Zombies Off Into The Sunset

Our last zombie game was this week. We basically tied up loose ends. The PCs saved a bucket-load of people being held captive in a concentration camp/refugee camp. (Ok a bucket load means like 7 people. Still more than they saved all campaign long).

They then sailed off toward the Pacific Ocean, in two boats. Due to scheduling changes this will be it, for awhile.

But, if we were continuing where could I head this? The PCs are basically the leaders of a community (20 people!). Would they fight for that community? What can threaten that community? There’s zombies, rednecks and the government has gone off the deep end. I’m sure there’s pirates on the high seas. Internally, things are split between two boats, which would make for a good dynamic. One boat has all the supplies. That’s covetable. Maybe someone on the inside wants to take the group over.

As far as systems, AFMBE is out. I’ll probably transition to GURPS or Cthulhu D20.

Under the Dying Blood Sun

And now this.

PCs are decadent nobles of a dying empire, trying to hold back the encroaching forces of barbarism a billion years into the future.

This is the World of the Blood Sun.

Right now, this is more of a brainstorm than a proper setting. My impulse here is a D&D that dispenses with all the D&D-isms. No elves, no dwarves, no halflings. Less medieval romance and more weird fiction/science fantasy. Equal mixes of Zothique & New Sun & Dark Sun & Carcosa & Zardoz & Moorcock & Heavy Metal magazine (Metal Hurlant, whatever) with a set-up right out of the fall of the Roman Empire.

So here’s some of the random stuff:

Dying Blood Sun: the sun is a massive red giant that takes up a quarter of the sky. It bathes the landscape in a dimmer reddish light. The light’s interaction with the strange gases in the atmosphere causes a multi-hued sky, wisps of purple, fluorescent green, and red. You can actually look at the sun in the sky without blinding yourself. Further more, in the portion of the sky opposite the sun the stars are visible in the day time.

A lot less green in the world, since chloroplasts can now make plants a dizzying array of colors. And to soak in the dimmer light, plant life has grown to dinosaurian proportions. Flowers as tall as trees, knee-high lichens, long thin trees that reach out into space sorta thing. There’s probably a lot less trees, actually, with flowers being the dominant life. And with them come Nausicca of the Valley of the Wind sized insects.

The sun is so dominant in the sky, that organized religions are ruled by priest-king heliomancers who study it’s landscape for occult significance and patterns.

The temperature wildly fluctuates, with the seas going from boiling to frozen depending on solar storms and flares.

Post-historical: Between now and a billion years in the future a lot can happen. This world at the end of Earth inherits all that came before. It’s jumbled across its landscape in crumbling super-tech ruins and irradiated wastes. Humanity has been through several singularities by now, to the stars and beyond and back, and likely to have alien DNA intermingled with its own. It’s like super-Gamma World out there, plus with high magic.

Cities and civilizations are built around teleportation portals that transports people and things to other parts of the planet or other planets or other dimensions (cue Gate to Techno-Hell and sexy-time demons and devils).

No Elves! (sorta): Now’s time to play around with races. Chucking the demi-humans seems appropriate.

Still I’m a big believer in stereotypes and cliches in RPGing. Familiarity makes for easier buy-in (it’s why fantasy is so much more popular than sci-fi in roleplaying). So the races would probably be identified as “like” this race and “like” that race, but here’s how they’re different! So there would be a decadent “elf-like” Melnibonean race. More focus would be placed on the out-there races, so definitely would be a lizard/saurian/Gorn “dragonborn-like” race, and if there’s techno-hell there’d be a devilish “tiefling-like” race (popular races with my players). This type of setting also demands a bug-folk and cat-folk race, I think. Radioactive mutants should be a thing, though I’m not sure as a playable race.

I’m considering that humans no longer have “binary” sexuality/gender but are instead a spectrum. This isn’t just identity either but a whole range of body types from the ur-morphic versions of masculine/feminine (cue florescent Richard Corben pictures) to true androgynes who can choose either female or male on a moment to moment basis. There’s a real minefield to be careful in here, but it would definitely signal a different mainstream culture or society.

Each race should have some of “the weird” attached to it, since a setting at the end of time should have “weird” flavor. Children are laid in eggs or incubators or require 3 sets of DNA could be a such a “weird” signal. Thinking about having a daily mutation table including psionics, so that strange game-breaking abilities come and go. The fact you could wake up with a fungoid-growth between your eyes that grants telepathy or harden crustlike skin that adds to your AC or even wake up as a boneless amoeba that can squeeze through paper thin cracks. And the next day, you do it all over again. Oh yeah. Fun times there.

The Last Dark Age: The world is a dying ember, and the PCs are here to watch it slowly burn out. The continents have mashed together into Super-Pangae, but the truth is that the majority of the planet is a dead sterile landscape. PCs, though, live in the Zones, where the last vestiges of life and growth congregate. In fact, the PCs live within the most vibrant one – where the last high culture is – the last of literacy, the last of artistic endeavor, the last of intellectual pursuits in science and sorcery. Still humanity has lost much in the way of knowledge, resulting in a mostly medieval existence. The other Zones are barely habitable hellscapes filled with barbarian hordes. Hordes desperate to have what the high society has, clashing against that society’s protective barriers

Some have to go outside the Zone, find the technology of the Ancients that powers this society. The weather engines that change the poisonous gases to breathable atmosphere. The intricate crystals that power the invisible force screens along the edges of the Zone. The immortal sapient AIs that inhabit the robotic slave underclass that allows pursuit of the higher functions. Or maybe, maybe that one thing, that can revitalize the Earth, or take Humanity to a distant star so that its great accomplishments aren’t snuffed out by the mercilessness of the Universe. 

What’s Worse: Zombies or Rednecks?

Tonight’s game went well, even though I felt like we were fighting the game system, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, pretty strong.

The session was focused on two sets of PCs. One set was on a boat fighting rednecks, while the other one had been scouting a concentration camp, and now fighting their way back to the boat. There were some reversals, but overall, things were pretty much on the side of the PCs. The boat guys made it out to the main river, and the scouts were able to navigate to the rendezvous point, and saved two more people. There’s probably more NPCs right now on the boat than PCs.

I thought I would whittle down the NPCs this session, but no dice. I did introduce new fast zombies. Plus they got a sense of what was happening on concentration camp island. The players had fun.

But system has some nonsensical rules – point blank range is 30 feet for example and suppressive fire allows for automatic hits.

Next week is going to be raid on concentration camp island so I think it’s gonna be a natural break point for the game after that. If we continue after that (and we might not), I’m gonna push for a different game; either GURPS or d20 Cthulhu.

Die Ants

I mean seriously. Fuck.

The Doom That Came To Westerlans

So, here we go.

The PCs are licensed adventurers exploring a world that has experienced a monumental cataclysm. It’s the post-apocalyptic D&D idea.

The Westerlans campaign was something I’ve been dinking around with for at least two years. Currently, I’m missing a ton of maps I drew up. That sucks. They gotta be around the house somewhere. It’s important because everything I have in Google docs references them.

The pitch is simple: you live at the last place in the Known World. A major Revelations/Ragnarok-level cataclysm has occurred (earthquakes, moon turn to blood, plagues, falls of frogs, only 1st level spells can be cast, etc.) and there hasn’t been contact with anything since. Now it’s time to go find out what happened.

For the Westerlans campaign, the last place is the cosmopolitan port city of Portaine. It’s the largest city in Westerlans. Westerlans is a faux-Brittanica, a peninsula with a mountainous monster-infested pass that attaches it to the remainder of the world. Four tribes “co-exist” in the kingdom of Westerlans: the coastal Fyssi, the pastoral Daelish, the hill-folk Heorn, and the highlander Thunians. The Daelish co-exist with the hobbits, but elves and dwarves have arrived from elsewhere in the known world, living in Portaine. The original pagan religions of Wotan, Cernunnos and Thoryr have been (mostly) swept away for the One True God, Yahhim.

After the apocalypse, a heavy mist fell across Westerlans, obscuring the lands to its east. The trade ships of Shamballah and Yang Sia stopped arriving. The ruling class succumbed to plague. The criminal mob ruled over the city, except where the apocalypse cults held sway, such as Maclypse the Eschaton and Shub-Nurgot the Perversity.

Ten years went by. Nothing got better.

Finally, an autocrat, the Warlord, defeated the criminal gangs. High Cleric Bracius the Good was on her right, and High Wizard Illion to her left, signaling magic had returned to the world. She instituted harsh totalitarian rule yet, a welcomed rule compared to the criminal chaos she replaced.

Now she’s issuing Writs of Adventure. They’re mostly being issued to hooligans and unwanted thugs (I mean who do you think adventurers are?) to enter the mists and determine what is out past the city walls. The Warlord claims the lands beyond for Westerlans, and claims a heavy tax on any gold brought back by adventurers. Still, the PCs are this world’s Cortez or Pizarro. Empowered to conquer a new world. Get rich. Or die trying.

Unless there’s madness in the mist.

At War With The Ants

Dear Ants:

I want you to die. Every single one of you.

I tried to be nice. I recognized you had a colony that needed to grow. I wanted to spend my time watching old episodes of True Blood. We should have a truce, I said.

So it was fine. Outside was your domain. Inside mine.

But you couldn’t be satisfied. You had to do it your own way, and find the smallest tiniest pinprick size holes in the walls of my 80 year old home, and then go straight to my kitchen, weaving your way behind bottles and glasses, into cabinets, desperately swarming the peanut butter jar trying to break through the metal lid. You might be able to lift 50 times your own weight, but that doesn’t mean you can unscrew a peanut butter lid! Score one for science!

So we spent hours wiping everything down, clearing out the cabinets, crushing your little bodies with our thumb, murdering you with vinegar and a squirt bottle.

That was the warning.

You didn’t exactly heed it.

Next up, we purchased poison traps, which you, being beings of insectile intelligence, should have taken back to your lair and infected the whole colony Ebola-like, leaving your nest a genocidal mausoleum of ant corpses. But no, you weren’t really that interested in the traps, they just didn’t seem appealing, even when I dropped them on top of your conga line to my kitchen. I spent $10 on those traps! $10! When I covered them with honey, you seemed game, and even decided to take a few days off after that. Did the traps work? Had we reached an accord?

Nope. You came back. Through my kitchen windows.

I mixed honey with borax. You barely acknowledged its existence. You were more interested in the plants on the window sill.

I spent hours pulling back the window frames, filling the space with caulk, covering many of your compatriots in gooey white silicon. I used a whole tube of caulk. If you can’t get in, how can you get in?

Here it is the next day. And you’re in. Through my windows. Did you tunnel your way through the caulk? What the F?

You think you can beat me, but you can’t. You think I’ll give up, but I won’t.

I’m not sure what next is on the Home Ant Defense System, but I’m sure it has to do with fire.

New Music Express

Beats Music came out in January. I’m whole hog into the music streaming thingie, so I signed up. The thing I like best about Beats are the playlists. I pretty much loathe any of the streaming radio stations (I loathe radio in general, actually), so I’m only in for stuff like Spotify and Rdio. I find the Beats playlists have a much better signal-to-shit than any of the streaming radios (even Pandora, maybe even especially Pandora).

Anyway …

Since then, I’ve been making a playlist out of all the new music from the previous month. I’ve finally gotten around to assembling my list for July, and it makes sense to share it on this blog. I post whatever the hell else on my blog, so why shouldn’t I?

Yeah, well, without further ado, here’s July’s new music playlist.

 

So Many D&D Ideas, So Little Time

A new version of D&D means new possibilities, and I’ve been thinking hard about where I might want to take the new version of the game. Several ideas have hit me and hit me hard but, depending on the time of day or day of the week, I flip from the idea from which to base my campaign.

I do detect a trend though: the high concept sandbox. PCs are X in a world doing Y. The action for each world is very much D&D. Explore the local area, kill and get powerful. The X is the rationale for why the PCs do what they do, and the Y is basically why the world pushes back on them.

The model for this is Jonathan Tweet’s Elysombra. In that campaign, players were crusaders taking back their promised land after forced exile. The X was crusading, the Y was of course all the bad guys that kicked them out in the first place. Boiled down to its essentials, it has a strong hook, but practically demands complex play, where right and wrong aren’t so obvious to see.

The sandbox should also have a limited scope, like the West Marches. The X in that go ahead was to map an uninhabited area, moving from landmark to landmark, and strangely, the Y was other groups of PCs who may take your stuff before you get the opportunity.

I’ve come up with quite a few X and Y combos, that I think are really compelling. Some I’ve done some real work on, some are nothing more than a meager skeleton of brainstormed ideas. While the truth is I’ll probably run the Tyranny of Dragons campaign to start off, I can, at the very least, throw out the random musings I’ve got.

Ant-Killer

Hey, remember when I was so humane about wishing the ants long lives and to go all Marxist on their overlords? That, nay, I would not employ the poison that bursts the stomachs of the tiny valiant warriors?

Well, I’ve mixed boric acid with honey, and got sprinkled all around my kitchen.

They. Will. Not. Go. Away.

Zombies Need Better Stats

More on that zombie game.

I’ve been thumbing through my copy of Call of Cthulhu d20. Nice little compact game. I considered BRP for my game when looking at systems but well, nope. The % mechanic skews toward incompetence. Nice for squishing people with Cthulhu. Not so good for lasting through the apocalypse. While D20 Cthulhu is 3.5 era rules, it’s pretty stripped down (thank god). No classes for example. It’s chock full of useful rules, like object breakage and vehicle chases. The auto fire rules are a thing of horror, though (oh my god multiple attacks and interacts differently with different feats -4/-6/-8/-minus make the madness stop) and we’re back into the whole five types of actions thingies. So there’s some house-ruling that has to go down. Need to add a scavenge skill, and different CR levels of zombies. Still, I think you could be cooking with gas with this one. It’s one core book and done. Plus it’s got psychic powers, which I’d like to add into the mix at some point.

Unisystem does have all this, too … yeah … it’s just I don’t know. It’s just too loose for me. GURPS would require a bit more toolshed tinkering before switching over.

We’re coming close to a natural break point in the game – a zombie horde is coming to push them out of their comfort zone – and I think that’s when I’ll go for a rules shift. Into what I’m not sure. Truth is, I’m itching for a D&D game, but that’s a whole other post. Maybe the zombie game will go on a short hiatus, which would be fine with me.