RPGPundit Reviews: Ghostories

Ghostories: Supernatural Mystery Roleplaying is an RPG by Precis Intermedia, for their "Genre Division i" system.  The book is a complete game by itself, but can be used in combination with any other GDi game as well. I'm reviewing the print version, which is a softcover 75 page book.  The book seems to be physically well put-together and I suspect it could put up with prolonged wear-and-tear.

GDi is a good system for what it does, but I don't see it having a lot of range past the kind of "gritty, playing regular humans" sort of deal. There's a reason why it wouldn't fit well with a game genre like high-fantasy, for example. 
Ghostories is Precis' attempt to enter the Call of Cthulhu club; and I get the feeling that such a game would be straining the limits of what the GDi system can do. Straining, but not breaking.

That said, whenever I see a "Modern investigative horror" game, I ask myself: "Is there any reason to play this game instead of just playing Call of Cthulhu?".  In most cases the answer is no.
In this case, the answer would be "not enough reason, unless you are already a big fan of GDi or want to incorporate some of the ideas in this book with those of the other GDi games".
Nevertheless, there are some interesting new mechanics here that could be appealing especially to fans of the GDi system, and possibly to people who are just whores for this sort of "occult horror" RPG genre.

Brett Bernstein, the author, states that the purpose of the game is "a toolkit for your own paranormal mystery adventures- designed to be versatile".  It certainly fulfills the first requirement (though again, not in any really original or better way compared to what's already out there), as for the second, it has about as much versatility as the GDi system allows; which is to say, a medium amount. It isn't a hard system, so its not a hard system to add your own skills and powers to.

The GDi system is based on a 2d6 mechanic; where characters have a set of five abilities (ranging from 0-5 in value) , and a bunch of skills (ranging from 1-8; 0-8 if you count "untrained").
Players must select a role for their character, an occupation or vocation; in the case of Ghostories you get the standard gamut of Cthulhu-esque occupations: clergyman, detective, dilettante, doctor, journalist, professor, etc etc. There are a few others, none too unusual. Interestingly enough, no role for "soldier" or "military" is included; though it'd be easy enough to create one.  Your role determines your required starting gimmicks and some recommended starting skills.

Characters in Ghostories in particular also have another, new, mechanic called "pursuits". A pursuit represents an obsession for the character, no doubt what leads them into a world of occult-investigating.  This obsession is powerful enough that the PC has to make composure rolls to manage to tear himself away from anything related to his pursuit when there's something more pressing that needs to be done (ie. a character obsessed with ancient texts would have to make a composure roll to remember to pick up his kid from school rather than just keep trying to translate that new aramaic manuscript he found). Pursuits can be psychological, religious, magical, occult, scientific, or "vigilante" (this last one seems an odd choice, but it has to do with another innovation related to the default setting of the game; where there are ancient powers that give special (mostly physical) abilities to those who fight injustice; I suppose that this is meant to be a Buffy-esque sort of deal).

Each pursuit determines either additional gimmicks or skills for your PC, and each has its "tainted" version (ie. the way your pursuit is changed after your initial encounters with the "dark powers"), which gives you access to particular powers or special ability gimmicks.

Skills represent areas of training: both in regular education, and also in special powers; magic or divine abilities, etc. all work through granting access to powers that work as new skills.
Gimmicks are your "feats", which range from social gimmicks, cultural gimmicks, natural talents, and also "detrimental gimmicks" (ie. disadvantages). Each of the various occult powers also grant access to new power-related gimmicks.

For those who haven't read my previous reviews regarding the GDi system; task resolution is very simple: you roll 2d6 and need to roll under the value of your ability+skill. Harder tasks can require you to beat the roll by more than 0.
Composure, a special skill of sorts that has appeared in most other GDi games, becomes more important in this game in particular, since it determines one's ability to resist one's Pursuit, and also to resist the maddening effects of the supernatural.

As in other GDi games, there are five levels of damage, and two kinds of (regular) damage: fatigue and injury.  But to this we add, for Ghostories, a third track: Dementia.  Taking Dementia damage affects your mind, and is essentially the Ghostories version of Sanity Points.
Any of the three damage tracks will, as you progress along them, create increasing penalties to all your resolution checks, and marking all five boxes on any of the three tracks will basically take you out of commission (either unconscious, dead, or delirious).

The chapter on task resolution is particularly good in this book; it includes details not just on combat and composure, but also on how to resolve other tasks, like using your various connections during the process of an investigation and such.

Now, as I'd mentioned before, each of the different pursuits can, once the PCs become aware of the supernatural world (ie. become "tainted"), allow the PCs to have access to particular powers.  These are detailed fully in chapter 3 of the game, and include "second sight" (ESP, basically), Divine Arts (the power of faith), Sorcery (the power to conjure up objects and illusions, and to create magical wards or barriers), Unholy Arts (which lets you summon, banish, or make pacts with "phantoms"), Binding (which lets you trap a spirit inside a magical object), and Heritage of the Egis (the aforementioned "vigilante-buffy powers").
Of all of these powers, there is definitely something of a range of both usefulness and clarity to them: Second Sight and the Buffy-powers are pretty straightforward; Unholy Arts seem like something cultist NPCs would be better off using and don't seem overly practical for those Players who want to be "evil"; and Sorcery and Binding seem somewhat vague and (I would figure) open to player abuse; they could easily be abused to be way more broken and game-unbalancing than any of the other powers.
An additional problem is that each of these is linked to your PC's pursuit. You choose a single pursuit, and whatever pursuit you choose, those are the powers you get. So if you don't want to allow a given power in the game, you have to not allow a given pursuit. Sorcery and Binding are tied to the Magic and Science pursuits, so if you don't want PCs to end up with these potentially unbalancing powers, you basically have to end up not allowing any scientist or magician PCs.

In spite of these flaws, these new powers are something that could be particularly useful for GDi fans that would be interested in Ghostories mostly for getting additional material for their existing games; these powers could easily be adapted for use in any of the other GDi settings.

So, what would an Occult Horror RPG be without some good occult horrors, supernatural entities, evil tentacled thingies? Ghostories' chapter on its monsters gives details for the type of creatures PCs are likely to run into. Unfortunately, they seem a little dull to me. You have your ghosts, your embodied spirits (gremlins, golems, gargoyles, etc), your "phantoms" (which seem really more like Demons than "phantoms" to me; entities that delight in corrupting mortals), your "banes" (entities that possess human beings), and finally your moral opponents, be they misguided law enforcement officers or evil cultists. What you don't get are either Mythos-like creatures or some other kind of really new and original horror.  The creatures here are utterly conventional and recognizable.

You know, I get the feeling that supernatural horror isn't really Mr. Bernstein's forte.  The guy kicks ass at things like the wild west, hard sci-fi, pulp, anything relatively gritty. Asking him to do something related to the supernatural is a little reminiscent of Steve Ditko's disastrous and mercifully short run on the Legion of Superheroes; its not that the guy didn't have talent, he just was utterly unsuited by personality to present the type of atmosphere that the setting requires.

The book goes on to have a good, albeit brief and by now utterly standard section on "how to run a horror game" with some basically solid advice, and then (after the brief rules on advancement, optional rules, long-term injury rules, some conversions for other systems, and some ideas for incorporating the Ghostories rules with the Mean Streets Film Noir RPG) the book finishes off providing a set of ready-run scenarios for the game. 
They aren't particularly detailed, each covering only a few pages, and while all are ok, none are particularly mind-blowing.  You have an adventure about the restless ghost of a murder victim, a conflict with a Dr.Frankenstein-esque mad scientist, a hunt for a succubus, and an adventure involving a possessing entity trying to cause a really big earthquake in San Francisco.

In conclusion, I'd have to say this is far from my favourite GDi game.  Its still got a lot of useful stuff, and if you're a real GDi fanatic, you could easily use these rules as the springboard (or the toolkit as Bernstein put it) for creating a really good supernatural horror campaign if you have the brains for it, but in and of itself it strikes me as rather unoriginal.  Its certainly no Coyote Trail.
Buy it only if you're a huge fan, or you're looking for some slightly darker-sort of supernatural powers and details for your existing GDi campaign.

RPGPundit

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LSH Campaign Character Profile: Dawnstar





First of all, I would like to note something.  As you may have seen, I've gone around collecting images of the different LSH heroes for visual aids in my campaign.  Out of all of them, Dawnstar is clearly the "fan favourite"; or at least the "online artist/collector favourite".  There are more images, both amateur and professional, of Dawnstar than of any other legionnaire (discounting Supergirl and Superboy, obviously).

Here's a few more:






Ok, anyways, that's just a tiny sample.  Personally, she's not my favourite character; I don't particularly think she's the hottest legionnaire, but I guess its something about the wings that get people drawing or collecting her image.

In any case, Dawnstar is Dawnstar of the planet Starhaven, a planet that was (I kid you not) founded by native american geneticists who left earth to found a new paradise for their tribes.  The people of starhaven have all been genetically modified to have flight abilities (including wings), the ability to survive in outer space, and tracking abilities.

Dawnstar is exceptional even for her race, however, because she was born with an exceptionally high level of all three abilities.  She is faster, in flight, than any other Legionnaire; in space she can fly as fast as a space cruiser in hyperflight.  Her tracking abilities let her follow someone's psychic trail right across the galaxy. 

From an early age, Dawnstar was filled with a wanderlust uncommon among her people, and she trained herself as a hunter from childhood. By the time she was 13, she left Starhaven to get work as a bounty hunter.  She did not have at that time a particularly high sense of morality, and was accepting any sort of job for the money, being little more than a mercenary.  Nevertheless, when she came to R.J. Brande's attention, he thought he saw in her some heroic qualities and felt that the young girl could be saved from a shadowy career.  At first he hired her on permanently to act as his own exclusive bounty hunter, and worked hard to try to redeem her from her more mercenary qualities.  Eventually he convinced her to enter the Legion academy, though he had to continue to pay her a rather hefty salary to do so.

Dawnstar eventually decided that the career of a superhero had some of its own rewards, and while her own morality is still sometimes a bit questionable, she mostly began to fall in line with a way of thinking that was suitable enough for the Legion: Dawnstar sees her place as that of a professional doing a job; she sees things as black and white, she has a job to do, and in the current situation her job is that of a law officer in the LSH.  She will try to excel at her work to the letter of the rules; but often still misses some of the spirit or heart of the Legion's mission.

She was promoted into the Legion itself during Wildfire's leadership.  Shortly after becoming leader, Dawnstar came to his attention in the Academy, and besides being extremely impressed with her abilities, Wildfire became utterly smitten with her. He proposed her immediately for Legion membership, and all but rammed his decision down the other Legionnaire's throats.  Nevertheless, Dawnstar has ended up proving herself to be a valuable addition to the team.

Dawnstar still has some trouble making friends among the Legion; Wildfire is the person she is closest to, though at first it was hardly from her own choosing; he began all but stalking her like a schoolboy with a crush.  At first she rebuffed him, claiming he was too pushy for her liking and reasoning that there would be no way for any relationship with Wildfire to work (given that Wildfire is an energy being with no material body).  She also grew to resent Wildfire's excessive attention and protectiveness of her, especially on missions, where Wildfire would get in the way of her doing her job in his zeal to protect her, and would risk the mission. 
However, in the last few months since leaving the Legion leadership, Wildfire has calmed down somewhat, and Dawnstar now appears to be developing reciprocal feelings toward him.

She has also grown in her short time in the Legion from feeling that the Legion was "just" a job, and believing that she didn't need anyone, much less friendships; to starting to fit in more and more with the legion and developing friendships among the other Legionnaires.  She has developed a friendly relationship in particular with Colossal Boy (who has gone out of his way to try to help her to fit in), Shadow Lass (with whom Dawnstar has a mutual admiration toward a fellow warrior with), and Dream Girl, who has been very friendly to her; although that last one might be for more self-serving reasons on Dream Girl's part, as it appears that Dream Girl is trying to work toward a candidacy for next year's Legion leadership.

Although she never expected it to, the Legion has changed Dawnstar.  She can no longer see it as just another temporary "job", it has grown into a place where she belongs, perhaps for the first time in her life. But whether the attraction of that, or the possibility of a relationship with Wildfire, might be enough to keep her there; or whether her own wanderlust, or a better offer, or especially the long-range complications for the possibility of any kind of meaningful relationship with Wildfire might not end up pushing her away from the Legion, remains to be seen.

RPGPundit

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RPGPundit Review: @ctive8

This is the second in a series of reviews of products by Postmortem Studios, this time of the complete RPG pretentiously but perhaps appropriately entitled "@ctive8".

Let me start with this note: I think that this game might have been a hell of a lot more interesting if it was made as satire. As it is, written seriously, I think its going to be unappealing to a fairly large segment of the gaming population.

Now, to give you the story of @ctive8 in brief:  this is an RPG about political activism.  Not about running a political game, but rather a game that self-describes itself as having a political message (though what that message is besides "people ought to be more activist" is truly beyond me), where you roleplay a group of people brought together by a wierd computer program that functions sort of like a free-range internet forum designed to unite people to take action against injustices or problems in the world.

Its a game that the author describes as being about "actually acting on what you believe in, striving to make a difference, and, in some small way, actually making the world a better place".  That's all well and good, but, wouldn't it actually be better if people just went out and DID these things, rather than play an RPG based on doing those things?
I mean, anyone who already is an activist will probably be too busy "activising" to bother playing an RPG about being an activist. Anyone who isn't probably won't find this game too appealing.
I'm an historian.  I enjoy RPGs that are about history; I wouldn't be particularly interested in an RPG that was about being an historian. Except maybe if it was about being an Historian with powers of time-travel, or being an historian with superpowers, or being an historian caught up in a dark occult underworld of conspiracies, or something along those lines.

This is not a game about activists with superpowers, or activists who time-travel to set right what once went wrong, or activists caught up in a dark world of occult conspiracies. Its about activists being normal activists.

A few structural notes about the book itself:  First, the format of the book is, like the previous book I reviewed by this company, solidly structured but nothing to write home about. Its efficient and adequate. The neatest illustration in the book is probably the cover, which is formed of a collage of a metric ton of tiny images that unite to create a vague collage about political themes. All the illustrations in the book (and there's a fair amount) are in black and white, and the artwork is efficient, but again nothing to write home about.
The book is some 40 pages long, of which the first 23 are a combination of political diatribe (most of it relatively mild, some of it in first person and kind of disjointed, a couple of rants against the "first past the post" system of democracy, etc), in-game fiction (explaining that @ctive8 is some kind of almost viral computer program whose origins are shrouded in mystery that functions on the internet to bring people with similar political causes together in an apparent effort to try to get them to be more involved in activism), and your standard fluff about how to run the game.
Included in this section are some "adventure seeds", suggesting some of the kinds of activist adventures you can have with this system.  Possible ideas include trying to deal with asian gang violence in urban centers, trying to help get food to a famine-wracked country in Africa, and trying to cut off the water supply to Las Vegas for 48 hours to teach the Las Vegasites a lesson about conservation (?!).

Next, by page 23 we get to the game system.  The system is a dice pool system, supposedly inspired by the White Wolf system but using D6s rather than D10s and trying to make it more efficient and streamlined than WW's monstrosity.  In this, I would say that the author has succeeded. The system is relatively straightforward, where your skill level determines the number of dice you roll and the target number on the dice that indicates success. You get to reroll any successes (but only once), and if you roll all 1s you have a critical failure on your hands. You generally need only one success to actually perform an action, but the more you get the better you do at the success in question.
Modifiers can reduce or increase your target number. 

There are a couple of unusual details to the system that are worth noting: first, there is no "experience" system. Characters do not improve mechanically at skills or abilities as time goes by; though they may "improve" in other ways as determined by the GM. I don't think there's anything wrong with this setup, though anytime you have an "experienceless" system its important to express very clearly to the GM that he should then put the emphasis on other ways to advance, improve, or change your character, or else players can get bored pretty fast.

The other significant rule is that a player can choose at any time to guarantee success in an action by sacrificing his life to do it. On the surface, this is a neat idea, and ties in well with the "activism" theme. However, in execution I could see it running into a couple of problems: first off, sometimes it might be difficult to justify in-game just how your character would die, and why his death would guarantee the success of his cause (I guess its meant to represent the impact martyrs can have on a cause, but sometimes it just seems like it would be pretty strained for an explanation). Second, this feature combined with the lack of experience rules would lead, I suspect, to a strong feeling of "disposable characters", where players would be too willing to let their characters die, since they really aren't going to get much better at anything anyways, and its just the same to start with a new character as to continue with the existing one.

Character creation is pretty solid and complete in the game, with your standard range of attributes, skills, merits and flaws, etc.

The next thing I find very odd about this game, however, is that pages 32 to 37 are dedicated to the combat system, and pgs 38 to 39 are dedicated to vehicle rules. Pg. 40 is an equiptment list, with most of the equiptment being weapons, armour, and vehicles.  There's nothing per se wrong with this, and the combat system itself is a pretty solid dice-pool system that is about on par with Shadowrun 4e's system (and better than White Wolf's system by far), but it seems a strange emphasis to dedicate 20% of the book to combat/action related stuff when the supposed theme of the game is political activism.  The message it seems to be sending is that most of the "activism" in question will be of the heavily violent variety with lots of explosions and car chases.

The author implies that the game system is being used in this book for the first time, and will be used in other products of his in the future (and expanded upon; he implies, for example, that other games that use this system will have an experience mechanic).  That probably explains the excessive(?) emphasis on combat in a game that would strike me at first glance at not being quite so combat-oriented.

In conclusion, my feeling is that the theme of this game is of relatively limited appeal; but if this sort of thing is of interest to you, you will find that the system itself is relatively solid.  You may actually end up feeling that the book is wanting for more setting detail/gameplay ideas, and has a little too much personal dialogue on the author's part. It probably could have used quite a few more pages on ideas of how to run the game and what to do with the concept behind the game. There is an overall smattering of pretentiousness in the writing, but without going completely into the college-boy-liberal swinedom I expected from it at first; nevertheless, in the end I find myself asking whether anyone would really be interested in running a game like this, and whether anyone who is wouldn't be better served by spending their time actually trying to do something in the REAL world about famine in africa or conservation issues...

RPGPundit

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(originally posted September 22, 2006)

Time For Some Campaignin'

Someone owes Bob Dylan money.

RPGPundit

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Stephen Hawking Declares His Support for RPGPundit

You might recall that over a year ago on this blog I declared that, in my opinion, it is critical that mankind make the jump into being able to live in a self-sustaining way in space; to travel to other worlds in our solar system and beyond.  Not out of some kind of startrek nerdboy fantasy but out of a real concern for the fact that humanity is grossly overextending our resources on the earth. We are parasites, when it comes down to it, consumers; and one world is no longer enough to manage us.  Also, because our energy consumption is such, and the lack of viable alternatives to fossil fuels, that if we don't do it soon, we might never be able to do it at all, and humanity would eventually sink away and become one of the "might have beens" in the race of civilizations that I have no doubt is occuring througout our universe.

Some of you lesser mortals out there thought to disagree with me. That's fine. I have people in my camp that make me more than secure in my conviction that my logic is well-thought-out.  Who, you ask as though the title of this blog wasn't a dead giveaway?

That's right. None other than quite possibly the smartest human being alive, and more importantly an expert in physics, has come to the same conclusion I have.

Stephen Hawkings Declares that Humankind Must Go Into Space

Apparently, Stephen Hawkings, or "Steve-O" as his friends call him must have read this blog sometime last year, and finally got around to expressing his agreement with the Pundit's wisdom back in June.  But, busy guy that he is, I guess he forgot to send me an e-mail letting me know about his little speech in Hong Kong. Fortunately, I got wind of this finally.

I sincerely thank Steve-O (or "Wheelsy McGenius", as his friends call him) for his steadfast support in backing up my argument and supporting my position. Its glad to know that you can count on your loyal readers to make public statements in support of your theories, and few friends can make such statemetns like good old Wheelsy.

The article doesn't actually mention whether he talks about this blog specifically, but I'm sure that someone like Wheelsy (or "Robovoice 3000" as his very dear friends call him) would have seen fit to cite the original source of his position, and wouldn't just claim that such an idea sprang forth from his own brilliance, brilliant though his brilliance is.  Robovoice's brilliance is so brilliant, in fact, that when you refract it through a lens it can be used to cook meat.

Anyways, thanks heaps for coming to the same conclusions I did, buddy. That's Stephen "Steve-O" "Wheelsy" "Robovoice" Hawking for you; a genius of our times (now proven, by his agreement with me), a genuine good guy, and cheating the grim reaper like you wouldn't believe for over 40 years now.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Missouri Meerschaum Corncob + Monte Pas' Ark Royal

Originally posted: September 21, 2006