Comparative Character Generation, Part 6: The Last Roundup

This, the last installment, will take a look at some other interesting systems, detail some possible campaigns, and try to make sense of all this mess.

The Story So Far

In the first installment I considered six relatively light-weight, generic, modifiable role-playing systems. In the following installments, I looked at variations of d20. In the most recent installments, I finished with d20, and looked at various others.

Some criteria for consideration include:

1. How long it takes to translate a character concept to a valid character? How complex is character generation?

2. What are each character’s chances of success in a conflict? How long does it take to compute them? Do the results violate common sense or basic physics?

3. How well does character generation reflect the original concept?

4. What style of play does the system support: gritty vs. cinematic, story-oriented vs. combat-oriented?

5. How complex are the rules? Can a new player or GM pick them up in a few minutes? Hours? Sessions?

Additional considerations for the final choice:

• How well does the game system fit with the intended campaign?

• How likely am I to find players comfortable with that system?

• How much existing material can I use, and how much do I have to add, to do the setting justice?

Addressing criterion #1, I’ve collected character generation times in previous installments:

Meanwhile, A Quarter Century Ago

Over the years I’ve run across several other promising or inspirational systems, which I’ll touch on “briefly”:

• Aces & Eights: Showdown, a simplified version of Aces & Eights’s gunfighting system, defines a gunslinger with only Speed and Accuracy. Each round players declare an action, roll 1d10 for initiative, adds Speed, and adds the time to determine an Action Count in tenths of a second. The GM counts upward and resolves each action on its Action Count. Whether the gunfighter hits or not relies on the Shot Clock, a transparency placed over a silhouette of the target. The shooter’s player centers the Shot Clock where his character is aiming, then rolls a die (modified by Accuracy) for the distance between where he aims and what he hits; to determine direction, he draws a card.

• Amber is the most well known, and possibly first published, diceless RPG. (By “diceless”, I mean games without card decks, spinners, or other randomizers.) While I’m indifferent to Zelazny’s novel series, I’ve always found its key mechanics themselves intriguing: Attribute Auctions, Absolute Attribute Rankings, and Diceless Combat Resolution (a.k.a. snowing the GM). I’m glad that Diceless By Design, its current owner, has licensed the system for an upcoming game by Jason Durall called Lords of Gossamer and Shadow.

• Call of Cthulhu d20 replaces d20 classes with two options: an “offensive” progression table (a “fighter” BAB + one good save of the player’s choice) or a “defensive” one (a “rogue” BAB + two good saves of the player’s choice). Like the BRP version, characters have professions which determine which skills they may spend most of their skill points on. I’ve given up on d20, but if I change my mind I’d steal that idea.

• Castle Falkenstein used cards in place of dice, allowing players to have a “hand” to keep good “rolls” until needed. It’s also the first game I encountered without a distinction between “characteristics” and “skills”, and where a “character sheet” could fit on a bookmark in your “character journal”. To some extent, its novel mechanics existed to evoke the feel of a Victorian alternate world, but some ideas – minimalist rules systems and character sheets in particular – presaged modern “rules-light” systems.

• Recently I bought Diaspora, a “mostly-hard” science fiction game based on Spirit of the Century, that includes collaborative star-system generation. I haven’t read through it all the way, but so far it looks good. I might use it instead of Traveller, especially since the author cites it as a major influence.

• In Don’t Rest Your Head, insomniac PCs find a doorway into the Mad City, where nightmares are real and the worst thing you can do is sleep. PCs aren’t defined by “strength”, “intelligence”, and the rest, but primarily by answers to questions about the character, and by the size of dice pools representing Discipline, Exhaustion, and Madness. All conflicts, and only conflicts, draw from these dice pools, or the GM’s “Pain” pool. Describing characters solely through their emotions and thoughts, again, isn’t new: Sorcerer and My Life With Master spawned a thousand experiments in thinking outside the adventure-gaming box.

• Dread goes even farther than Don’t Rest Your Head: there are no numbers at all, just answers to leading questions about your character. Like Amber, above, the GM decides most conflicts without dice. If, however, the GM cannot determine what would happen from the scenario or a character’s questionnaire, the player can opt to fail … or pull a brick from a Jenga tower. If the tower still stands, the character succeeds; if it topples, the character dies horribly. The name Dread, then, is remarkably apt. Quite apart from the GM’s role and responsibility as impersonal judge, Dread’s use of a resolution mechanism so different from dice, cards, point-bidding, or Rock-Paper-Scissors gets a big thumbs up from me.

• When I first read D6 Adventure, the D6 System seemed overcomplicated and fiddly, wholly unlike the simple core mechanic. After playing Star Wars D6, though, a simple but complete system emerged from the endless options of later books: all quantities rated in d6 + pips, and every task translates to a D6 roll vs. a fixed resistance or an opposing roll. Like True20, damage rolls oppose Strength rolls, with the margin determining the character’s degree of damage (Stunned, Wounded x2, Incapacitated, Dying, and Dead). One supplement included with the GM screen for later D6 games suggested dropping base attributes, and only using skills (defaulting to 2D), not unlike Spirit of the Century. So yes, I have those other games, but at least D6 doesn’t use funny dice.

• The design of GUMSHOE, the system behind Fear Itself and Trail of Cthulhu among others, solves one problem in investigative scenarios: what if a character blows a skill roll and never finds an important clue? GUMSHOE declares that anyone with the requisite skill automatically finds necessary clues, and rolls only determine if a character finds something more. Admittedly it’s not a novel idea: GMs have avoided or fudged die rolls for decades. GUMSHOE, though, incorporates the idea into its core mechanics. Instead of skill rolls, GUMSHOE characters expend skill points from a relevant skill, with any rating in an investigative skill ensuring minimum success. (Physical skills require a die roll, modified by points expended.)

• Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role Playing is Yet Another Retro-Clone based on Basic (BECMI) D&D … except for improvements based on d20, a version of Thief skills consistent with earlier “detect secret doors” and similar mechanics, and a bias toward “weird fantasy”. The author draws inspiration from H. P. Lovecraft, R. E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Poe, and similar authors. Amont other touches, the resulting game eschews monster lists and +1 swords and potions of giant strength in favor of unique creations, explains classic D&D spells with “all-knowing spirits of the dead” and “frightening the light”, and enforces class niches (e.g. Fighters gain attack bonuses with each level, while other classes remain at +1 permanently). The end result is a world where adventurers leave staid and oppressive civilization to hunt treasure in haunted ruins and ancient deathtraps … which makes D&D’s experience system a little more sensible.

• Microlite 20 strips down d20 to the basics: only three or four stats (Str, Dex, Mind, and possibly Cha), four classes, four skills, no feats, and drastic simplifications in level advancement and magic. Despite that, its author claims that one can trivially adapt most d20 supplements to it. Some variations emulate Original D&D (three classes, no skills), Conan, Call of Cthulhu, and Star Wars, among others. I’ve seen other simplifications, like Peryton Role Playing System (3,x with “knacks” replacing feats and skills) and “Quick 20” (fewer stats and more flexibility), but “Microlite 20” makes d20 as simple as The Fantasy Trip or Barbarians of Lemuria.

• Mutants & Masterminds also gives me hope for d20, in that it replaces levels and classes with a point-buy system. True20, in fact, derives from M&M, especially its streamlined combat rules. Unfortunately, I’d like to run a science fiction, fantasy, or horror game with normal-to-heroic humans, while Mutants & Masterminds primarily supports superheroes and thus has way more options than I need. I’d almost have to create a “Mutants & Masterminds Lite” to define what skills, feats, and powers fits the game. (Arguably, this “M&M Lite” is called True20.)

• The Mythic Game Master Emulator uses a system of random tables and scene templates to “emulate” a GM. Players divine what the emulated GM decides by asking questions, estimating probabilities, and rolling percentile dice. New scenes require rolls on a random table, similarly interpreted in context of previous scenes a la the I Ching. Solitaire players love it judging from the Yahoo group, but small groups might try it out if nobody wants to GM, and no member has munchkin or other pathological tendencies.

• In Pendragon, a.k.a. King Arthur Pendragon, players portray generations of Arthurian knights, but two other aspects of its design influenced me greatly. Greg Stafford’s choice to leave out mental characteristics, save for skills, made me reconsider “intelligence” scores in existing games, and presaged the Old School Renaissance’s mantra of challenging the player, not the character. More importantly, Stafford refused to design a “magic system”, arguing that in Arthurian literature magic is rare, mysterious, subtle, and dangerous. That argument, applicable to a lot of pre-D&D fantasy, eventually led me to a preference for low-magic settings and NPC magic that breaks “the rules” yet needs only a sharp mind (or sword) to counter.

• Reign, based on the One Roll Engine, casts player characters as leaders of a small tribe, a conquering army, or an entire kingdom. The group itself has its own attributes, increased or decreased by player actions. Players must tend to the cohesion, loyalty, and power of the group as much, if not more so, than the player characters’ personal fortunes.

• Unknown Armies, a recent acquisition, uses a lightweight percentile system to portray a gritty, dark urban fantasy world. It has three levels of play: “Street”, where (mostly) ordinary folks investigate rumors of an Occult Underground, “World”, where members of the Occult Underground learn the secrets of postmodern magic, and “Cosmic”, where elite Adepts and Avatars battle to shape reality itself.

Our Story Concludes

A man can generate only so many characters before he gets tired. Most other systems are variations on the systems we’ve seen so far, so I don’t see the point in working yet more examples. To summarize the three systems mentioned last time:

• Unisystem uses a d10 + bonuses system, where bonuses are one of six attributes plus one of a number of skills, or double an attribute for a straight attribute roll. All versions use point allocation for attributes, skills, Qualities and Drawbacks, and Metaphysics/Magic/Psi, all from different pools; All Flesh Must Be Eaten and later games provide PC templates, requiring no point juggling at all. Classic Unisystem uses Life Points for damage, Endurance points for fatigue, and Essence points to use supernatural power, while the Cinematic system drops Endurance and Essence for simplicity, defines fewer but broader skills, and adds Drama Points for last-minute saves. Cinematic magic, as featured in the Buffy and Ghosts of Albion RPGs, uses a skill roll against the power level of spells, and time to cast.

• Character generation in Mongoose’s RuneQuest II¹ works a lot like Basic Roleplaying, with different magic systems, mandatory hit locations, and random tables for life events at the end. In play, however, “Combat Maneuvers” – effects the clear winner of a combat exchange can use, like targeting a particular hit location or disarming the opponent – change combat a lot. What in BRP might be a slow grind of hit points becomes a decisive battle when an arrow goes through an opponent’s head. Mongoose’s decision to dole out improvement rolls like experience points requires magic to use one or two skills, instead of one skill per spell. Maybe I’ll do a more in-depth review at a later date.

• Warhammer 3rd Edition² has dropped off my list, after two sessions. Character generation involves picking a race and career card, allocating small numbers to six attributes (why always six?), and picking out skills and talent cards based on career and race. During play, though, there are so many fiddly bits to track: aggressive/conservative stance track, fatigue tokens, stress tokens, wound cards, fortune tokens, not to mention your own character sheet. After a little practice, a player can figure out which dice to roll, but it still requires seven different types of dice; judging probabilities is much harder.

My original point for this series – and I did have one – is to pick on a system for my next campaign. Having run a very short-lived BRP campaign, it’s obvious system is only one factor, but I’d still like to find systems I’m comfortable with, and suited to the genre(s) I might try next.

Analysis

What I run depends heavily on what sort of players I can find, what setting strikes my fancy, and what sort of support the system has for my chosen genre or setting. From the previous five installments, I’ve narrowed the field.

d20 or not d20

For the most part, NOT d20; 3.x is a sprawling mess that I don’t want to tame, and 4e just leaves me cold. If I do anything D&D-related, I’ll go with retro-clones. I’d only consider d20-related derivatives that simplify d20 (e.g. True20, Mutants & Masterminds, or some flavor of Microlite), and only if they had well-developed and interesting settings attached (e.g. Call of Cthulhu d20 or “Iron Heartbreakers” for Microlite 20).

“Rules-Light”

If I’m not going to run The Worlds Most Popular Role Playing Game (TM), I want simple rules I can explain in ten minutes, character generation that takes no more than half an hour, and mechanics that play fast at the table. Most of the games I’ve considered meet those criteria, with Warhammer 3rd edition and many versions of D&D notable exceptions.

I’d also like to say character generation should take no more than half an hour, but that eliminates GURPS, Traveller, and anything but mortal-level New World of Darkness. GURPS I could work around with templates and restricted options, and Traveller arguably builds a history in addition to working out stats. For nWoD, though, I’ve got nothing; it takes as long as it takes.

Granted, players can amortize character generation over the number of sessions that character survives, but new players may not want to make that initial investment. Depending how many players I have, I’d consider building the first characters. In games with random character generation steps, I can roll up enough characters for half again the number of players, and let them choose.

Generic or Specific

An age-old question – well, as old as HERO System, anyway – is whether a game-specific system beats a generic system. A system applicable to multiple genres reduces the learning curve for subsequent campaigns, but a customized system can fit the game’s genre more closely.

Generic systems have proven successful in some areas. Chaosium has adapted its house system to more than a dozen games, a few of them classics, and Mongoose produced a work-alike for their version of RuneQuest. HERO expanded from superheroes to nearly every other genre, even Lucha Libre. Even detractors of GURPS buy their supplements because of the wealth of game-ready information they contain. Savage Worlds has more than half a dozen settings, notably a revised Deadlands and a few set in space.

On the other hand, the d20 boom and bust, coupled with the coming of 4e, demonstrates problems with generic systems. Some makers of d20 settings that didn’t go under converted existing d20-based games to their own systems. Fantasy Flight Games’s Grimm developed its own Linear D6 system, Mongoose moved their Judge Dread and Babylon 5 lines to Traveller, the most recent version of Mutants & Masterminds has moved away from d20 compatibility, and on and on.

Since I’m lazy, I’ll use generic or almost-generic systems if they already support the genre I’m planning to do, or when I can’t find a suitable specific system. That is, if I don’t like existing systems in the same genre, or I can’t find any systems that do what I want, then I’ll have no choice but to cook up something in a more general system.

“Old School”

In a previous installment, I said some harsh things about the “Old School Renaissance”. Most of them I still stand by, but Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing_ opened my eyes. Not only does it resolve the Thief skills issue, it integrates rule improvements from d20. It looks like a game I’d actually play (or run), not a mere exercise in nostalgia like the OSR movement sometimes appears.

To some extent I agree with “Old School” sentiments: players using their brains instead of their dice, conflicts resolved simply and quickly (by GM fiat or dice) instead of hunting through a rulebook for the pre-defined answer, fragile mortal PCs over invincible heroes, and combat as a sometimes unacceptable risk instead of a guaranteed fair fight. I also agree that GMs should improvise actions from die rolls, and avoid adding up every little bonus or penalty. I do part company with them in believing that giving players some control over the narrative adds to the experience, that the old ways aren’t necessarily best, and that skill systems used well can enable richer and more diverse games.

In other words, I’d like to try gaming “old school” … as long as Old School includes not only early D&D but RuneQuest, Traveller, and The Fantasy Trip.

The Strange Case of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3e, after so many interesting hints, proved to have too many fiddly bits for me. Some individual bits I might steal, like using pawns, cards, and tokens to indicate relative positions of characters and scenery, conditions that apply to each PC, lost/remaining hit points, remaining fate/drama points, or reminders of spells and special talents. The stance meter is an interesting mechanic, as is a heterogeneous pool of dice. Throwing them all together in the same game, with recharge tokens, career cards, action cards, talent cards, recharge tokens, ally cards, and the rest, just didn’t work for me.

Just like 4e, a game that requires cards and tokens just to keep track of applicable rules has too many rules. Both games also share an unfortunate “core rules on the installment plan” ethos. whether it’s $30 boxed sets or a $30 Player’s Handbook 2

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e, which I spoke approvingly of earlier, has fewer fiddly bits, albeit more bookkeeping. WFRP2 is heavily wedded to the Warhammer world, not that that’s bad. That does mean my dream of porting my low-magic worlds to WFRP2 would require almost as many lobotomies and grafts as a d20 port.

Great Artists Steal

Even during my unemployment, I’ve learned the value of using published material. I simply can’t write every adventure, since I have at least a few responsibilities. So, rather than labor over some wacky idea that might or might not interest other people, I’ll start with as much existing material as possible, then fill in gaps as needed.

A game system must have a lot of existing support, even if it’s out-of-print but reasonably priced. No support, no chance.

Settings and Systems

So what genres will I try next? Here’s an overlong list of possibilities, with what seem like sensible system choices.

Note that FATE 3.0, PDQ/PDQ Sharp, and Basic Roleplaying (BRP) are my “go-to” systems for any genre, with some customization. Mongoose RuneQuest II (MRQ2) works for most fantasy settings. GURPS is always a possibility, but new players may find character generation daunting.

Dominion of Man

In the far future, humanity is only one of a handful of sapient technological species, and only one of three who has spread across the stars. Interstellar travel, limited to the speed of light or less, proved too much for beings without natural advantages, or mankind’s sheer bloody-mindedness.

The Elders have traveled between stars at sub-light speeds for hundreds of millions of years. They visited Earth twice, once during the late Cretaceous, and took samples; the raptors evolved into a species called the Hydthrik. The second time, they found Cro-Magnon man, and transplanted them onto eleven other planets. Guided by the Elders, who they revered as gods, these humans make up the bulk of the Elder Confederation.

Other sapient species have sent artificial intelligences to explore the universe in their stead. These intelligences found more commonalities between themselves then their creators, and formed what humanity calls the Artificial Sophont Collective, or ASC. AIs from Earth and its colonies joined later. Despite hints of meritocracy, patronage, oligarchy, and a pseudo-caste system based on brain complexity, neither humans nor Elders truly understand the ASC’s organization and politics. That ignorance has proved dangerous; the Confederation had no warning before the Reaver Wars, when a faction of the ASC tried to rid the galaxy of organic life; only the Reavers’ crimes against pro-Confederation factions galvanized the ASC’s neutral majority against the Reavers and their supporters.

The discovery of the faster-than-light Jump Drive in the last few decades allowed other powers to rise:

• The quasi-religious Order of the Adamantine Blade, elite warriors during the Reaver Wars, have bases on or above most populated planets. In the Jump Age they have branched into interstellar finance and, disturbingly, planetary politics.

• The twin planets of Arta-Deheb, ship-builders extraordinaire, acquired the first plans for mass-produced Jump Drives. Arta-Deheb parlayed this advantage into contracts with militaries across the Confederation, and wealth beyond the dreams of Arta’s corporate officers and Deheb’s nobles.

• Despite wars, ecological disasters, AIs, and three different attempts at an interstellar empire, Earth survived. With Jump technology, the Fourth Terran Empire extends its influence to nearby stars.

Other worlds, used to self-sufficiency and isolation, struggle to adapt to a universe where traveling across the stars takes weeks, not centuries. Certainly the Elders, still in their huge sub-light carriers, have slowly retired from stellar society.

Potential Systems:

• Diaspora (FATE 3)
• D6, using some Star Wars material and inspirations from elsewhere.
• GURPS, using Bio-Tech, Ultra-Tech, Starships, Transhuman Space, …
• Mongoose Traveller

Erebus

Erebus is a brutal world of dark sorceries, and the remains of advanced civilizations. Iron age barbarians and decadent empires face the dark sorceries of serpent-men, daemons from other worlds, and mysterious relics left by otherwise unknown Ancients.

Erebus takes more of a kitchen sink approach than other worlds described here. Unlike Telluria (below), Erebus’s history has numerous gaps, and the map consists mostly of wilderness, barbarian territories, and space-filling empires. The world of Erebus resembles Warhammer’s Old World: full of ignorance and distrust, where ordinary folks can’t distinguish “adventurers” from outlaws … or monsters.

Erebus is meant to evoke “old school” games as well as swords & sorcery. Loot-bearing ruins abound. Players may find crashed spaceships, Lovecraftian horrors, mutants, contemporary or historical artifacts, gateways to other worlds, refugees from other worlds, or anything else that takes my fancy. I’ll even consider using some or all Tolkien races, albeit with a different spin: Elves and Dwarves are remnants of an older culture, and primitive Halflings use traps and tunnels to discourage Big Folk from taking their land.

Magic remains rare and untrustworthy, but player characters may use one or more magic systems the game defines.

Potential Systems:

• Basic Roleplaying (Sorcery and/or Magic from the Classic Fantasy supplement)
• Barbarians of Lemuria (Sorcery, Alchemy, and Priestly magic)
• Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role Playing (Cleric and Magic User classes)
• RuneQuest II (Sorcery, Spirit Magic, possibly “Common” Magic as a rare talent)

Princes of Elysium

Inspired by the upcoming Lords of Gossamer and Shadow, I had an idea for an “Amber Lite” setting using the same game rules:

• A custom setting replaces Zelazny’s world. The players have ascended to a place named “Elysium”. The center of Elysium is a sprawling and possibly multidimensional Palace, surrounded by a defensive wall. At the center of the Palace sits an empty throne room, with an enigmatic inscription behind the throne. Other surprises lie in store.

• Every character has Pattern Imprint, renamed “World Walking”. The other available powers are Trump Artistry, renamed “Icon Artistry”, Shape Shifting (not renamed), and advanced versions of each. The powers work more or less like their ADRP counterparts, with references to Pattern, Logrus, Amber, the Courts of Chaos, etc. removed or replaced.

• Characteristics are either Unranked or Ranked (Amber/Elysium level). Conventional wisdom says selling down attributes is a bad idea, anyway.

• Characters bid for attributes as usual, and spend remaining points on items, creatures, and powers besides World Walking. The remainder ends up as “Stuff”, renamed Karma (good, bad, or balanced).

A more advanced version includes Chaos and Mortal attributes, “Portal Walking” (Broken Pattern Walking, again without pattern), “Eldritch Magic” (a new magic system TBD), Personal Shadows, Constructs (from Shadow Knight), and allies in Elysium for non-Elysians.

Antagonists might include Demons from Shadow Knight (Chaos isn’t courtly in my world), Eldritch Horrors, cross-world empires, parasite universes, and other multiverse-level threats.

Potential Systems:

• Amber Diceless Role Playing or Lords of Gossamer and Shadow
• HeroQuest
• RuneQuest II (played on an “epic scale”)

Telluria

Telluria is a world I came up with after reading just a bit of Iron Heroes. While I passed on the system, I did like some of its underlying assumptions and themes:

• Humans only
• Low magic
• Absent gods
• Little if any civilization

Such a world pushed aside the FRPG cliches I had grown to loathe:

• “Races” which supplanted characterizations with cliches: dwarVes are gruff and Scottish, elves are wonderful yet melancholy, halflings are burglars, etc.
• “Kewl powers”, either racial or magical, that automatically solved problems and sometimes short-circuited adventures.
• Worlds with enough magic to create a utopia or a nightmare, yet somehow had medieval peasants and manors from Central Casting.
• Healing magic that makes even death a temporary inconvenience.
• A landscape of surpassing dullness except for surprisingly large and previously unexplored underground complexes conveniently providing puzzles and loot to passing strangers.

“Telluria” itself is a large continent (think Eurasia + Africa) with several regions:

• Cradle of civilization, the Fertile Triangle’s flood plains hosts dozens of independent city-states and the farmlands that sustain them. Each city has its own character, and provides its own sort of adventure: the decadence of Nepesh, the political intrigue of Ur-Kesh, the freaks of Dharesh epitomizing law vs. chaos, and others yet undeveloped.

• At the center of the Theran Sea lie the Theran Islands, whose plutocracy sails far and wide for more loot, and whose smaller islets provide ample mysteries. Along the rim of the Theran Sea, coastal cities of the Fertile Triangle contend against the Theran merchant princes, the Osiran Kingdom labors under the totalitarian rule of its seemingly immortal God-King, and the northern coast of Sarkennia offers trading partners and the threat of a new religion.

• Above the Fertile Triangle lie the barbarian lands: the icy Northlands and their fair-haired raiders, Kymry and its stubborn ginger-haired warriors, and the “Border Kingdoms” between Kymry and the Triangle, whose constant feuds and shifting alliances prevent the election of a High King. Amidst these barbarians stands the unnervingly quiet city of Kaerillus, whose people refuse to speak of its curious history and bizarre landmarks … notably the windowless black basalt tower dominating the center of town.

• Near the mouth of the North Sea that separates the Northlands from Kymry lies Verda, beautiful and terrible realm of the immortal High Elves, whose mortal kin and human serfs work tirelessly so that the fey court of immortals need only attend to their endless and useless intrigues. Some brave humans trade with them, but none risk death or enslavement by venturing past its docks. Even fearless Northlanders avoid its shores, lest the High Elves unleash sorceries only spoken of in whispers.

• South of the Theran Sea lies the Holy Sarkennian Empire. Its leader and prophet unified horse nomads into an army that conquered the entire Sarkennian plain. Its capital, Qutub, once the legendary city of Asterion, now hosts a growing theocratic bureaucracy and the Prophet himself. It’s only a matter of time, everyone says, before the Empire turns its eyes across the sea, and its armies make even more unwilling converts.

• West of the known lands lie forbidding and unexplored territories. West of the Northlands and Kymry stretches the Ghost Lands, scattered forests where, graybeards say, spirits walk in animal form and the primitive tribes have uncanny allies. Below it, threatening the Fertile Triangle and the Border Kingdoms, lie the Goblin Steppes, where misshapen and implacably hostile goblins guard their territories jealously, and raid human settlements when food is scarce. West of the Theran Sea, the Goblin Steppes fade into the Great Desert, deadly to all but a few nomads who know how to avoid its many dangers. South of the desert lie mountains, and beyond them lie savannas and tropical forests surrounding the Sarkennian Plains; these are the Wild Lands, whose dark people, strange beasts, and horrific monsters give even the most fanatical Sarkennians pause.

• Theran merchants and others sail eastward, across the Great Ocean, to explore the Xanthic Archipelago, pathway to fabled Cathay. Northland explorers sail even further northward to frigid Thule, and west through fields of icebergs to find Telluria’s unexplored western shores.

Even if players somehow tire of the adventures in these lands, two thirds of Telluria is yet unexplored, never mind what continents may lie east across the Great Ocean and west beyond unnamed seas.

Unlike Erebus, Telluria should stand as a self-consistent, genre appropriate world. To set the right atmosphere, a Telluria campaign may restrict magic to NPCs, port Barbarians of Lemuria magic to another system, or implement a system similar to d20 Incantations, depending on player opinions.

Potential Systems:

• Barbarians of Lemuria
• Basic Roleplaying (with customized magic systems)
• D6, for a more cinematic take
• GURPS
• Jaws of the Seven Serpents (PDQ)
• Mongoose RuneQuest II (with customized magic systems)
• Savage Worlds

Unnamed Hollow World

I’ve been obsessed with basing a campaign in a hollow world: continents across the “sky”, a central sun, civilizations exploring (and warring against) places only glimpsed overhead. Different alternatives jostle for attention:

1. Sort-of-Hard Science: The world is a cylinder within a sphere, spinning on its axis to simulate gravity. Oceans and continents line the cylinder; visible parts of the sphere present a false sky, becoming “world’s end” mountains at the join. The sun rotates, exposing a dark side (with a moon and stars?) once per day. Its people believe in “magic”, which in reality are conjuring tricks, ultra-technology artifacts, or hacked autonomous systems (climate control, water cycle, etc.).

2. Pulp Science: The world looks like a spherical shell, with flora and fauna drawn to the inner surface, but how it works is a mystery. The dim sun creates a perpetual half-light. There are dinosaurs and lost civilizations; its magic may be flummery, psionics, or some sort of unfathomable super-science.

3. Just Magic: An unknown force pulls all matter toward the sphere and/or away from the sun. Here, some form of magic works: RuneQuest magic, GURPS default magic, something from GURPS Thaumatology, or a port from another system, depending on the cultures I end up with.

Possible cultures include an expansionistic theocratic Solar Empire, a polytheistic feudal region, a looser and stagnant empire combining aspects of Persia and China, and scattered regions of madmen, barbarians, ancient ruins, wastelands, and walking dead.

Systems:

• Basic Roleplaying (with customizations)
• Barbarians of Lemuria
• D6, for a more cinematic take
• GURPS
• Mongoose RuneQuest II (whole or subset)
• PDQ Sharp, possibly with different magic a/o tech

Other Worlds

Other homebrew worlds, less developed, have passed through my mind.

Several published worlds have also caught my eye. I might run them as is or in altered form.

So, Which System Again?

As always, It Depends. I’m leaning towards LotFP:WFRP (Erebus) or BoL (Telluria) at the moment. Diaspora or Traveller (Dominion of Man) are possible if I get tired of fantasy, and I’m always up for anything in BRP, MRQ2, or PDQ. Really, though, it depends on what I can drum up interest in.

If I had free reign, here’s what I would pick:

FATE 3.0

While these articles never really explored FATE 3 (only 2.0), this “new” version handles narrative-driven stories very well. Ordinary actions rely on a character’s Skills. Aspects of the character’s personality and history, and Aspects of the situation, allow “fate” as Fate Points to help or hinder him. Characters also have Stunts, special techniques they can use, but I’m less keen on those. On the Fate Wiki I saw an optional rule that “pins” an Aspect as an on-the-fly stunt for the duration of a scene.

Support for many genres has come out in the past few years: Spirit of the Century, Starblazer Adventures (a British SF anthology comic, not hacked-together anime), Legends of Angleterre (SA for heroic fantasy), Diaspora, and The Dresden Files RPG (finally!), plus some third-party PDF releases adapting the SotC SRD to Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Steampunk. An “official” FATE 3.0 generic book hasn’t come out yet, but it’s easy to find something close to whatever you want to do, and invent the rest.

PDQ and PDQ Sharp

PDQ and PDQ Sharp, as we saw earlier, allow players to convert character concepts to game stats almost trivially. GMs need to think on their feet (or seat), and judge the penumbra of Qualities fairly, but what do the old schoolers say about “rulings, not rules”? The “getting punched in the girlfriend” part of conflict might bother some people – it bothered me early on – and die-hard combat wonks might want a “harder” system. On the other hand, D6 and True20 demonstrate how that system might work.

Genre support includes Dead Inside (urban fantasy/horror), Jaws of the Seven Serpents (swords & sorcery), Questers of the Middle Realms (classic fantasy), Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies (swashbuckling fantasy), Truth & Justice (superheroes), and Vox (mystery/personal horror). Really, though, all a GM needs to do is pick a version (original, Sharp, or a hybrid like Vox or JotSS), add extra mechanics if any, and define what is and isn’t possible in his world. OK, that does sound like a lot of work, but not much more than any other homebrew campaign.

Basic Role-Playing: From RuneQuest 2 to … RuneQuest II?

Fundamentally, the Basic Roleplaying system hasn’t changed in its over 30 years of existence, which says something about its flexibility. Magic systems have changed, combat has changed, individual skills have changed. Mongoose’s version changed a bunch of things, notably magic (again), combat, and experience. Arguably, all that stuff defines a game. However, the basic mechanics of seven stats and percentile skills have changed little since RuneQuest in 1978; everything else is just layers on top of a stable foundation.

Apart from the Gold Book, BRP provides many resources to draw on. Nearly all Chaosium products have used some version of BRP: dozens of Call of Cthulhu adventures and supplements, more recent BRP-based offerings, out-of-print games like Elric!/Stormbringer, Hawkmoon, Corum, and Nephilim. Mongoose’s RuneQuest II is close enough to allow cross-pollination, and the previous edition even more so. MRQ1, released under the OGL, produced a number of supplements and spin-offs, notably OpenQuest from D101 games.

Weird Fantasy Role Playing

In Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft writes:

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain – a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

The writer of Legends of the Flame Princess, James Edward Raggi III, starts his chapter on “Weird” roleplaying with this quote. “Weird”, here, refers not to bizarre or gonzo in the vein of Gamma World, but eerie, disquieting, disturbing, creepy. Weird roleplaying according to Raggi, and weird fiction according to Lovecraft, puts characters in circumstances beyond their experience, beyond their control, beyond explanation, even beyond reason and natural law as they understand it.

LotFP:WFRP retains compatibility with Basic D&D (a.k.a. Classic D&D, BECMI, Rules Cyclopedia), and all its modules and resources from its original publication to the Old School Renaissance. Nevertheless, Raggi’s changes to Classic D&D create a world where foolhardy treasure hunters leave the stifling safety of cities and towns for dangerous ruins of civilizations best forgotten. His variant rules, flavor text, and the largely system-neutral advice in his Referee’s Guide encourages Referees to surprise and shake up their players with the unexpected, unexplained, and unnatural.

To a lesser extent, Barbarians of Lemuria has the same sensibilities: magic is unpredictable and dangerous, ancient ruins hide ancient evils, dark gods threaten to invade reality while kinder deities do only occasional miracles. Its supplement Barbarians of the Apocalypse provides the same treatment for post-apocalyptic games, with more randomness.

Both systems echo my own attitudes towards magic and monsters in RPGs, and I’ll carry those over to games based on other systems. Even the Weird West or places Where No Man Has Gone Before could use a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces”.

GURPS

As I stated at the beginning, I have a perhaps irrational affection for GURPS, and I’d like to run one GURPS-based session for old times’ sake. SJ Games has created some notable settings, like Transhuman Space, Banestorm (their default fantasy world), Infinite Worlds, Atomic Horror, Goblins, and Reign of Steel. (Atomic Horror, Goblins and Reign of Steel have no conversions to 4th Edition, but a general conversion document exists.)

Beyond that, GURPS in its 20+ has amassed a number of well-researched supplements, most now available only as PDFs or leftover books. Since I own a bunch of those, I can use the content – notably tech catalogues and world-books – to fill gaps in other systems. (E.g. BRP still has little science-fiction support.)

ORPSWSS (Other Role-Playing Systems with Well-Supported Settings)

(ORPSWSS sounds something like ORP-suss; use ‘w’ as a Welsh vowel.)

If the above systems prove impractical for some reason, I have a few other systems I can bend to my will:

• D6: cinematic action in any genre
• HeroQuest: any cinematic, narrative-based settings
• Reign: socially-based fantasy
• Traveller: “hard” science fiction, space opera
• Unknown Armies: modern conspiracy, fantasy, or horror

Alternatively, I could use one of their well-supported settings:

• D6: Star Wars
• HeroQuest: Glorantha, Mythic Russia (to some extent)
• Reign: Heluso and Milonda
• New World of Darkness: Hunter, Mage, Changeling, Vampire
• Savage Worlds: Deadlands
• Unisystem: All Flesh Must Be Eaten, C. J. Carella’s Witchcraft, Ghosts of Albion, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel
• Unknown Armies: most of the core book

And finally, Grimm and Pendragon meld setting and system seamlessly enough that I’d use either as is without reservation.

THE END

That’s it. Go home.