Games Night: GHOST/ECHO

Yesterday's games night was great. We played GHOST/ECHO with me GMing, and Patrick taking the role of GRIP, and Steve playing COIL. One minute these characters were just names on the page, and soon they were thieves on a job-gone-bad, armed with origami guns and brain hack knives, stealing information from the Ghost World and running from men and wraiths in a future-China of seemingly endless night...

Wicked Wednesday (Sort Of)

No trip to Yoon-Suin this week: noisms was too busy with work, and then Patrick and David both had to cancel on the hastily arranged In A Wicked Age/Tales From Zero Point one-shot that I proposed.

I'm quite a fan of both In A Wicked Age and our homebrew oracle that we played with the same mechanics, Tales From Zero Point (I've blogged about them here and here before). Plus I like GMing and those have been my only experiences so far.

So it was that yesterday evening I decided to draw the cards anyway for what the story might have been at Zero Point Waystation, the greatest single work of humanity ever, a vast space station adrift in the Oort Cloud, right at the edge of the solar system...

THE ORACLE SAID:
Ace of Spades: An insane Robot tends an ancient mosaic, endlessly renewed.
4 of Hearts: A criminal punished with sentient stasis.
10 of Spades: The foundation stone. A beam of iron drawn from the heart of the Sun. The druid that serves it.
King of Clubs: A militant hegemony virus propagates through the transient population.

Now, I have no idea what Patrick and David would have made of this, but in the ten minutes after I pulled those cards, the following ideas for characters and interests came to me.

The insane Robot who builds the mosaic is not "insane" in human terms, it merely has Asimov circuits and directives that are stuck. I think this would be a good NPC. It used to work for or with the Criminal, a PC, who has been released from millenia of stasis by the Druid, also a PC, who is more of an Engineer-Mystic who tends the deep bowels of Zero Point and worships the central beam of perfect iron at the exact centre of the station.

No-one seems to know where the Virus has come from: perhaps somewhere long forgotten within the station, perhaps from a fragment brought in by a salvage-captain. Maybe it is a weapon sent by the Schwarm-Laden beings from beyond space-time. What is known is that it is organising. It creates a network within the small pockets of sentience within the station, then it spreads. And spreads.

The druid thinks that the criminal might be able to help stop it, and the criminal needs the robot repairing to get it done. It's in the druid's best interests to help the criminal recover and stop the Virus. The criminal wants to escape the station and head for Far-Away Earth, even after all this time. So he'll do what he needs to in order to achieve that. The Robot, for now at least, just wants to perfect the mosaic.

And the Virus... Well, no-one can figure out what It wants...

I'll turn it over to you anyway: given the four prompts from our Oracle up there, what do you see?

Some thoughts on a Time Travel RPG

I've been thinking about how a time travel tabletop RPG for some time now, wondering how it could be put together in a neat way without being burdensome in terms of rules. noisms is responsible for two provocations that started me thinking about it. The first was introducing me to Microscope, which works really well in terms of role-playing and world-building, and which has the neat mechanism of populating a worldline with cards that put things in historical places.

While playing it I thought about how the end result was really neat, but that if you took a picture at the end you might not have a clear picture of the timeline of the player actions (i.e., the order in which the group put things down). A simple way around this would be to just number the cards as they come in to play. That was the first seed which went in to my mind.

The second thing that noisms did was talk about Continuum on his blog:

Part of [what makes Continuum compelling] is all the talk of time-travel combat: trying to "frag" your opponent by making him cease to exist due to historical discrepancy. And undoubtedly, a large part of the attraction was the air of enigma surrounding this apparently excellent but impossible-to-possess gaming grimoire.

But he went on to say that there were plenty of reviews and notes out there from people who had played the game that it inevitably lead to a kind of railroading. Not so much Doctor Who as the Time Tunnel by the sounds of it: instead of exploring the whole of time and space to explore you have to contend with a "mission" at a particular instant. Again, I have not played Continuum, but having played RPGs that have been presented to me more as "story games" the idea of this described game doesn't appeal all that much.

But it did spark a couple of ideas... (continued after cut!)

Wicked Wednesday

Diplomacy - early in life you learned that you sometimes have to compromise to get what you want. You can persuade people through your ability to empathise with them and see things from their perspective.
The strength can't be used in combat.
PCs use for yourself; NPCs use maneuvering.

Aggression-fuelled Psionics - your rage creates psionic turbulence that you can use in combat (or to move things if you are sufficiently angry).
You have to be angry to use your ability, you have to feel rage and the deeper your rage the more terrible your power is.
PCs use with violence; NPCs use action.

Seduce - you have a knack for being able to flirt and persuade members of the opposite (or same) sex; they become compelled to follow your words.
This is a slow ability; you have to take time to do it, be subtle and careful sometimes. You can use it against people who have a negative opinion of you, but you have to know what to say.
PCs use covertly; NPCs use maneuvering.

Third Eye - your training with the Blind Nuns of the Eastern Foothills has developed into the ability to see things that are hidden: you can see the web of connections between people and also objects connected with them that are not in plain sight.
You have to be able to concentrate in order to see things; active combat or other distractions will limit the usefulness of your Third Eye.
PCs use directly; NPCs use maneuvering.

Cognitive Blindspot - you can create a pocket of un-ness to almost make yourself invisible; pockets of negatively charged observance in the people around you limit their ability to be aware of you. You are a ghost, and soon even memory of you will start to fade.
Concentration is key. You must project outwards from yourself. This is an indiscriminate strength, it affects everyone around you when you try to use it.
PCs use covertly; NPCs use self-protection.

Bone Blade - a retractable spike of bone rests in your left arm as a result of a birth abnormality; thirteen inches in length, and razor sharp down one edge, it can be used very effectively in a fight.
This strength can always be used (although you may wish to hide it from others).
PCs use directly; NPCs use action.

Diaspora: Character Generation

There's a running joke in our gaming group that all of my characters are fundamentally the same person: this is perhaps a not uncommon occurence in gaming groups. noisms provides a helpful summary of things that my characters have been involved in (and I follow with a rebuttal of some of them). Given the crazy worlds that my characters are in, their actions seem fairly sane and logical to me!

However, when setting up my character for Diaspora it occured to me that it might be good to steer things from the start so that the character has a different direction, a lifepath that might take things beyond what is typical for my characters. Adding details of this in yesterday's post would have made the post much too long.

I like the way that Diaspora sets up characters; noisms ran it really well, leading us through each part. Essentially, you detail five phases of the character's life up to the present, and from each phase you get two Aspects, defining features, details, locations, weapons or characteristics for the character. We didn't get to any proper play yesterday, but we were told that you essentially invoke these Aspects when relevant in play to help influence the outcome of situations.

So this is what I wrote for my character, Silence Arizona.

Wicked Wednesday

Mind Blast - you transmit thoughts to others when you want to, shocking imagery, horrible ideas, depictions of pain and cruelty.
The power was something that developed through your life; your family, when they were alive, never told you where it came from.
PCs use with violence; NPCs use maneuvering.

Paralyse - the tips of your middle fingers have venomous stingers in the nail bed that extend and retract.
The toxin, if unresisted, can stop a strong healthy person for at least an hour. You're a freak of nature, it has to be said. If unused you have to milk the venom sacs in your palms once a week. After doing so there is a 4 in d6 chance that the toxin is too dilute for 4d6 hours.
PCs use covertly; NPCs use action.

Telekinesis - following an encounter with an otherworldly power you have been gifted with the ability to move things with the power of your mind. Nothing visible occurs around the object you want to move.
A psychological restriction that your mind imposes on itself is that the object moved must be something you could physically lift.
PCs use for themselves; NPCs use action.

Levitate - a blessing from a djinn means that you can rise from the ground, or slow yourself when falling. You cannot truly 'fly' nor can you express this ability on another.
The djinn embedded this power in your dead grandmother's wedding ring; you must be wearing it in order to levitate. You can attempt to levitate in combat to provide a more difficult target for your opponent.
PCs use for themselves; NPCs use action.

Memory Drain - the ancestors of your people were much sought after for their power to remove unwanted or painful memories. You don't know why you have this power, which last appeared in your people generations ago. You have to decide how best to use it, as there is no-one else to teach you.
You must have physical contact with the person whose memories you are trying to remove.
PCs use with love; NPCs use maneuvering.

Mutate - as a defence mechanism you steal DNA from others, splicing it in with your own. Good for hiding/disguise.
1 on d6, nothing happens; 2-5, you start to resemble the other person. 6, you become them, almost twin-like. You need physical contact so that you can extract DNA.
PCs use for themselves; NPCs use self-protection.

Game Idea: Mystery Novel

This is a sketch of an idea: if anyone knows of an already existing game like this then please let me know, I want to play it!

A Microscope/Cluedo hybrid game. Together the players work to simultaneously create and uncover an Agatha Christie style murder. I'm really thinking of the way that information is presented, uncovered and connections made, a little like a Poirot story.

Perhaps the following elements could be used in some way:

• Every turn a player draws a card and Oracle-style this gives a provocation as to a clue or to the investigation. Or random tables could help populate a setting with 1920s/1930s upper class characters with murder in mind, and also introduce other plot elements, objects or artifacts.
• Microscope-style event placing leads to finding out what happened - or what people think they saw happening - with the timeline being populated by only scenes (no events or periods).
• There could be a rough positioning of scenes in to three periods perhaps, "Before the Murder", "During the Murder", "The Investigation."
• One feature of Poirot novels is the fact that he is the only detective (save for Chief Inspector Japp, who invariably has the wrong end of the stick). Perhaps the GM could be the detective - in that sense determining the focus at times to allow the other players reign to be characters, bring to light evidence or lay red herrings.
• Each player could have their own little playbook of random tables that is distinct from the others.
• Rotating GMship could occur between games to allow players to take turns being "the Detective" and being "the Suspects."

I think there is some scope here; my "little grey cells" are working away trying to draw some attention to possibilities, and to make connections between others.