Superhero RPGs

While it is true that the majority of my tabletop RPG (and even computer RPG) experience has been with the classic Dungeons & Dragons, kind of inferred by the title of the blog, I think I have mentioned before that I also play other RPGs. Cyberpunk 2020 (and hopefully Red after it comes out here soon... or recently if this article takes as long to write as most of my others do), Deadlands, dabbled in Rifts/TMNT/Robotech, Shadowrun, MechWarrior... the list, it just keeps going and going. Anyway, for caped superhero, comic book parody, I have turned mostly to Champions. About a year or so ago, I got an itch and built up a backstory for a world, ready to throw my D&D players into a one shot, in case they got bored with my usual hack'n'slash 5e games (or they watched one too many reruns of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, whatever). I had a "brilliant" idea, typed it all out, even did a little map of the state of the world, politically, and patted myself on the back. Thought I had done a real bang up job, and my players would enjoy playing in the world immensely. Until recently.

I have a friend who is big into comics, so much that we have been discussing his plans to open up a comic book store locally, and I realized something about my fantastic little slice of gaming heaven - it is a fantastic story, very much in the vein of many deconstructionist comic books that have been popular in the past couple of years. Watchmen, The Boys, Invincible... that dark and gritty, far more realistic version of caped superheros in the world but have stopped giving one damn about anyone but themselves. Where governments control the superheros and kill any who try to step out of line. Sounds like a fun story, huh? It is, but after thinking it over, I don't know that world is that fun to play a Champions game in. Here, read what I wrote for yourself.



Superhumans begin appearing in WW2, due to population density or a mutation of influenza or the common cold or magic coming back into the world or something, no one is sure what caused it, but the human genome has mutated and superhumans now exist on Earth. The UN is still formed following the end of WW2, also still ended by the dropping of several nuclear weapons on Japan.

Many nations begin enacting legislation to register and track all superhumans, as well as legislation to make punishment in crimes involving superhumans/superhuman abilities more stringent.

In the 1950s, the world is still in a state of shock and disbelief. Germany is whole as it was never split due to being completely overrun by the Soviets, but left out of the Warsaw Pact as the USSR was still trying to consolidate the rest of Eastern Europe and having many problems. As the mutation shows up in every so many hundred thousand(s) people across the globe, China had a very large number of superhumans appear within their population. Enough that China has another Xinhai Revolution after the end of WW2, but this one restores China to a dynastic empire as most of the native superhumans turned out to be classical monarchists instead of hard-core communists. Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and many smaller island nations band together to present a united front against a once more powerful China, calling itself the Pan-Pacific League. Great Britain loses almost all of its colonies, being expelled forcibly from India and the Middle East, and retracting its influence elsewhere due to unpopular views from the locals. The Middle East reorganizes under a Turkey-Saudi Arabian coalition, is still heavily Islamic and calls itself Persia once again. Israel, barely formed after the end of WW2 is not strong enough, militarily or politically, to withstand the formation of Persia and is subsumed, the minority Jewish population being tolerated like many other minorities in Persia, such as the Kurds and other non-Islamic religious or non-Arabic ethnic groups.

By the 1960s, manufacturing and computer technology is on par with the technology we see in our world in the 2000’s, thanks to all the superhuman mutations that resulted in extremely high IQs. The Cold War between the US and the USSR is in full swing, though without their fellow communist brothers in China, the USSR does not have the Koreans nor the Vietnamese to back, so the Vietnam and Korean wars with America don’t occur. Most of the Cold War involves espionage and superhuman conflict throughout Eastern Europe Warsaw Pact countries. After Kennedy tries and fails to base nuclear missiles and superhumans in Persia and Khrushchev tries and fails to do the same in Cuba, the US annexes most of the Caribbean island nations into territories, some through public democratic votes of those nations to join, some through displays of superhuman power, and some through espionage led coups. Many of the non-Warsaw Pact European countries (Germany, France, Italy, and Great Britain, plus many of the smaller western ones) form the European Union, a sharing of economies and military protection. Most of Africa (the non-Islamic/Middle Eastern parts and the countries not touching the Mediterranean) is brought into one new nation called the Zulu Concordant and many European colonists die while the rest are expelled.

The 1970s sees not only the USA landing on the moon, but a USA colony being established, along with visits from the Soviets, the European Union, the Pan-Pacific League and many others, both in rockets and simply superhumans going under their own power. The European Union establishes a GPS satellite network, also backed by the Pan-Pacific League, and most countries have established high bandwidth cellular networks delivering both communication and entertainment. Super lightweight (yet still safe), all electric vehicles have replaced 75% of all road vehicles (both private and commercial) in many nations. The oil crisis doesn’t occur due to a lowering demand for oil and Persia’s economy crashes. The military superpowers (USA/European Union and the Warsaw Pact) begin developing energy weapons and other new battlefield technologies (stealth, sensors, transportation, medicine, training) and the Pan-Pacific League and China (known internally as the Everlasting Empire of the Tian Dynasty) both begin building giant robots (why? because fuck you, that’s why).

The 1980s was a decade filled with war and strife. Focusing more on their conflict with the West, the Soviets fail to notice a Chinese invasion of Siberia until it occurs, but manage to rally enough to drive the Chinese back to pre-invasion borders. The Pan-Pacific League helps out (not to help the Soviets but to get in a lick on the Chinese while they can) by invading southern China and freeing many Chinese holdings in the Malaysian islands as well as Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (but not Tibet, which was their goal). The USA and European Union (now including Canada… I know, right?) do not take a poke at the Soviets, instead consolidating and strengthening their respective borders and using that lack of direct action as huge political leverage after the invasion fails. The China-Russo War drags on 5 long years, and disrupts the world’s economies as every nation spent vast amounts of capital to build up armies to deal with spill over or take advantage of the confusion. Almost every country not directly involved has a flare up afterwards with every one of their neighbors, most subsiding after a short period of time, but some flare ups (particularly in South America) last for the next several years, consisting of low level, low scale conflicts. Medical technology still manages to advance enough to discover cures for most cancers, AIDS, tuberculosis, and many other diseases, though the cure for the common cold did cause a small zombie outbreak, so that cure was locked away.

The 1990s sees many technological advancements entering the civilian sector from the military R&D of the previous decade. The US expands its colony on the moon, the European Union and the USSR also establish colonies, and the US begin building larger satellites and space docks at various Lagrange points in near Earth orbit. The Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe are fully integrated with all internal borders erased, at least to the international community as the USSR cracks down even more and becomes more restrictive on the lives of its citizens. The Soviets also focus their attentions to the east and begin developing Siberia. The rest of the world starts using autonomous, flying vehicles due to the technology explosion during the China-Russo War. Brazil absorbs most of its neighboring South American countries, forming the Império do Brasil while America absorbs Mexico and Central America. Persia’s economy rebounds as they have been using improvements in technology since the late ‘70s to increase irrigation and expand their industrial base (all that oil needed for plastic, and everything is made of plastic) and increase their population. By the end of the decade, the first true AIs are being revealed, scientists are close to developing antigravity technology, and the US sends a manned mission to Mars.

The year is now 2003. The party is either a group of registered superhumans (“capes”, though not many supers wear them these days, never really did, but the iconic Superman from 1938 comics with a flowing red cape stuck) working for the US of A, or they are vigilantes trying to do their part and dodging both the supervillains (who are all big time, because the small fry tended to end up dead over the past 5 decades, instead of in jail) and government tracker teams. Being a cape is like owning a main battle tank - you can be a danger to everyone around you and project death and destruction in a wide radius while being very difficult to bring down in return. The government wants you under their control, or in jail, or dead.



See? That sure sounds like a fantastic story you would like to follow along, but think about running that Champions game - you work for some world government or another, or are running from them all. Are you fighting against the "bad guys" (who may or may not be bad, just not legal in the eyes of the/all government) publicly while working with them in private to change or overthrow the government? Yes, if the whole group is into it and you play a long-term campaign, that would be fantastic fun. But for my intended purpose - a backstory for a possible one shot for my group of some comic book nerds and the rest that are only tangentially interested in comic books because of the MCU - not so much. Ah well, I'll hold onto it for now, and if we do decide to play a one shot, I'll pick whatever sub-genre interests the players most (I like Iron Age personally) and we'll go from there. Hey look, Champions 5th and 6th Editions put out a setting book. That problem solved itself.

Confessions of a Tabletop Wargamer

I have a confession to make, or at least feel like I do - I have not always been a tabletop roleplayer. No, it started in high school with a fascination for a little game involving heavily armed, giant robots called BattleTech. At my second college (don't ask), in between games of Cyberpunk 2020, Rifts, D&D of course, and live action Vampire the Masquerade (again, don't ask) that I got introduced to Warhammer Fantasy Battles (WHFB) and Warhammer 40,000 (WH40K), and all of their convoluted offspring. Later, around the time 3e came out, we were playing Champions, 2nd Edition AD&D, and spicing things up with a pretty intense club league of Necromunda and some WHFB pickup games. After that, having no RP group (unless you count the SCA, which I admit has many RP fans in it, but I don't believe it to be a LARP like others do) for a long while, I got back into WHFB and burnt out on the then new rules (which they have since updated, I think twice), and also similarly played and lost interest in WH40K. Finally, having moved another two times and finally retiring from the SCA, I found myself getting into Flames of War (FoW) and Team Yankee (TY) while still not having found a good opportunity to join an RP group. I did, eventually, and now DM that group in 5e weekly.

There you have it, the dirty, dirty secret is out - I also play tabletop wargames, not just tabletop RPGs. Enjoy, folks!

Okay, fine. That confession is just not that shocking, and never really was. The first RPG, the venerable Dungeons & Dragons itself, grew out of a medieval fantasy wargame by the name of Chainmail. Many D&D players to this day play both RPGs and wargames, and vice versa. Hell, four out of my six current players I met through FoW and TY, and is how I got invited into the group in the first place. Sorry folks, the whole "confession" thing I just did was a scam and not very original or shocking, but maybe it got you to click and read.

What started me down this road is the return of a friend of mine, freshly back from a little vacation overseas we in the military like to call a "deployment". He is the one who got me into FoW and TY in the first place, and now that he is back to civilization (insert 3rd world country joke here), he wants some time killers and life distractions. Plus, I have some decidedly odd rules in my current 5e game that spring from wargaming, and I have an itch to start up another project that is also wargaming related. Before I get into this, I want to reaffirm that the game I am running is MY game, not your game, and you can run your game however you see fit. Please leave my game alone.

Shortly after Chainmail morphed into D&D, that game lost most, if not all, of its wargaming flair. This was mostly due to lack of affordable miniatures, and it was easier for TSR and their competitors to sell you rules that didn't rely a lot on miniatures (or contain costly minis that would have turned away many potential players), let that be an option that you could pursue. Or not. Usually not. I don't think I ever really played D&D like a miniatures wargame, even with my past experience, until 3e came out. This was also about the time that internet sales really became a thing, and suddenly we had access to a lot of affordable minis and the rules to really get good use out of them.

That is not to say that there has been no works to turn D&D back into a miniatures wargame, from abstract, map based large scale conflicts (AD&D's Battlesystem boxed set) down to resurrecting the Chainmail name and style of combat to a pure small unit sized skirmish game. These efforts have come from within WotC/TSR as well as from 3rd party developers. Even in 5th edition, the WotC editors have released a Mass Combat Unearthed Arcana and Matt Colville put a set of simplified wargame rules in his Strongholds and Followers book. There are many attempts out there to turn the game at least a little more wargame friendly than it has been in a long time. Do not mistake me, though - if you are not a wargamer yourself, most of the modern options will work for you, if you want to add a dash of large scale conflict in your game. I do not find them attractive, because I am a snob and want complicated (at least compared to the aforementioned Mass Combat rules in Unearthed Arcana and not, say, The Campaign for North Africa) and much more nuanced and granular.

Options for the wargaming-minded DM are not limitless, but you do have some choices. The already mentioned WHFB is a good choice as it has free basic rules with many free army lists covering most of your standard fantasy races. The downside is that WHFB has its own special flavor that was made, quite on purpose, to be distinct from D&D, even though that is where the company who makes it, Games Workshop, got their start. Still worth a look, if for nothing else you are more likely to find other WHFB players in your area if you want to play it as intended. The other major player is Kings of War (KoW) by Mantic Games, and a strong contender, at least in my eyes. Again, free rules and army lists to download, but a far more generic feel to the game, which I think will let you mold it as you want to fit your campaign setting. I could be wrong, and maybe WHFB would work better for my (and your) needs than KoW, but I am not really worried about that now, more of a thought experiment at this point. And there are other rule sets out there, mostly historical skirmish to battle simulators, but none of those have magic inherent to them, which is very important to keep true to the flavor of D&D. Seriously, I have been working off and on for years to turn SM Stirling's Emberverse novels into an RPG, and to get something that low magic, D&D just does not work and I have had to turn to other systems to build it up from. But that is a series of posts for another day, suffice it to say that part of the very fabric of D&D is magic and it is inherent in every class and most of the races.

That is just the large battles that D&D doesn't currently handle well, though, and while they are nice distractions, should not really be the main focus of the game. If they were, you should just play the wargame and say you are breaking up the monotony with D&D and not worry too much about it. But D&D's issue with large combats doesn't end there, it's baked into the combat mechanics on the small scale - 5 foot squares are just too big. Yes, I get how easy it is to calculate everything when it is being divided by 5, but honestly, 5 feet by 5 feet is an overly large volume of space. I had thought about making a grid of 5 foot squares up and asking the local boffer LARP folks to stand in them so I could show you how big, but it would have been too big a waste of time and PVC pipe, so let's just lay down some numbers, see if you can track. A 5 foot squares is 25 square feet. Are you telling me that in 25 square feet, you can fit one and only one person and they take up that entire area? How about a 10 foot wide hall, that only 2 people walking side by side fill that entire hall? And how bad does it look, once you realize the implications of how big your grid squares are representing, to see one 28mm miniature just filling that space? I'm not buying it, which is why I switched my game to 3 foot squares. Much more realistic to get 3 people abreast in a 10 foot hallway, and much more believable to see just one person on 9 square feet of area as opposed to hanging out alone in 25 square feet. Not only that, but gives your players a bit more maneuver room - say you have a 15 foot squares area that the fight is happening in, if you are doing 5 foot sqaures that is a mere 9 squares to maneuver in, and basically one medium creature or bigger in the middle square touches everything else. But if you are doing 3 foot squares, that same area gives 25 squares to play in, and unless something is really big or has Reach, they're not dominating the whole board.

The downside, of course, beyond all of the little rules in the book you have to change (and I have... for the most part), you are also losing real estate on the board. By using the same inch of grid to represent less physical space, you suddenly have to have a lot more inches on your board to adequately represent the same area. If you have a giant board or playing area, no big deal, but my current board - a hunk of Plexiglas with some poster board behind it marked in a one inch grid - looks big and impressive, but already my players who are barely 10th level can cast spells that either can range off the grid or pretty much cover it entirely. I have a bigger one in the works, roughly 5 feet by 3 feet, but that still only gets me 60 squares by 36 squares. Still a decent sized play area, but still not quite enough real estate for what I would really like to do - grand sweeping battles involving tens of combatants at the party level, and then sprinkle in army level battles (most likely using the KoW rules) with hundreds on each side when it is appropriate. My new project, which I will be completely honest and say that this may never happen, but is at least worth pursuing over the long term and when other projects get wrapped up, is to convert my game from the traditional 28mm scale miniatures and terrain and 1 inch square equals 3 feet square, to a very much non-traditional 15mm scale for miniatures and terrain and 1/2 inch square equals 3 feet square. Wow, that was a long, complicated sentence, let us bask in the glow of it for a second.

Upsides - smaller minis means far more room on the same patch of real estate (the 5'x3' table I was talking about earlier goes from 60 by 36 squares, or 180 feet by 108 feet in game terms, to a whopping 120 by 72 squares, or 360 feet by 216 feet inside the game - still not enough to fit an entire castle on the board, but more than before); and minis are far more cheap.. ahem, affordable than their 28mm companions, plus being easier to store more of them. Downsides - it is harder to paint smaller figures, the table is not as dynamic and attention grabbing at that scale, it is harder to distinguish differences between the minis at that scale, and the minis, being non-traditional, are harder to find. Not to mention I have printed (paper ones, working mostly on terrain with my 3d printer at this point, but that may change) quite a lot of monsters and NPCs in 28mm, and it is going to be a pain and time/money consuming to replace it all in 15mm. The big problem with that isn't the printing (shrink it by half, 15mm is very close to half the size of 28mm, I'm not going to quibble over a few percent), but finding cheap, plentiful weights to replace the coins used in the full size ones. Oh, and I will also have to shrink all the terrain I've been 3d printing, but again, half the size and call it good. Yup, that's a lot of downsides for apparently few upsides. Ah well, everyone's gotta have something to do with their spare time and money. And if I was far more serious and deep into this project, I would put in a picture, or even series of pictures, showing what 28mm vs 15mm miniatures looks like and board sizes of what I was talking about earlier. But I'm a lazy schlub who hasn't started gathering in minis much less painting them up, so it is hard to show what I do not have yet.

Look, I can steal one from the internet! 28mm on the right, 15mm on the left.

Now I know at least one of you in the audience is wondering that if I wanted so much space and showing so much willingness to throw tradition out on its head, why stop at 15mm, why not go to 6mm? Or even 3mm? Think of the huge combats you can have at those scales! Admittedly, I am currently building armies for Team Yankee in 6mm, a wargame normally played in 15mm scale, but where the focus of that game is very large military vehicles (please see the picture below to see how big a modern main battle tank is compared to a 6' human), and stands of infantry are not single people on a stand but multiple soldiers, usually with large weapon systems, so 6mm is not all that bad.

Main battle tanks are big things, who knew?

I would show you pictures of 6mm Team Yankee vs 15mm, but let me instead share this blog post that goes into detail and has pictures and everything. You know, professional. Anyway, 6mm works better for that game, where vehicles and multiple members of a squad or a weapons team are the focus of the game, and so are still distinguishable at that scale and not too small. But where the focus is single, vaguely human-sized beings, like in D&D and even large armies of man-sized beings like in WHFB/KoW, 6mm is just too small. You can't distinguish individual characters (is that an elf? or a halfling? or an orc? oh, wait, it's a blink dog, sorry, had to get out the magnifying glass) and painting? I know, I am the world's laziest miniatures wargamer who loves playing and hates painting and gluing, but painting 6mm minis vs 15mm minis (at least in what I consider is good enough for D&D versus a wargame where everyone is mostly wearing camouflage to literally blend in with their surroundings and individual soldiers don't have names or backstories) is just making it too difficult for my tastes.

Comparisons of a variety of scales. Do you see how small 6mm is?

Enough of my meandering. I am definitely not jumping on the 15mm bandwagon (or, creating it, as it doesn't look like many of my contemporaries are doing it) (okay, there are a few who have talked about it or done it: here, here, and here, just to name a few, so I am definitely not the first with this idea) quite yet, I still have a majority of 28mm stuff - some miniatures, a ton of Rich Burlew's excellent A Monster for Every Season paper minis, terrain that I have 3d printed, and plexiglas'd grids that I can dry erase marker all over. I do want to add some more larger scale battle rules into my game in the short term. Don't worry, I'll be back posting more on this as things develop.

West Marches, The New Hotness

Ah, the West Marches campaign, the new "hawtness" in D&D circles. Okay, not exactly new, considering Ben Robbins (the primogenitor of West Marches) posted about it over 12 years ago and actually created it and ran the first West Marches many years before that. And even I only heard about it from Matt Colville only two years ago (yes, with everyone else who is talking about it, don't fool yourself into thinking you heard about it any sooner), so it is not all that new of an idea. What? You have not heard of a West Marches style campaign? Fine, I will let Master Colville explain it, mostly because I want an excuse to watch the video again myself.

This post is more me letting my brain run wild and putting it down somewhere, than it is me discussing the history of the West Marches phenomenon and what others are doing with/to it. More so than usual, so bear with me please. A little (more) history first. See how I taunt you by saying I'm not going to talk history and then turn around and talk history?

A West Marches campaign is built on a few fundamentals - there are a lot of players, it is a sandbox game, focused on exploration with no over-arching storyline, and focused less on roleplaying and more on discovery and combat. The focus is not on the politics and intrigue back in whatever chunk of civilization the players use as their home base and safe area, though there is some but all internal to the players, but on the wilderness outside of civilization. The exploration of said wilderness, the conquering of it, the mapping out of it by the players, them finding all the fun rocks to turn over and find all the creepy crawlies underneath. As such, since I am pretty much stuck with 5e for reasons I have gone into detail about before, I need to introduce some rules into 5e that it is sorely lacking.

First off, exploration. Wizards of the Coast and TSR before them both claimed D&D existed around three pillars - combat (fighting really cool monsters), social (talking with really cool monsters), and exploration (finding new, barely rumored really cool monsters). The latest edition of 5e, as I have written about before, has combat down. Most of the core books you get from WotC are about combat, far more than any other topic. They do also talk a bit about the social and exploration portions of the game, but these suffer because they are boring and/or tedious things that aren't flashy like combat, so they get mentioned in passing, at best. Exploration really suffers because at least with social encounters you can award XP to the players based on the CR of the monsters/NPCs they talked out of the party's way, but it's hard to judge the CR of a ruined keep in a vast wilderness the party managed to locate based only on a few rumors they heard at the local tavern (Ye Olde Inne of the Golden Arches). I think I have a solution for it, one that makes it fairly easy to implement and also level appropriate for any party - take the average level of the party that made the discovery, and reward them for conquering that CR of monster. Simple. This is necessary because part of a West Marches campaign is going out there and finding out what lies in the vast unknown wilderness, tracking down the rumors of the lost treasure, the orc horde gathering itself to go fight the giants, or the undying necromancer building up his power to cross the line into lich-hood. Pretty much the basis of a West Marches game is giving the players a blank map and a handful of rumors and seeing what they do with them, and while that is entertaining for the DM, the players won't know they are doing what they need to unless you reward them in a tangible fashion. Well, okay, not so much, but giving the players XP for things you want them to do makes them want to do it as well.

Have to beef up the exploration rules as well, not to mention travel times and tracking supplies and encumbrance. And have to take into account that exploration also means searching locations for secrets or clues, not just finding said locations based on vague directions. I am not doing this from scratch, as I have run across some interesting exploration rules from the Angry GM (a couple of times, in fact) that I have been itching to inflict on some players to see how well they work. And in the last few episodes of the Digressions & Dragons podcast he shared with Fiddleback, they also talked about how to improve searching locations that have got me thinking along those lines as well. At least, my brain is telling me they did, but that podcast ended a while back, and I can't find the episode or episodes that my brain tells me exist.

This is all important to a West Marches campaign, of course, maintaining that feeling of awe and discovery for the players, so that they keep diving back into the great unknown. And the rest of it, the tracking of travel times and encumbrance and how much rations everyone brought with them is also important, as the West Marches is more about a feeling of realism and grittiness, at least as far as a game about slaying fire breathing, giant, flying lizards with magical talking swords and wizards who break every physical law we currently understand can be thought of as "real". Why? West Marches is D&D on a harder mode than what you get in the vanilla game. This is not level appropriate encounter after level appropriate encounter, this is watching the players possibly walking into a fight they cannot win and seeing if they are smart enough to run the fizzock away. Part of creating that reality is stressed other than the immediate, stresses like thirst and hunger, stresses of finding more gold and plunder than the party could possibly carry and watching their greed overcome them or they overcoming it, and stresses like getting lost in the wilderness or still trying to fight that unbeatable foe. 

Another aspect of the exploration game that I think is important is the finding of loot. Again, this is a very low magic setting, and magic items should be few and far between (and in the hands of the monsters and being used against the PCs instead of mouldering in some rotting box). Not only are magic items hard to find, but loot and treasure is also scarce. Oh sure, your iconic hoarde sitters, dragons and whatnot will have lots of currency and jewels, but your common monsters that are basically living a subsistence lifestyle have no use for coinage they can't eat. However, the treasure hoards do exist and present their own challenges when found - how do you carry/transport thousands of a thing when it only takes 10 of them to make a pound? When you get back to town and dump said thousands of coins on the local economy, what do you do when suddenly everything costs 100 times more due to explosive inflation? The small group that found it is fine, but what about the other adventurers, the ones who have not found their hoard yet? Yes, I like a little more realism in my fantasy, but I also admit to being an asshole when it suits me, as other people's pain is funny.

Second up is social. Yes, we are still counting things that are important to a West Marches campaign, but wander wildly off the tracks as we go, you will just have to keep up as best you can. Social encounters. Again, a West Marches campaign is not about the intrigue and political maneuvering back in civilization, but about exploring out in the wilderness. That does not mean you cannot let your players talk their way into staying with a tribe of hobgoblins who they overhear are planning on attacking their orc neighbors, and then the party decides to run and sell that info to a nearby band of ogres, either just for the cash or for the laugh riot of watching both the hobgoblins and the orcs get screwed over by the ogres who sell their services to both sides, but provide them to neither. Yes, that is a long, run on sentence, sorry, but the things I see possible in this game just come pouring out from time to time. You have to establish early that talking with the monsters is an option, and from time to time a good idea. You can encourage this by not following the classic slow buildup of monster CR like your classic campaign design tends to call for (more on this in moment), or by straight up offering it as a suggested course of action to the newer players. However you do it, offer them multiple avenues of approach to every group they encounter, from fight it, to sneak past it, to talk to it, to bribe it to go away, and even to join its fight against something else. You never know what you'll see your players doing.

Still, the original and many of the follow on West Marches games have ignored social encounters entirely, but I don't want to do that. I want to have a list of all the political groups in the wastelands and how they feel about each other and where they are going next if they are not staying exactly where they are now. It doesn't have to be high intrigue, that plan within a plan within a plan you see in things like Frank Herbert's original Dune books, just enough to feel like a slice of reality and to keep the players interested. And maybe I will make my list and not one of my hypothetical players will ever do anything more than immediately kill all the monsters they encounter. That too is fine, at least they had the option to do something more.

Third and last, combat. You can take a look at my article on wargaming (which I'm typing at the same time I'm typing this one, so it could be out already, or it will be out at some point in the near future) and either you've read it or you have not. For me, I like big battles with lots of room to maneuver and lots of terrain bits to play around. I like gridded combat, and deciding tactics with the rest of the party. And I like seeing the party push themselves to the limits of their resources to either succeed grandly or die horribly. In short, I want to see more social and exploration from a West Marches game, but I freely admit to being a combat monkey at heart.

Your normal D&D game slowly ramps up the challenge, to kind of match the PCs' abilities and skills, but with a sandbox style open world setting like the West Marches, the best you can do is try not to put too many very high level monsters anywhere near town. The best approach seems to be layering the challenges in zones that steadily increase as you go further from town. As there is nothing stopping the party from pushing directly through stuff they can handle and dive right into stuff they cannot handle, the PCs will still have to be ready to recognize they are in a bad situation, which will come, and know it is time to "yalla yalla imshee" back out of the situation. Again, you try your best and let the players make whatever bed they are going to sleep in.

One of the tricks that Ben Robbins used in the original campaign was to not only put challenges in front of the players, but also layer challenges vertically. Many of his dungeons were multilevel affairs, with secret or inobvious entrances (that wasn't an easily found and avoided pit trap, it was a way down to the next level, stairs or ladder not provided) that were put there for players to come back and discover later (exploration, again) when they were a bit more experienced. His world was layered like an onion (or a cake, pick your favorite metaphor and run with it), and the players needed to slowly peel it away. So why is this in the combat section and not the exploration section, you may be wondering? While it is about exploration, it is more about fighting, conquering the enemy while not becoming overwhelmed yourself. The layering, the multiple dungeons one atop another has always fascinated me, and I have even added it into my own game, though I skip the subtleness and go straight to "it's an apparently bottomless pit, but if you listen real close you can hear voices... what are they saying? I don't know, which one of you speaks Undercommon?" My players still haven't taken the bait, but I'm keeping them in mind when the group needs a bit of an XP boost and a side quest.

Anyway, back to combat. Tactical combat is the name of the game, and be brutal with it. Most West Marches games tend to have a lot of players in them, make surviving with a particular PC a hallmark, something to be awarded or at least a spotlight shone on when it happens. If you have read my Confessions of a Wargamer, you will know I play mostly gridded combat, and am even attempting to change my D&D campaign to 15mm scale down from 28mm scale, and if that happens, I would transfer that right over to a West Marches campaign - can't get much bigger in the combat department than using a scale that doubles your play area. And because this style of game tends to attract many players old and new, the lower cost of the scale is appreciated by both players and the DM(s).

The other important aspect of a West Marches campaign and combat is that this is far more OSR - Old School Revolution, or something like that, basically a return to very early D&D gameplay - than it is modern tabletop RPG, with their fancy plots and character arcs and personal development. This is down and dirty, explore the wilderness, conquer the wilderness, and loot what little you can find in the wilderness. Combat is a huge part of this style of game, make sure it doesn't suck. Keep it moving fast, make the monsters smart and deadly, and don't be afraid to kill PCs. This is why so many West Marches campaigns have large numbers of players, and also why they are allowed to roll new PCs if they do lose one.

That is all for now. In the next post I will talk about the things I would do specifically to run a West Marches campaign, rules, organization, that kind of thing. Enjoy, and see you next time around.

They're Making a New Cyberpunk RPG

I know! The whole site is mostly D&D focused - if you have not figured it out, Truncheons and Flagons is a play on the sound of Dungeons and Dragons... and if you have not figured it out by now, welcome to the site for your first post. D&D is the first RPG I ever played, just like the majority of people who play RPGS, which is no surprise, but is by far not my only interest when it comes to RPGs. For sci-fi flavored games, I currently prefer Planet Mercenary which is based on Howard Tayler's excellent Schlock Mercenary webcomic. For Western/steampunk games, I prefer Deadlands, and not the d20 based version of that game, but the original version. For comic book-like superhero games, I like Champions the most. And when it comes to dystopic sci-fi noir, Cyberpunk 2020 is my jam. Oh, I started in Shadowrun, as most did because I think they had better advertising and was more kid friendly, but found I liked the cyberpunk nature of the setting, though I could do without the fantasy elements inherent to it. In fact, I like CP2020 so much that out of all the RPGs and tabletop wargames that I have purchased books on over the years, I have sold most of them, but the CP2020 books I have kept the longest. And quite a large collection it is, though not complete but nearly so.

Cyberpunk, as a genre of fiction, began with the publication of Neuromancer by William Gibson... you know what, this podcast episode came out recently that describes the history of cyberpunk better than I can off the top of my head. If you are not familiar with the fantastic podcast GM Word of the Week, well, shame on you. Either way, please go listen to their episode on the word Punk, and come back afterwards.

Glory in my collection while you listen to GM Word of the Week.

Back? Good. As the title of the post suggests, they are making a new edition of Cyberpunk 2020, called Cyberpunk Red. This will be the, um, hang on a second, let me make sure I get this right. The first in the series was actually Cyberpunk 2013, then CP2020, followed by Cybergeneration, then Cyberpunk 2030, also known as v3, and now Cyberpunk Red. All have used pretty much the same system, so it's been less of a massive rewrite/revision of the previous edition so much as each is a slight tweak and update to the rules, while making major changes to the setting and events, and Cyberpunk Red promises much of the same.

If you are wondering whether or not CP2020 is for you, let me do a little explaining. Combat in CP2020 is deadly dangerous in combat, as it was based on FBI and police data on gunfights and the resultant gunshot wounds. There are also no classes in CP2020 like there is in D&D, the baseline for these types of things. You can create a character with a hint of this and a dash of that, though usually most players tend to focus on one thing and fill in their gaps with other player characters. Not quite as exciting, but it is definitely a different kind of progression system than most roleplayers are used to, very much functional but nothing like D&D. The world setting itself is about as messed up as you can envision it, high tech opposed by world dystopia, where governments have mostly crumbled and corporations pretty much run everything when they are not busy squabbling amongst themselves. And there you sit, at the edges of everything and struggle to get what you can from the leftovers and crumbs of bigger fish than you. Makes me all tingly just thinking about it.

Sadly, that is about all I have to say about that, at the moment. I have been very excited by the news of Cyberpunk 2077 the videogame coming out, as there has been several good Shadowrun games in the past (the first was on the Sega Genesis, imagine how long ago that was) but never really a good CP2020 related game until now. And now I am excited to see them updating to the new Red ruleset.  Why even bother with this, then? In the leadup to Red coming out (in like two weeks, I know, but it'll be months before I pick it up and maybe even longer before I get to play it), I wanted to share some of the things I did in CP2020 back when I was playing it regularly. It will help me get ready for the new rules and world setting. Mostly the world setting, as rules are rules and all, but the feel of the world and all of the conflict points exist that are the important bits. Funny, I know, since I talk more about 5e's rules more than I talk about the setting, but that's because my 5e game setting was made by me. Kind of pointless to make it and not like it, now isn't it?

In addition to all of that, I am looking forward to seeing what Red has to offer. The last campaign of CP2020 I ran, well before the era of handheld computers disguised as cell phones (ie: smart phones, or, The Thing I Have Used to Type Much of This Post), and still did a lot of tweaking to the Netrunner class to make it not boring, and Red seems to have improved on it in a similar fashion. In fact, most of the changes I made in that game to Netrunners almost 2 decades ago, a thing I called "Netrunner magic", I made up mostly on the fly. Just last year I started codifying some of those changes, put my thoughts down in a document just so I could make them more solid. It is an odd coincidence that Master Mike Pondsmith has beat me to that punch, but one I am glad to see. Admittedly, what we're seeing in the early reports for Red is not exactly what I was doing but still SSSOOOO much better than what netrunning was in CP2020. Oh, and I was calling it "Netrunner magic" because the base purpose is to make the Netrunner more like a D&D wizard - instead of boring, drawn out deep dives of a nearby computer, make using programs like casting spells. The Netrunner describes their desired results - open the security door - and instead of hunting through the corp's mainframe for the security node, fighting or fleeing from ICE the whole way, the computer system makes a save versus the Netrunner's skill, and if the save fails, the security door opens. The cameras turn off, or start feeding into the 'runner's cortex so he can see what they see. The alarm stops sounding. The auto-defenses turn on the guards. All outside communication gets shut down. And so on. Make it fast, make it snappy, and keep the 'runners in the game with the rest of the players.

Okay, I am going to call that good for now. More updates as I think about this stuff. And after today's 5e session, I may be running them through a one shot, just to see if they like it. These posts may be coming more frequently.

Lessons Learned 21

The players stumbled into the final dungeon, weary from the long fight and ready to get this over with. They drove deeper and deeper into the complex, trying to clear as many rooms as they could and finish it on as few long rests as possible. Little did they know that the bad guys are focused on their days long summoning and won't chase them outside of the complex. No, not very original, nor is it realistic, but without bringing their own army to invest the walls and protect the party in between forays, there wasn't much else to do, so the original campaign's creators did the best they could. Inside the dungeon, very not safe; at the same time, outside the dungeon, minus the hag's power to attack at least one party member in their dreams with impunity, safe. My party still decided to try a short rest and got at least the benefits of the short rest, before they left their hidey hole and ran into an ambush. It was not too bad, though I was hoping for a worse result, actually convince them to leave the dungeon and try again tomorrow. Alas, all they did was drive further in.

Of course, not clearing all the rooms in the front portion of the dungeon just means they have bypassed the night hag, and if they get to the final battle of the dungeon with the hag still alive, that just means she escapes and continues to haunt the party. The end of this dungeon already contains a fight the party would be wise to run away from, which means they will already be hunted by one powerful being that they will have to deal with before going on to the next campaign. Oh well, they made the choice to charge forward instead of securing their flank or exit, and I'm not here to correct their tactical blunders. Of course, one thing that has been written into the adventure is that there are only so many roaming patrols and the BBEG at the heart of the adventure can replenish some of these every time the party takes a long rest, plus throw some more monsters into one of the rooms that has already been cleared out. By not taking a long rest, the party has for now short circuited that challenge out of their way. We shall see if that will work for them or against them in the long term.

The party finally hit the wall in tonight's session, going just a little too thin to try and finish the dungeon with only one short rest to tide them over, and teetered on the brink of complete failure and Total Party Kill (TPK). They saved themselves in the end, and forcemarched out of the dungeon and moved away from it, hoping they could distance themselves from whatever had haunted the druid's dreams. Unfortunately for them, that particular ability of the night hag has no range, just so long as they are on the same plane can she still affect the party. And she did, this time bringing the paladin's rest to a screeching ruin. More on this in a moment.

The paladin has received 2 cursed items, one which was intelligent and nasty, and the current one which just makes him far more violent and angry than usual (he is an Oath of Vengeance paladin, after all). The ranger is so worried that when the published adventure I am running finally gives him some  magic items meant specifically for him, he goes all cautious and doesn't want to attune to them. Nope, sorry, just plain old magic items, no curses on these, but it is nice to watch him squirm.

Back to the night hag. While I could not convince the party to go looking for the hag on the way out, I did manage to pique their interest on the way back in, and she got them to come pretty close with a shape change that made her look like a sacrificial victim. Still, the party did almost half the hag's HP with the first PC to go, so she left when it was her turn shortly after. Hags are not meant to be close combat monkeys, more suited to working from the shadows, so when she had the chance to run, she took it. Plane shift and she was gone, which explains why her nightmare power only works on the same plane as her target. This will be fun, as even though the wizard managed to track her to the Shadowfell, there is no way they are following or keeping her from eventually returning to the Material plane to cause more trouble. I have been looking for things to fill the gap between the end of this campaign arc and the start of the next one, and this will fill at least some of that nicely.