through reading the rest of the weighty tome. There’s a game design philosophy that sometimes comes into vogue that says “Make it read like a big ol’ dictionary, and they can just piece it together from all the individual definitions!”  And that’s about as easy as learning a foreign language from a dictionary. Game designers, stop being lazy. Write a game.

I think it’s at this point I decided giant complex games were not for me any more and started eyeballing lighter approaches (though sadly Savage Worlds was supposed to be the lead candidate there).

Those are the games that I really, really wanted to like, that many people told me I should like, but that in the end I like so little that if our group was like “Let’s play X” I, who generally go along with whatever game system without comment, would have to say “Uh… I don’t know if I’d really enjoy that.”

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 46

Posted on May 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

Forty-sixth Session – The Externals assault the Aegis system in force, and we have our entire fleet there to prevent them. We tear them a new one. Now we have to figure out what to do with all these weirdo prisoners!

This was an interesting session.  First we spent a good bit of time planning our strategy – we knew the aliens were coming.  Since we’ve teamed up with the Medurr and have access to their drivespace denial weapon, we came up with a plan to trigger it in microbursts designed to spread incoming ships out in a big ol’ line trailing out of the system.  We’d then put our forces in one big ball and roll them on up!

Before they come, we go and get the other forces in the system on our team – some Thuldans and some VoidCorpers. The Thuldans say yes, the VoidCorpers say no.

We were interrupted by a systemwide hack. I thought we had thwarted that back in the day but apparently not.  This took a LOT of rolls to resolve.  Taveer went out into cyberspace to thwart it. The enemy AI pretty much chased Taveer off and back to the station and started attacking us!  Once we got VERA and Captain Takashi into the fight, we finally managed to cut it off.

Then we found out it was a VoidCorp AI behind it all. They had some flimsy excuse but the Admiral pretty much told them they were going to join our fleet or we were going to seize their assets in the system.They gave in.

In an attempt to turn this whole thing around, we took the AI, VORL, and put it on a barge with some External wireless codes to mess with the incoming fleet.

But before the battle – a promotion!  I had actually written that “Letter to the Admiralty” and sent it to our GM Paul  a while back so that when we were in Bluefall and could get some admirals together that we could have a board of review to promote the faithful Martin St. John to Captain.  He was surprised! And in fact, once he was promoted, we talked about a command for him – it hadn’t originally been my plan, but Takashi as an Admiral has been kinda kicked upstairs to do full fleet command tactics a lot of the time, so he offered command of the Lighthouse to St. John, who accepted. Woot!  We put as much pomp and circumstance into it as the GM had patience for (not all that much). Hell, I’d be happy to do a whole session around just the promotion, but then I’m a roleplaying freak.

Then we fought the Externals and pretty much owned them.  Only two problems – one, the second fortress ship got away despite all our efforts to catch up to them (we’re not really sure how that worked, it was GM fiat) and also the rules tended to punish us for being big.  We were using a simple abstract system that uses Space Tactics rolls; that’s where Takashi is a Viking. Well, first round he rolls Amazing and the first bit of the enemy fleet rolls like Ordinary, they lose 15% of their force and we lose 5% of ours – but we are so much bigger we lose about as many ships as they do!  We were like “WTF!” Usually “stacking” all your forces is an advantage but in this ruleset it’s not, so next time we’ll go with small task forces that should get the same effect with fewer losses.

Suddenly we went from most of the Externals being rare “never seen by humans” stuff to “We have a prison hulk full of thaal, what the heck do we do with them?” We spent a lot of time trying to turn the various client races with mixed results. Not everyone is on board with the crazy Scientology religious heart of this war, but many of them are stupes who like their congenital slavery so it’s a hard nut to crack.

The bareem were like this.  We got some sifarv turncoats to command them all to help us, but Chris had the most inspired idea; we’re putting them through Concord Marine training not only to battle harden them but also to try to inculcate them with our values. Once they accept leadership other than the sifarv, and kill sifarv on orders, then they’ll become more liberated dudes, at least that’s the idea.

The A team is going to take half the fleet to Tendril to lift its siege and the B team is going to go RIF the Algemron system, which is probably controlled by teln mind-worms.

Interestingly, I think we kinda all unanimously and implicitly backed off going from one big serious space battle thing to another – after another half hour of roleplaying suddenly the next steps became smaller and closer to home!

We were looking for the N’sss (stealth space jellyfish) we are sure are in the system, and detected the VoidCorpers beaming clandestine messages into the gas giant (where N’sss like to hang out). Admiral Takashi lost his shit. Forget about interstellar diplomacy and weak excuses, this is an act of war and/or treason and he immediately ordered a Marine strike force to load up and assault VoidCorp’s Cloud City. After the AI thing, and finding out that they are trying to stop Old Space from coming to the Verge’s rescue, it was the last straw. They are clearly traitors against humanity and he’s not going to tolerate it another second. Long term consequences can worry about themselves.

Plus, there was a throwaway rumor about problems on the set of actor Jack Everstar’s new movie and suddenly, for no real reason, all the B team (while playing naked beach volleyball on Bluefall, our usual vacation time diversion) decided we all want to meet Everstar and have cooked up a Burn Notice/Leverage style plot to all get onto his movie crew.  Woot!

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Myth & Magic Playtest Underway

Posted on May 14, 2011 | 7 comments

Myth & Magic is a 2e retroclone under development and it’s looking good!

In retrospect, the much maligned 2e was probably, in my opinion, close to the best version of D&D. Shocking claim, I know.  But a lot of the stuff in 0e (race as class?) certainly deserved to die, and 1e was pretty Byzantine. 2e cleaned it up but was still light enough that people could house-rule and “ruling, not rules” reliably. I was really sold on 3e when it came out, and it definitely had some nice bits, but over the years it led to some mighty undesirable things (CharOp, Christmas Tree Syndrome, etc.).  A cleaned-up 2e might just do it for me!

You can download the Myth & Magic Player’s Starter Guide and GameMaster’s Starter Guide for free (forum registration required) now, they’re a playtest covering levels 1-10.

Player’s Starter Guide

It’s not just a slavish reprint of 2e, which is good. They’ve adopted the to-hit bonus and AC ascending from 10 from d20 instead of the less intuitive THAC0.  And they’ve added a seventh stat, Perception.  I think this is just wonderful; I ran with a Perception (and sometimes Luck) stat for most of 2e’s run. In general it’s 2e but cleaned up.

They also add “class talents” which are kinda like feats but scoped down a lot and limited to specific classes. You can spend proficiencies on them. I like some things about that approach, though I worry that powergamers will just take those and not actual NWPs.

There are still some wonky bits I’d like sanded off, like different XP tables per class – that’s just complexity that adds no value.  I don’t require classes be “balanced” but let’s avoid those different-for-the-sake-of-it bits that littered early D&D. If you want thieves to advance X% faster, give them the same XP table and just give them X% more thief skill points a level. Voila, same effect, less complexity.

On the other end, the only modernization I’d remove is the point buy character creation.  That is the gateway to optimized character builds, which in turn are the root of all evil. Yeah, it was an option back then, it was still bad.

GameMaster’s Starter Guide

The GMSG kicks off with the usual but keeps it short instead of meandering in for hundreds of pages, and even includes the first raft of monsters, which is good. It goes bad, however, when it incorporates the 3e approach to balanced encounters – ELs and XP budget.  “The XP budget tells you the maximum amount of XPs you can tally to an encounter.” That’s some 4e bullshit right there and needs to go.

On the monsters, they have a “CAM” (Combat Ability Modifier) which seems overly simplistic – it’s a single modifier for all skills and attacks and physical attribute checks in combat. It replaces all the stats but Int and Per. I’m about streamlining but that’s a little much, it makes monsters too homogeneous. Everything’s as strong as it is dextrous as it makes Will saves. And it’s always equal to the monster’s HD, which begs the question of why it needs to be an additional separate stat with an oblique acronym in every listing.

It does have random treasure determination tables; I get pissed off every time I run Pathfinder and want one, so props there.

Both

The art is sparse but good,the graphic design is simple but good, and it’s copyedited better than many pro products I’ve bought.

The game is definitely a good innovation on and return to 2e; with some more work I could see it being competitive with e.g. Pathfinder which I really like. And I like it better than the 0e clones, I never got that, 1e is the first real edition, and even in a cleaned up version like Castles & Crusades there’s still a little bit too much “Oh I’m a first level cleric and have… no spells.  I suck.”

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13 Assassins

Posted on May 11, 2011 | 2 comments

Here’s a movie you don’t want to miss.  I saw 13 Assassins back at Fantastic Fest last year and now it’s in limited release in the US; here in Austin it’s showing at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. I went to see it again last night and again was blown away at the brilliance of the film.

13 Assassins is directed by Takashi Miike (Ichi the Killer, Sukiyaki Western Django) and stars Koji Yakusho (Memoirs of a Geisha). It’s a traditional samurai movie in many respects, the kind there used to be scads of but isn’t really made much any more (technically, jidaigeki).

The general setup is that there’s a noble who is a degenerate Caligula style freak who is committing all kinds of atrocities, but he’s the Shogun’s half-brother so can’t be held to account. In fact, he gets nominated to be the Shogun’s chief advisor and once he travels back home from Edo, will take office and be untouchable. Finally the Chief Justice has to do something, and he approaches a samurai, Shinzaemon Shimada, and asks him to take care of this problem. Shinzaemon recruits 11 other samurai willing to risk their lives for the sake of taking out the sadistic noble and they plan an in-route hit, culminating in them taking a small village and turning it into a prepared kill zone. In an unfortunate turn for them the noble’s head samurai, who knows Shinzaemon, is forewarned and gets more troops, so the opposing force is 200+ clan samurai. This does not of course dissuade the samurai, who just hold up a banner stained with the bloody tears of one of the noble’s victims that reads “TOTAL MASSACRE” and then proceed to kick a legendary amount of ass.

The film is very, very well done. It has an economy of motion about it very fitting for a samurai movie.  There aren’t wasted scenes or movement; the momentum of the film builds strongly even through the early recruitment and planning scenes and doesn’t spin out or go over the top even in the end fight scene that’s an hour long(!). The violence is not done in a “cheap” way like in many, where the super-protagonist just kills an unlimited number of people because, hey, it’s a movie and they’re the star.  And it’s not turned into a big epic costume drama either. It is a very personal movie.  I was impressed that the 13 protagonists (they are joined by a hunter they find tied up in the forest, though he is a lot more than he seems) were all distinct characters without being broad stereotypes – that’s hard to do even with smaller ensemble casts.

It is refreshing after a diet of Hollywood movies where all you can really say is “Well, I’m glad it wasn’t awful” – like Thor and everything else I’ve seen this year really – to see something skillfully done, a movie made like a movie can be, with drama and violence and some humor and executed completely faithfully to its theme.

And also – you get to see an unparalleled samurai bloodbath.  Woot! Go see it.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Tenth Session

Posted on May 9, 2011 | 1 comment

Tenth Session (7 page pdf) – “Sign of the Void” – A shadow demon tries to claim the PCs’ allegiance and takes rejection poorly. But their rune-markings unlock odd new weapons that prove most efficacious against the phantoms he unleashes from beyond the dark gate. Will they work as well against Clegg Zincher and cannon shot? They find out!

This session was basically two big battles; the first was a continuation of the major sea-cave setpiece from last session. Chmetugo the shadow demon showed up and laid a rap on them about how they are marked with the sign of the void and are fated to serve him and to transform the world into some weird monster realm. Naturally they turned him down. So he raised all the pirates as undead and sicced them on the party as basically unlimited numbers of tentacle-dogs came through the dark gate into our world.

I came up with a cool environmental thing; the shadow demon used his cold powers to make the surface of the water start freezing, moving outward another 10′ radius every round. This allowed the tentacle-dogs to attack (albeit precariously), provided danger for the PCs in the water, and generally made things interesting. They enjoyed breaking the ice, sliding around on the ice, and generally indulging in shenanigans. They finally decided that the only way to take care of the whole thing is to blow it up, which is fair enough.

Also, they investigated their weird runes they got from the activation of the Cyphergate. Glyphs from Tammerhawk’s glyph-plaque that exploded are embedded in their bodies and tattoolike runes appear over their location. They know that the glyphs burn when the tentacle-dogs are close, but now once they touched the gate they seem to be more active somehow. They resonate with the matching larger glyphs that once sealed this gate. During the fight they got a hold of the glyphs and they turn into weapons made of orichalcum that allow the PCs to hurt the shadow creatures. And when they saw Zincher with a similar weapon, they realized that he too was there in the Riddleport Light that day. They didn’t have a lot of spare time, but they started counting glyph plaques and trying to put two and two together. And the metaplot rolls on.

And more Clegg Zincher. That’s always fun. They kinda want to kill him and kinda not.  But he’s threatening Tommy’s girlfriend! But he’s a made man! But we don’t like him, he worked against us and Saul! But he does a lot of damage with that pickaxe! But he told the demon he refused to be its butt-boy! But… I see Zincher as an interesting Mafia type guy. He tells demons and Commies and other undesirables to go hose, and is out there personally helping people in the neighborhood when disasters come. But he’s a ruthless businessman who is not hesitant about having people killed.  But he operates under a certain code of honor. And he loves birds.

So pretty much, two three hour long fights! I don’t usually do that, I go in for more RP and stuff, but I wanted to really amp up this start of a new leg of the campaign. The first season was mostly urban and not so much pirate; this leg will be real pirate in spades!

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Alternity to Feng Shui Conversion

Posted on May 6, 2011 | 6 comments

Here’s a little something I started working on in the year 2000 (!) and just found and decided to finish off.  It’s a conversion of Alternity to the Feng Shui system.  Feng Shui is the RPG of action movie roleplaying and has a nice fast system, one that it’s easy to teach people at the beginning of a convention game, for example.  Alternity’s system has its charms but it’s heavy crunch and requires time investment to learn. Anyway, it’s a simple stat + skill vs difficulty system, with a positive and negative d6 roll applied (stat + skill + d6 – d6) – fast and reasonably normalized, and you intuitively know you can hit a difficulty equal to your stat+skill on average.

I’d like to hear comments on the conversion and how it could be made better.  Here it is for your reading pleasure!

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Alternity: Second Edition

Posted on May 4, 2011 | 3 comments

I like Alternity, but it could stand a little cleaning up. You could remove a lot of the complexity from the system by just jettisoning the class system and making a couple skill changes.

Here’s what I’d do with an Alternity Second Edition.  I’d keep the general skill basis and skill check mechanic with the differing quality of results for skill/half skill/quarter skill. Really the main rules are great and need little tweaking; the optional rulesets are where things start slipping.

Remove classes.  They give you so little that it’s annoying – go “full GURPS” with it. Removes one chunk of useless complexity.

Remove levels.  Spend XP as you get them. Removes a second chunk of useless complexity.

More skill points.  Or cheaper costs.  Definitely use at least the “Optional Rule Set 2” skill point values and, since you’re getting rid of classes, maybe just reduce all the skill point costs by one off the bat and tweak from there; maybe another one point drop for all broad skills. “But I always suck” is the main Alternity critique one hears.

Damage and hit locations.  This would go a long way to fixing the armor issues.  Top Secret/S.I. had a hit location/box system I really liked. You’d do this, fix the “lower number of mortal points” problem and the O/G/A weapon vs armor thing to be nicely symmetrical.

General guidance.  There are a couple recurring pain points that are more about how you run the game than the rules as written.  This includes “let any relevant skill work, with a 1 step penalty if it’s a real stretch.” Looking to stop a security computer on a starship from sending an alert signal?  Yes, you can use Sec/Security Devices, Tech Sci/Juryrig, Computer/Hacking, or System Ops/Communications. Not “No, that’s not the perfect one.” Cover and stuff, it’s worthless currently, need a bit more focus on the firefight.

Consolidate and simplify.  No separate GMG with rules players should know hidden in it.  No “weapon accuracy by range modifier” special table. Make it so grenades work faster. Mainly look in the GMG, pull out all the tables, and then delete 99% of them as pointless cruft.

Psionics.  Done once in the mainbook, redone in the Mindwalkers book, still sucky. Our party psis are always really weak – you don’t want to make them uber but currently you end up feeling sorry for them.

Computers. Are tarded. For what should be a sci-fi high tech game, the equipment and especially the computers are boring and stupid.

That’s it really, mostly a “delete all the exception stuff” rampage, and you’d have a terse and solid ruleset. More on specific new rules I’d like to add tomorrow…

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Alternity: The Community

Posted on May 4, 2011 | 3 comments

Is Alternity a dead game?  Well, of course WotC isn’t publishing it any more, and you can’t even buy the PDFs because of them being huge ol’ bitches.  But between Half Price Books, ebay, and bittorrent, you can get your hands on the materials OK, and there’s still communities out there actively supporting it!

The big one is AlternityRPG.net, or “A.Net” for short.  They host a bunch of great downloads and have some reasonably active forums. If you’re interested in Alternity it’s the place to go.

There’s a lot of fan content too – most notably the two major Alternity e-zines, Action Check and Last Resort! Action Check had folks like Neil Spicer work on it, but stopped in 2002; Last Resort last published in 2009, but you can still download all the extant issues of both.

Action Check E-Zine (16 Issues!)

Last Resort E-Zine

And then there’s the massive Resources list at AlternityRPG.net, with metric tons of player contributed goodness!

There used to be an Alternity mailing list but Wizards discontinued it way long ago.  If you know of a pocket of Alternity goodness out there, let me know!

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 45

Posted on May 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

Forty-fifth Session – The A Team and a fire team of Recon Marines take the Lighthouse back from MINA and a bunch of aliens.  Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me? M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E. Enter a world of shit in this episode of our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!

The Lighthouse’s bridge is taken by a bunch of aliens and MINA, the station AI, is compromised (more than usual, of course). A bunch of old plot threads come together pleasingly in the solution.

First of all, we have the hacker Brent Terchyev, the son of the Jamaican Syndicate leader on Lucullus, who we saved from kidnappers and have had on board the station since our last visit.  Now we’re back to free the system from the aliens, and this apparently kicks him out of his normal diet of videogames and Grid porn into action.

Secondly, we have our means of access – the concealed airlock in the back of a massage parlor that our criminal characters have used from time to time. Lambert Fulson was reluctant to narc it out to the station personnel, but with the fate of the station on the line he gave it up.

Third, we have the Concord Marines. We’ve been making good use of these guys, and this time we promote them from faceless NPCs to real personalities. Besides Concord Marine Captain David Chase, who is a named NPC in the Lighthouse supplement, we had along an elite Recon/Marauder unit consisting of:

  • Sgt “Animal Mother”, violent and jaded even for the Marines, largely derived from the character of the same name in Full Metal Jacket
  • Cpl “Klinger”, whose armor is skillfully painted to be wearing a negligee and garter belt, somewhat based on Klinger from M.A.S.H. and Fruity Rudy from Generation: Kill
  • LCpl Wierzbowski (no cute nickname yet), the unit’s grenadier, named after a quickly deceased character from Aliens
  • Pfc “Ludafisk”, a Nordic whiteboy that talks like a gangster rapper, inspired by Evan “Q-Tip” Stafford from Generation: Kill
  • Pfc “Motorhead”, with mottos like “Eat the Rich”  and “Born to Lose” spraypainted across his combat armor, just inspired by a love for Lemmy

They are stock second level NPCs, altered only from the default Concord Marines listed in the Lighthouse supplement in that they have recon powerered armor and a couple more skill points due to our more generous chargen rules – just about everyone who played Alternity used “Optional Rule Set 2” published as part of the Alternity errata that upped skill points by a small but noteworthy margin.

As you may be able to tell, we’ve been watching a lot of stuff like Full Metal Jacket, Generation: Kill, etc. lately.

Back in the day, I had done some work with an ex-Marine on a Concord Marine supplement detailing some Marine TOEs, training, and the like – I’m going to dust that off and publish it here for  your enjoyment! And we’ll be using it ourselves, Paul generously told us we can level this squad to third and customize them up a bit for future supporting cast roles!

Anyway, it took us a while to insert, make our way down the two kilometer elevator shaft, disable our crazed station AI, and then assault the bridge. The Marines burst in and put down the thaal high priest like he was Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad. It was beautiful – the bridge was full of External bigwigs – the thaal high priest, a bunch of other thaal psychics, superior sifarv bird-men, a gardhyi (or “space vampire” as Takashi calls them), bareem ape-thugs, karaden roach scientists… And our squad of Marines ripped them a new asshole in extremely short order. (Well, it took hours of game time, but short order in game).  The KZ 130 13mm charge machinegun is quite a weapon in the hands of some motivated men. We put the video out on the Grid to demonstrate the lack of invincibility of our heretofore-untouchable enemies.

As Takashi, I alternated between using my Command skill to give our friendies bonuses and the Infantry Tactics skill to mess with our enemies. And I also shot down two bad guys with my little laser pistol – Takashi has way more luck then he has any right to with that thing. For whatever reason, he is really not good at combat by the numbers, but when he finally whips out the pistol and shoots it’s always followed by some alien boss falling with a hole seared in his forehead.

Next time, the fleet goes to Bluefall to defend against the approaching External fleet!

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 44

Posted on May 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

Forty-fourth Session – Back on Lucullus, the Lighthouse comes to the relief of the kroath-beset locals.  That’ll teach them to be such criminal douches next time we need their help. We engage in some large scale land combat and send in the A Team and some Recon Marines to nip the alien leadership in the bud. It all goes well, except those darn psychic aliens teleport up and take over the Lighthouse’s bridge while we’re giving them their whupping! Experience the twists and turns of the latest installment in our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!

We spent a ridiculously long time getting the various Lucullan factions on board with the Verge Alliance last time we visited, only for them to totally roll over like bitches for the Externals. All the alien fleet left but has ovipositor-ramming facilities in full swing turning Lucullans into kroath soldiers. Sigh. We put together a joint Verge Alliance and Medurr fleet, using the Medurr riftship to gate in draco-centaur needle ships. Concord Marines, Lucullan Picts that have been on board the Lighthouse, and Medurr all take part in the assault.

I as Admiral Takashi put together the tactical plan. We had our forces feint at the alien domes to lure out their armor as we sent in an infil team (including our command staff, of course) to take out their orbital-capable guns and decapitate their leadership. Then once those guns are silenced, our aerospace superiority would enable us to pound their armor and carry through the assault. I made some great tactics rolls and the larger army action went very, very well for us.

On the micro level, we rolled hard on the aliens and had a lot of success, including killing some of the birdlike sifarv whom we hadn’t encountered in person yet, until one of them downs Haggernak and negotiates for his release.  Admiral Takashi is a naval man of his word type, so he accepts the sifarv’s parole and chats cordially with him, only to discover the other alien leaders had teleported off to take over our space station!  Grr. We’ve tried to set up psychic teleportation detectors with little success and prevention with zero success. Fricking aliens.

I am always a bit worried about going into a lot of battles with Takashi since he is by no means a combat monster. He has inordinately good luck with shots from his laser pistol when it counts, but he is not well armored or really all that skilled. He excels in using his Command skills to inspire other combatants and give them bonuses, however.

This episode also features the continual combat effectiveness of the Concord Marines. We have been continually impressed with these guys; in fact, I’ll do some posts on them in particular as we’ve been inspired to detail them more as they continue to come through for us. Our PCs are not butch enough to go in on assaults without backup, and so we bring them along a lot. For second level NPCs they have performed remarkably!

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