Rifts Savage Worlds Kickstarter - Atlantis!

 

Well it's time for another Savage Worlds Kickstarter, in fact another Rifts Savage Worlds Kickstarter. The first run was in 2016, then another one in 2019 to expand the books with Magic, Coalition, and regional stuff books, plus an upgrade of the original to the new Adventure edition of Savage Worlds. 

This time it's for Atlantis for this version of Rifts. I always thought Atlantis was one of the cooler areas of Rifts and one of the cooler books for it as well - magic items, races, tattoo magic, plus all of the worldbuilding and backstory that came along with it ... it was a very strong early entry in making Rifts Rifts. 

Now I never did much with it in my games as far as the region. It seemed horrifically dangerous for most characters to approach, much less enter, sort of like going to the Nine Hells in a D&D game. It was more an "aspirational" destination than a likely one at low to medium levels. With the Savage Worlds version of the game levelling the playing field a bit I can see where it might actually get used at some point. 

The short version is that the original Atlanteans look very much like humans but they were driven out or enslaved when the Splugorth invaded a long time ago.  The city magically TARDIS-d out when magic diminshed on Earth but it returned when the rifts opened up and magic flooded the world again. This is one of the major evil powers of the setting so it's a dangerous place but there is a sort of underground rebellion of True Atlanteans active there as well. Oh and it's also full of dragons. 

It's awesome but deadly. I've used Atlantean slavers several times as a campaign opener so maybe next time they won't go somewhere else - maybe they will go back to the big island.

The good news is that Pinnacle knows how to run a Kickstarter and I am absolutely sure this one will run smoothly and deliver what it promises pretty much on time. 

The part that bothers me a bit is that Pinnacle has a ridiculous amount of KS experience because pretty much everything they publish these days is done via Kickstarter. I know I know, it's rough for small publishers out there these days and doing it this way makes sense. Doesn't it seem like today, though, with 5E doing this record business for several years now, that the RPG market should be better? There were a ton of smaller publishers in the 80's and 90's and early 2000's who supported game lines for years before crowdfunding ... shouldn't it be easier now? Shouldn't an experienced, respected, well-liked company be able to sustain their main game line without having to crowdfund?

Who knows, maybe they could but they know this is just better - more predictable at least. 

The downside of doing it this way is that you can't just buy a $30 book like you can with many other games. No, you are going to get the book, some character cards, and a poster map. Now the basic digital-only version is pretty reasonable but if you just want a printed Savage Rifts Atlantis Book you're in for the $45 package. If that's all you want your best bet is to wait until after the campaign, whenever it's printed and shipped and you can buy it at the FLGS or online for the cover price or less. 

The other stuff in this campaign include a set of cardboard stand-up pawns, like Pathfinder pawns apparently, and a couple of map packs along with the book and the cards and the poster map. It's all cool stuff, it's just the forced bundling that itches just a bit and granted that is a temporary state that will only last until it's all released separately, likely early next year given what they are saying on the KS page.  

So yes, I will probably back it at some level - Rifts is a great setting and Savage Worlds is a great set of rules that works well for it. I like a ton of what Pinnacle does so I try to support them directly like this when they make something I like. If you have some similar inclinations then go check this one out. 

 

Forced Character Grouping in Soulbound - and Elsewhere

 

I'm having a hard time finishing my read-thru of Soulbound and it took me a while to figure out what was dragging down my interest. I love the setting and think it's set up well for an RPG. It wasn't so much the mechanics although I'm still debating my opinion on them. It was one particular element:

Much of the game is tied to the concept that this isn't your typical fantasy adventuring party - you are "soulbound". Granted, it is in the title of the game, but I didn't realize it would be the dominant concept - with mechanics, yes - in the game that it is. Yes, I could probably run a party without it but a lot of the game is presented with the idea that your party is soulbound ... except for the Stormcast. Yes, weirdly the posterboys of the whole Age of Sigmar universe are NOT Soulbound ... but the idea is still that the rest of the party is and any Stormcast are there as trainers/advisers/guides/spies. 

Maybe if it doesn't work conceptually for one of the core character archetypes for your setting it is not a great idea for your first big RPG in the setting?

he effect of this approach, and what rubs me the wrong way, is that your party is locked in to being "Agents of Sigmar". They are tied to one god, mostly, and one faction (order) certainly. It feels like a straightjacket, conceptually. Your party is tied to the Big Agenda ... they're not really free agents in charge of their own destiny as you would see in most other RPGs. This is really a sticking point with me. 

The old Warhammer had characters starting out at ridiculously low power levels (this was a feature not a bug) but you had the freedom to do whatever the group decided with your Rat Catcher/Outlaw/Agitator/Acolyte all-star team. Soulbound does up the power level and I'm fine with that, it's a different game, but your direction is far more limited. You are probably not going to be digging through dungeons for gold and magic - you'll be sent there to recover some threat to the world or some powerful tool for order. You won't be running a free trader here - at best you might be escorting someone important from place to place. 

It's not mechanics - though there are mechanics tied to being Soulbound.

It's not setting - there's nothing inherent to the setting that makes this required to be a wandering adventurer.

It's ... feel. I just don't like the feel when the party concept is dictated by the rulebook in such a heavy handed way. 

Now there are other games that have similar approaches. 

The FFG Star Wars game is one and I wasn't a huge fan of it there with certain assumptions about a party unity mechanic whether it was Obligation in Edge of the Empire, Duty in Age of Rebellion, or Morality in Force and Destiny. Those at least could be broken down to an individual character level so you could mix characters from different books and people could come and go as they pleased. That's a little different than "oh and if you die after this ceremony your soul explodes and is gone so you can't even come back through some kind of divine shenanigans."

The FFG 40K RPG's took a similar approach where there were multiple books each covering a different type of game. Inquisitorial retinues are a very different type of campaign from an Imperial guard squad or the crew of a Rogue Trader. It made sense for that setting.   

Shadowrun assumes you're all shadowrunners ... but that's more of a social status and lifestyle choice rather than a permanent mechanical lock. You don't have to undertake illegal operations - it's just  an easy way to make a lot of money. You could be a .05 essence hot dog vendor if you want!

The various Star Trek RPGs do tend to assume that you're in Starfleet and part of an organized command structure that will be given missions and generally ordered about. Considering that's 99% of the source material though it totally makes sense. It would be weird if you weren't ordered to do something that spiraled dangerously out of control. 

D&D and superhero games and Traveller and other sci fi games do generally assume that you're going to be part of a mostly bipedal humanoid group of beings that will work together to achieve some common goal. That's it! There's usually no mechanical structure to it and no setting rule to it. The PC's are part of a team because it makes sense and they want to be there and they could leave at any time. 

The other big offender here of recent origin is the Savage Worlds version of Rifts. Original Rifts was a wide-open setting  -pick one of these crazy character types and then YOU come up with a reason why you're all together ... or let the DM do it. New Rifts presents everything around "The Tomorrow Legion" which is a do-gooder organization that serves as a base and provides other support for good-guy adventuring parties out there fighting the good fight against the multitude of evil beings and organizations on Rifts earth. The world is sometimes presented as  TL intelligence reports, the adventures often start with "The TL sends/has asked you to go to X and investigate something" and it's just a heavy-handed conceit that I totally ignored when I started my game. 

Part of the Rifts problem is that people were playing the game for two decades plus before this construct was added to the setting. The author of the conversion has stated that he wants to play clear-cut heroes and that's fine but it's a shades of grey setting, not a black and white one. There was no big organization of Good and that's part of what made it interesting. I believe there was a mention made as well of people not knowing where or how to start a campaign. How did you start your D&D game? How did you start that old Traveller campaign? Star Wars? Any approach that worked in those would work in Rifts. It's really not that hard. How did any of us manage to play Gamma World or Twilight 2000 without an obvious good guy organization to join? 

Hint: If that's what you want then GO BUILD ONE IN THE GAME! YOUR GAME!

I guess in the end that's what I'd like to see with Soulbound. I'd like to see "Soulbound" status as something players worked to achieve in the game, something desirable and with clear, tangible benefits in the game, and some serious tradeoffs - like that whole exploding soul thing. Instead of being the assumed party origin and just making it part of the back story, how about making it the object of an adventure path produced for the Sigmar RPG? That way if your players just want to look for loot to power up before the next wave of Chaos/Undead/Orc invasions they could do that, and a group that wanted to join the big leagues could follow that path. It's sort of like starting at "Runelord" level in Runequest. I mean, sure, you could, but you've missed out on a lot by doing it and you've assumed a lot about the characters prior lives.

The Mortal Realms for Age of Sigmar is a great setting with  multiple worlds, interesting magic, a variety of threats, steampunk dwarves, airships, lots of character options and built-in reasons for wildly different character types to be working with each other. I wish this first exploration of it had been more open and less ... channeled. Hopefully the future will open it up more. 

Greatest Hits #24 - Starting Concepts for a Rifts Campaign

Early thinking for my own campaign ...

With Savage Worlds Rifts a real thing now I thought I would share the three ways I have started and run a Rifts campaign. It's a post-apocalyptic game, but one where there is some organized technological /magical society and industry (unlike Twilight 2000 and most Gamma World campaigns) and most of the world has been covered at some point so I know it can be tricky trying to decide how to start a game in a way that makes sense.

Option 1: The North America opening - This is how my last campaign started. The idea is to limit the character types and the setting to the core rulebook and let things expand from there. The starting line from my email to the group that last time: Welcome to Horseshoe Bend, Arkansas, 2400 A.D. No flying cars, and not much indoor plumbing either.  It was a backwater town with some local problems where the PC's were drawn in and things gradually expanded from there. It's a classic "bullseye" type campaign where you have a fairly high level of detail for the town, some detail on the surrounding area (say a day or two of travel for normal folks), and a general idea of what's outside of that. The main premise here is that it's easier to add things to the game than it is to take things away from the game. It's easier on the GM and it's easier on the players too. Plus it makes no assumptions about where the campaign is going - it's just a starting point and once the party finds their feet it could go anywhere. Maybe they end up headed for Tolkeen. Maybe they become heavily invested in the town and the local NPCs and become local champions and defenders. Maybe they take it over and rule. It's wide open once things get rolling and it's largely player-driven at that point.

Specifics: I liked Arkansas as it was near parts of the Coalition, Texas (and so vampires), the Federation of Magic, and it's not all that far from Florida and Dinosaur Swamp. I prefer an area that's not in the middle of some heavily detailed region or plotline but is close enough that the party could dive into those if they wanted to. Parts of Texas, Iowa, and Pennsylvania would work well here too.

Option 2: The Epic Quest - I used this for my longest-running campaign. The concept goes back to everything from  Jason and the Argonauts to Sinbad to Lord of the Rings. Heroes from all over gather when a call goes out to join an expedition into mysterious territory.  In my case a wealthy patron wanted to travel across half of North America from Arkansas to the ruins of Detroit to retrieve some legendary artifacts. You can read more about it here.  The thing to keep in mind is that just because the Rifts allow instant travel to other places you don't always know where they go or how long they will last. People are still going to travel the hard way and the epic quest is based on doing just that.

This opens things up for the players to bring in almost any character type as a "wandering adventurer" with any motivation from a worthy goal to revenge to a simple payday. It keeps the GM sane though as you're not required to explain why all of these disparate characters are working together - it's built into the concept and it's up to the players to explain why they are joining up! So if you end up with a juicer from Texas, a Triax full conversion borg, a Japanese cyber-samurai, and a Venezuelan anti-monster, that's perfectly fine. Maybe they traveled by ship, maybe they came through a Rift, maybe they want to get home, or maybe they don't remember how they got here - it all works! It gives all of you time to discover the backstory of each character if you want to without having to know everything up front.

For the GM it puts the "why" on the players and let's you focus on developing the "where". You have a major quest goal that is the long term focus of the campaign but while everyone is traveling there you can have impromptu side adventures. It also puts a definite end point to the campaign when the quest is achieved. After that you can reset the campaign with a new situation and some or all new characters as desired. If you think of your game as having "seasons" like a TV show then this would be a great way to start and finish a coherent storyline or season. It's also a good way to explore another area of the world if you have veteran Rifts players. Maybe North America is something you've all played before and you want to go somewhere different - the quest for the heart of Africa (meet the Egyptian gods? Take on the Four Horsemen?) is a definite change up. The team could outfit in NA in relative peace, then board a ship (or a fleet) which would utilize Rifts Undersea/Coalition Navy for some adventures along the way/ once they land in Africa there's a whole support book plus material online and something besides Coalition Troopers to bash.

Specifics:

• "Expedition to Africa" as described above
• "To the End of the World" - NA expedition to Antarctica via South America. Could take a ship down the coast, could take a giant robot over land - either one could be interesting.
• "Transcontinental Transport" - it doesn't always have to be a one-way  traveling quest. What if someone gets an idea to rebuild a transport network across the continent? Part of the campaign would be talking to locals and working out deals along the way to extend the line, and part of it would be defending what you've already built. This could be a crazy back and forth campaign and could easily accommodate multiple groups of players and characters if you're fortunate enough to have multiple groups. It gives them a chance to change the landscape of the world in a notable way and gives them plenty of diplomacy and combat as well. Keep in mind it doesn't have to go east-west either - maybe Northern Gun wants to ship products to Mexico - or Chile!
• "Moonshot!" - Mutants in Orbit gave us details about what's going on up on Luna. It's kind of a wasted book if no one goes there, right? Maybe someone on Rifts Earth is convinced that pre-Rifts civilization survives on the moon and thinks humanity's last hope is to establish contact with them and get some help.  This could be a 3-stage quest: First, getting to Florida to what was North America's major spaceport. Second, taking control of the facility and figuring out how to get to space. Third, launching for the moon, landing, and finding out what's there. If all goes well then you might have set up your next campaign: "Red Planet". 

Option 3: Slave Ship - All of the characters begin the game on an Atlantean slaver. First session it comes under attack, the players break out, get to land, and begin exploring the area. There are some similarities to both of the previous options.

1. Player character choices are wide open. The Splugorth trade and raid across the multiverse, so if it's in a Rifts book (or any Palladium book really) you can justify it showing up here. Bring on your Robotech characters and Ninja Turtles! Characters from prior campaigns could even appear in this one with nothing more than "I passed out in a bar and then I woke up here".
2. The GM gets to pick the setting - I used this kickoff to explore those shiny new South America books back when they were shiny and new. Want to run around Russia or Australia or Japan for a while? Here's a great way to do it. You can assume your players will be spending a fair amount of time at the beginning just figuring out where they are and what they want to do so you can dive into that area of Rifts earth that interests you but has never made sense to include in your previous games. 
3.  ...but the players drive the campaign forward - once they have their bearings what do they want to do? Take over? Help the locals against those oppressive jerks from the kingdom next door? Find their way home? Pay back Atlantis for what they have done?  It's totally wide open at this point and it's mainly up to them. Sure, the GM can plant interesting rumors about a pre-Rifts city that's intact up in the mountains, or a powerful magic item hidden in a tomb in the desert, or a really nasty monster that dominates a local region, but the direction of the campaign is all about what the players want to do.  

Specifics: Pick a book! Any non-North America book, or any book that doesn't cover a region you've already played through. Talk to your players in advance about what areas of Rifts Earth they are interested in - veteran players will probably have some ideas. I don't know that I would open this way with a group of players totally new to Rifts but for vets it should be a blast.

So there are 3 ideas to help get a Rifts campaign organized and off the ground. They all worked for me when I tried them out so I believe they can work for other people too. It's hard to predict where a campaign will go most of the time so these are mainly focused on "how do I get started?" After that, hopefully, you won't need much help. If you do try some version of them out, let me know how it goes!

Greatest Hits #23 - Sandboxing Rifts

I re-read my own article when I was prepping the Savage Rifts campaign, so here it is again ...

While researching for my latest mania I realized that I ran and odd kind of sandbox back in the 90's for Rifts of all things. I think Rifts might be a decent game for this kind of approach, better than I had thought at first anyway.

The concept for the campaign was that the PC's all started out in one of those quasi-coalition towns in Post-Rift Arkansas. A local mage was recruiting for an expedition to Detroit, where he was convinced that he would find some ancient magic items in the collection of a wealthy collector from the time before. The plan was to travel cross-country in a Behemoth Explorer robot (pictured above) with a crew of adventuring types, explore things along the way (and sell that information later) and then dig into the ruins of Detroit.

I gathered some real world atlas pages of the travel route, slipped them into sheet protectors, and marked them up for apocalyptic damage, rifts and ley lines, and interesting locals. I knew the course the 'bot would travel, so I stayed within 100 miles or so of that course for any kind of detail and made some notes on what else might be off the edges.

The beauty of this approach is that the trip was going to take a few months to get there and presumably that much to get back so you get many sessions of sandbox exploration -with a moving map- but there is an overarching goal at the end for players who need a plot to work off of.

The giant robot follows all the rules of a typical West Marches/Sandbox Town - it's safe and nothing really happens inside it as that's where you go to heal/repair/learn new spells/accuse each other of being idiots. The interesting twist (other than having a base that moves) is that it can be attacked! Especially if the players start some kind of trouble and lead their enemies back to it, which happened once and spurred one of the biggest fights of the campaign, leaving the bot mobile but pretty heavily damaged. They learned form their actions, but they did enjoy getting to unleash some of the big guns and bigger missiles on the thing, so secretly I don't think they regretted it.

Managing players was easy enough - somebody can't make it? They're sleeping on the bot. New character? They are passing through the same area / a local / running from the law/ suffering a mechanical breakdown and agree to help out on the expedition. There was payment up front and at the end of the mission as this was a job, but money in Rifts isn't always a huge motivator, but XP's and knowledge, gear, and interesting types of ammunition (nuclear weapons) can be.

It was an interesting array of characters like the crazy who was severely claustrophobic so she slept in a tent bolted down to the top of the robot and the glitter boy who liked to drive his own truck alongside the bot (with his suit in the back). Along the way they fought demons, raiders, giant robots, vampires, superheroes, renegade wizards, and in a gladitorial arena somewhere in what used to be Tennessee.

We did eventually make it to Detroit (and among other things they nuked Windsor - sorry, but they had a good reason) but the game fell apart before we could make the trip back.

Looking back I think this kind of game works pretty well with Rifts because the power levels are all over the place and while rapid ground and air travel is easily arranged, enemies have all of those options too. Limiting things to a set region might work too but the moving base opens up more and keeps them from mapping everything from the air on Day 1.

One thing with running Rifts of any kind is forget about balance - it doesn't really matter. In a sandbox game the less powerful characters can actually shine as the Wilderness Scouts and Rogue Scientists have an environment where their abilities are extremely useful. That said, having a giant cannon with a range over a mile and a swarm of missile with double that range ready to go is still very comforting. In fact it gives your weapon-heads plenty of room (and likely plenty of reason) to cut loose. Yes the system can be a mess but once you stop trying to fix it things get easier to live with and the DM and the players can have a lot of fun.

Bringing it Back Online

Well, it's been a few months but it's time to get things back online, spin up the FTL, climb out of the hole, re-ignite the forge,  and get the blog going again.

Catching Up:

• Westworld! It's back and so far is looking good. I was concerned that they might not be able to match the first season and the total lack of knowledge we had - I mean, surprises are tougher once we know what's going on - but so far they seem intent on revealing even more about the park's place in the world and I am liking it all so far.
• Ready Player One! Saw it, liked it, still haven't read the book. As pretty much the exact target demo for this movie I appreciate it quite a bit but it's not a Star Wars/Raiders/Iron Man level event. That said, there's a fight near the end that if you're a fan of various Japanese pop culture things - like say, Godzilla - that you will never see anywhere else and that alone pretty much made the movie for me. 
• Pacific Rim 2 - Again I liked it, and again it just didn't quite hit the highest notes for me. The first one felt revolutionary. this one feels like we're just doing some business. I'm not really sure why. Maybe it felt like they could have done more.
• Infinity War - YEAH! Started off strong, didn't waste time with a bunch of exposition, kept Iron Man awesome, put Thor back up to awesome - maybe even moreso than before - and stayed true to what they've been doing for the last ten years. 

Game-wise it was pretty rare thing for a few months but we're firing that up again too. It's pretty much cut down to two games for now:

• Savage Rifts is going again with our first session since January in the books and another one on the way. No pre-planned campaign here, this one is all stuff from my head.
• D&D is rolling again with the Storm King's Thunder game restarted for the first run since December. I had another sessions scheduled but we ran late and ended up playing Smash-Up instead and everyone still had a good time. 
• I'm still playing in Steve's Pathfinder Kingmaker campaign. All is well there.

So I'm running Savage Worlds and D&D 5E which makes me a happy DM as I really like both systems. I expect we will get at least one more option in play for the summer. Reading Freedom City has me itching for a Supers game again, but a second 5E campaign has some attraction as does a second Savage Worlds game - resurrecting our Deadlands campaign probably tops that list. 

Anyway there's the restart update - more to come!

Savage Rifts - Session One!

So ... finally ran my first Savage Worlds Rifts game over the weekend. We had some character building to finish up at the start but after that we covered the ground I wanted to cover so I'm calling it a win.

Part 1 - Character Creation
It's more complex than a normal Savage Worlds game and there's a lot of jumping back and forth within the Rifts player book and over to the SW rulebook. Additionally the various Iconic Frameworks have different effects on the normal character creation process - some replace race, some alter the number of attribute points you get, some alter the skills, so each one would sort of have its own procedure chart if there was such a thing. We managed though and ended up with ...

• A Cyber Knight (Paladin Steve)
• A Glitter Boy (Paladin Steve's 10-yr old son)
• A Juicer (Variable Dave)
• A Dragon Hatchling (Apprentice Blaster)

That's pretty iconic Rifts right there for a 4-man party 

Part 2 - The Opening Scenario

I used (well, re-used) one of my starting concepts mentioned in this post. Specifically, the "Slave Ship" option. They wake up in the dark, stripped of gear, and in unfamiliar and confined surroundings. The ground shudders, the lights flicker, and a previously locked door half-opens, and you're off to the races!

For the GM this is a nicely controlled situation that you can use to introduce players to using various skills, then hand to hand combat, then to ranged combat almost like a tutorial if you wish. Less-disarmable characters (like the juicer) are held in higher security single occupant cells outside the general human "slave pen" and provide another way to try out skills and thinking while getting them free. the whole thing can be mapped out as a flow chart  - you don't even need a map!

For the players this means they have to try out some things without auto-starting with "shoot big gun". I had the human-form dragon, the GB pilot, and the cyber-knight start out in the "gen-pop" pen as they all look like normal humans without some kind of special scan. Admittedly, ridiculously high physical stats make things like forcing open a door much easier but I do want them to get somewhere so this is not really a problem. Our heroes forced the door open, ventured down a hall, found some doors labelled "Special Prisoner Containment" and with the help of some NPC's (I have no serious magic PC's and his restraints were mainly magical)  freed the juicer.  

Part 3 - Combat!

Moving through the next set of doors led to a group of humanoids in armor with pistols and vibro-knives - combat commenced! The basics of combat came back pretty quickly but we were all making wrong assumptions about who or what is or has mega-damage pretty much every round. The knight's Psi-Sword was probably their best weapon (remember that they're all basically naked) until the juicer slapped the pistol out of one crewman's hand, caught it, and then shot him in the face with it - all in the same round! The dragon was the victim of horrendous dice-rolling and did almost nothing during the fight - the wild die doesn't always save you! I'm sure we got some rules wrong here but it helped to shake the rust off. 

Part 5 - Gearing Up!

After this fight they reached some kind of control room that was connected to the armory where all of the prisoner gear was locked up. Several failed hacking attempts and several successful strength checks later they were picking up their gear and some "backups" as well. The Glitter Boy pilot was particularly thrilled at this point. 

Part 6 - The Big Fight

They had several options after getting their stuff back but the ongoing explosions, sounds of firing, and "whoosh" noises from outside led them to make "getting out" a priority. They took an elevator down to the lowest level of whatever they were in, The doors open and ...

... they appear to be in a large flooded room shaped like a U with ships docked on both sides. The elevator opens at the base of the "U" and there is daylight shining in an opening at the top of the "U". It's basically a hangar for waterborne attack craft and most of the attack boats are already gone. There is one still docked near the party and they immediately start after it. 

The boat has two deck gunners warming up their stations and a single full conversion borg watching aft. The juicer takes a shot at him which does very little and the fight is on! The borg gets off one shot with his railgun then the dragon sheds his human form, flies up, and flames the entire deck, setting it on fire, killing the two gunners and shaking the borg. The juicer and the cyber-knight charge in on him and out comes the chain greatsword to test their skill and protection. 

After this brief flurry of actions an armored figure emerges from a different elevator on the other side of the docking bay - a figure wielding a red psi-sword. "Duel of the Fates" fires up out of nowhere as he and the Cyber-Knight take stock of each other. Then the Glitter Boy declares "Everybody Get Down" and unloads the boom gun into the red-saber knight.

The boom gun does a lot of damage and ignores a lot of armor. After the first shot the red knight has taken 4 wounds but managed to soak one (DM bennie) so is still on his feet. We imagined he's just punched full of hole except for a line that perfectly matches where his psi-sword was when the blast hit him. He sneers at the party.

Then the GB fires a second shot and erases Mr. Red Sabre from the planet. Completely.

The juicer, knight, and dragon are all fighting the borg but are having a hard time getting past his armor. They've hurt him but it could be a long fight. Then they all back off and the big gun speaks for the third time and blows the borg into fragments while largely removing the upper deck of the attack boat, The controls are intact as they are inside what was the control cabin or bridge, but the boat is definitely a convertible now. 

They figure out the controls and jet out of the larger ship into the daylight. They spot a shoreline not too far away and speed for it as they watch Coalition SAMAS and skycycles making attack runs on the larger ship where they had been prisoners. They safely make it to land ... but what land?

The Aftermath

I know we mangled the combat rules in that last part as there was a lot going on. Autofire - that could have been a lot nastier if I had thought about it and there were several missed opportunities on both sides to do other cool things. The knight's psi-sword seemed overpowered against the normal crewmen but under powered against the borg. 

The good thing about the "slave ship escape" opening is that it lets me drop them anywhere in the world near a shoreline. The even better thing about ending it just as they land is that I can change my mind now about where they are and they will never even know the difference.

Our youngest gamer was hating life when his character was running around naked but he was cackling with glee once he finally got to fire the big gun. It is every bit as nasty as advertised and it's a medium burst template which means things like the red knight's -1 to be hit power doesn't help as you don't aim at a target, you aim at a spot on the ground, and everything near that spot gets blasted with fragments. It's going to be fun.

Everyone had a good time, including me, so it is going into the rotation. I'm going to re-read the rules and work up some cheat sheets for combat, psi, and magic to make things easier next time. I have the general SW cheatsheets but I want some Rifts-specific ones for this. 

Next time: Strangers in a Strange Land!

Something New for Monday: Savage Rifts - The Books!

The physical copies of the Savage Worlds Rifts books are finally here and I am completely happy with them at this point, that "point" being holding and reading them but not using them in the heat of play. In the kickstarter I went for the hardback versions of the main books because most of my recent Savage Worlds books have been hardcovers. Beyond this ...

• The ref screen is the nice heavy hardcover material and it's in the lower, horizontal format I've come to prefer in my limited use of the things these days. 
• The cards are well done as every single card has a different illustration. I already have a few different decks I'd say are appropriate for a Rifts game but these are the nicest looking of any of them.
• The bennies are surprisingly heavy. It feels more like a stack of coins than a stack of chips. Maybe I just haven't spent enough time in casinos, but I was genuinely surprised at the weight of these things.

Part of the fun with Savage Worlds is the physical part of the game. Props and handouts are nothing new in RPGs but this game makes physical items, beyond just dice, a part of play and it's another opportunity for reinforcing the genre or setting. Poker chips for Deadlands, bullets for Weird Wars, coins for fantasy games, and specially chosen decks of cards can add just a little bit more immersion to the game. Hopefully these will add a little something when I get to run this one. 

Beyond the physical elements I thought I would share some thoughts on the content as well. Between the Player's guide, the GM's guide, and the Foes book the authors do a really good job of covering the setting and providing the tools you need to run and play the game. Experience shows, and presenting a game that is clearly made to be played is a big improvement over a lot of games that to me look more like they are meant to be read. Things like mentioning that class X has a power or piece of gear in the class description only to find no mention of it in the relevant section, talking about certain groups or monsters as common opposition within the setting only to leave them out of the monster section, and describing common but impactful elements of a setting then failing to describe any mechanics for them - these are all common but aggravating flaws in new RPG's in my experience and I am not seeing any of that here. It's written to be used by your players, and there's a lot of common sense. Mechanics for Ley Lines!  Tables for what happens when a rift opens up! "Monster" entries for all of the PC types like Borgs and Juicers and Glitter Boys! A discussion of how money works in Rifts! These are all things that help a GM describe and administer a world as the players start moving through it! Again I haven't run this version yet but I am seeing a lot of those things that came up in Rifts specifically years ago and that come up in games in general covered in the actual game text here. 

Size comparison

A few things I am not overly thrilled about:

• The "Tomorrow Legion" - this is the "Rebellion", the "Round Table". the "Freedom League" of the setting. It's also very new. to the setting as in "created for this book". To me, as such, it sticks out like a sore thumb. One of the interesting wrinkles of the setting has been that there really isn't a pure good-guy faction in the world. The Coalition is xenophobic and does a lot of bad things but they also defend a lot of otherwise defenseless villages from a lot of terrible things. Various other magical groups are more tolerant but they also tolerate demonic summonings and other forms of bad/harmful magic. The cyber knights are a loose (very loose) group of ranger/paladin/lone ranger types but there aren't many of them and they occasionally go bad. This group changes that, especially since they are positioned as THE organization for players to join.
  
  New players will probably think this is grumpy old gamer syndrome  and from a practical point of view it is handy to have a group that the players can jump right into from the start. My counterpoint: we've played this game for 26 years without the "tomorrow legion" and we haven't noticed the lack.  The good thing is that while it's there - and even in the title of the Player's guide - it's certainly not necessary to the setting so I can ignore it and go on.
• "Castle Refuge" - the name of the Tomorrow Legion's base. Really? Could it be any more generic or obvious? It just smacks of not trying very hard. Maybe name it after the founder or a legend or something a little less literal?
• Different Dragon types - the original Rifts book used the dragon types from the Palladium RPG. It made sense as the two were connected. Other types have been added over the years and that's fine. The choices for dragon hatchlings in this book are ... one type. "Flame Wind Dragon Hatchling" is the only choice given. There were of course favorites among the choices in the old book but to only have one option here is a little disappointing. 

Honestly these are minor complaints. The whole game is a triumph in design, execution, and inter-company cooperation. It looks great and I can't wait to play it.

A Great Character Background Generator for Rifts

I doubt he was thinking of the Rifts when he wrote it but Jeff Rients has written something that fits it perfectly. The Why Did You Become An Adventurer Table . If you're stuck for an idea take a look.

Campaign Thinkin's and the "Tour of RPG's"

The Deadlands kickstarters had me looking back at my Pinnacle Downloads page and my Deadlands folder here and I have a really large amount of material for that game. From maps to one-shot adventures to full-blown campaigns I have a lot of good stuff to work with in the game. That's not counting a step back into the original edition, that's just Reloaded. If they put out as much supplementary material for Good Intentions as they did for Stone and a Hard Place I will be swimming in PDFs. It's a good problem to have.

Good material begs to be played. I have an irregular game of Deadlands with two of the Apprentices when they're available and it's a lot of fun but going back through this stuff makes me wish I had a regular group blasting through this stuff.

Naturally this also had me looking over the Savage Rifts material as well and since the Kickstarter ended there has been a lot of material pushed out for it as well. My players are already asking when we're going to play it. I'm going to try and work in  a one-shot or short adventure soon, hopefully this month, and see how it plays. If it goes well I expect it to be fighting for a slot next to Pathfinder and the Superhero game I keep promising myself we will run. Again, it's a good problem to have.

This is not a new problem. At one point years ago I threatened to run the "Tour of RPG's" for a year: We would play a different RPG every month. I would schedule up to 3 sessions each month:

• Intro, Character Creation, and Kickoff
• Meat of the adventure
• Finale, Wrap-up, and Review

 This would let us get our feet wet and do a little more than a one-off with each game. Right now I think I would propose ten games and keep two months for a Bonus Round with two of the games we liked best.

There is of course the question of "which ten games?" but that's a fun question, not a bad one. Heck, I could probably run ten different Savage Worlds games and have a pretty good year.:

1. Deadlands
2. Hell on Earth
3. Pirates of the Spanish Main
4. 50 Fathoms
5. Necessary Evil
6. Evernight
7. Slipstream
8. Star Wars (homebrew)
9. Day After Raganrok
10. Weird Wars (Probably WW2 but Rome and Vietnam are options too)

That's with just a glance at my folder -  there are additional options. I have one-shots for almost all of those which would easily be playable in a night so we could get in 3 small adventures at least, maybe more. I'll take breadth over depth if that's a better choice for my group.

The more I look at this list the more I like the idea. I wonder if I could set a once-a-month session to do this just for a one-off without disrupting our ongoing Pathfinder game? Hmmm, have to see.

My other choices for a once-a-month thing like this would be ICONS or Marvel Heroic - minimal prep and a system that's fairly easy to grasp in play would make this easier. "A Year in the Marvel Universe" or "Atomic City 2017" would make a nice campaign framework or this kind of thing. Genre-jumping with Savage Worlds or going all-superheroes would both make it easier to handle player comings and goings than the usual serial campaign approach.

More to come on this.

Campaign Status and the What's Next Conundrum

If you're a GM who's running an ongoing campaign you know there is some pressure to have some idea of what's happening "next" - next session, next month, next year, etc. In a heavily plotted campaign it's somewhat easier to manage as there's a plot to follow. With a sandbox campaign you might have the local region sketched out and some idea of what's going on there. You have to be careful though because players have a tendency to wreck detailed plans as fast as you can come up with them. My approach is not to waste time on a lot of detail for more than the next session or two and just have an outline, a sketch, of what's going on where and how the players might stumble into it. For me, the sweet spot is "I know where we are and I have some idea of where we might go next".

Right now the existing campaigns are in a pretty good place:

• With Pathfinder we are working our way through an adventure path - no worries there. We'll be playing it for another year most likely.
• With d6 Star Wars I know where they are going at the end of the current hyperspace jump and I have an idea of what is there. No worries here either. This will be a largely player-driven space sandbox with no particular destination in mind on my part. 
• With Deadlands the Apprentices are in the middle of an adventure - a short one, but still - so the next session or two is pretty straightforward. Long term we will probably investigate some of the published adventures.
• With ICONS I have an adventure I want to run so when we get time and interest that's what we will do.  It should be a single session so it will continue our nicely episodic approach to that game. Down the road I have several adventures I like plus some homebrew ideas to explore. 
• With M&M I also have an adventure I want to run. It is not a single-session type and will probably take 5 or 6 to complete. The trick is finding a window where all of the players who start it could continue to meet every week or two in order to finish it. I really want to run it and I don't want it to fall apart or have a 3-month break in the middle so I'm being picky about starting it. It may be an "intermission" between the Pathfinder AP books 3 & 4. 
• Marvel Heroic is one we only play every once in a while but we always have a really good time when we do. The good thing is that I have a definite (though pretty flexible) campaign in mind for it and we are ready to start the second chapter of that the next time we play. Plenty of material ready to go!
• The best thing about Savage Worlds apart from the system itself is the plot point campaigns - typically it's a setting, a campaign outline, and supporting adventures all in one book. It means I always have "one in the chamber", ready to go, for at least six different campaigns.  

Before anyone gets too jealous let me say a lot of these games are not on any regular schedule. We played Star Wars d6 twice in July, and if we're lucky we will work in another session labor day weekend, and I'm not sure when the next one will be between then and Thanksgiving. The boys are still excited about it, I just don't have all 3 of them here very often. We had our second or third Deadlands session of the year then too, and the last Marvel game was in February. I tend to have one or two games running on any kind of regular schedule and the rest drop in when we can manage it.  

Other games on the horizon are a little less set:

• For FFG Star Wars I have a pretty good idea of where and how I want to start and where I want to go after that but a lot of it will depend on actually getting a game started and seeing what the players want to do. I could probably summarize it as a 12-episode outline with some notes but that might be getting a little carried away at this point. 
• The DCC RPG has a lot of published adventures but no particular, expressly stated setting. I have chosen one to use as a starting point (probably one good session) and then one more as a follow-up (probably 1-2 more good sessions). I figure 3 sessions of material is plenty for a new game. After that we will have to see how much everyone likes it and how we want to continue. If I need a world to play in I have a homebrew I have used for Basic/Labyrinth Lord in the past and I would likely just adapt it as it has some similar flavorings. I might also set it in Greyhawk. Not sure, have to see how it goes. 
• Runequest: I have a nice retro-rulebook and an idea of what I would like to do with it for a session or two. That's enough to get a game going.
• For Trek I have a fairly solid idea on where to start for a Next Gen campaign and I'm working on a TOS idea too.  

The odds that I will run multiple sessions of all 4 of these before the end of 2016 is slim. I'd like to at least have a try-out session of all of them but even that is tricky. 

The real conundrums:

• Savage Rifts: The rules look great and I have a bunch of material ... and that's the problem! I wrote up my previous experiences with starting a Rifts campaign here but I still haven't decided what I want to do with the next one. There are plenty of options, I just don't know where I want to start things up.
• 5th Edition: I had mixed feelings about my first experience as a player but I want to give it another chance. I don't really like what I've read of the big published campaigns so I'l be homebrewing or converting some stuff that I do like. Part of it is going to be influenced by setting:
• Back to the Realms? Maybe a Return to the Ruins of Adventure again? Give Haunted Halls a try? Finally try that Waterdeep game I think about every few years? Also - when should it take place?
• Greyhawk? I haven't touched it in years but I've had a lot of fun there. Plus most of the classic adventures have a home there. Maybe run the Temple/Giants/Drow in the original setting?
• Scarred Lands? This was my favorite 3E setting and there's a 5E version of it due out soon from a Kickstarter. Because Pathfinder exists I can't see us going back to 3E any time soon and I like running PF in it's own setting so Scarn is not likely to get attention that way either. 
• Homebrew? I have more than a few worlds of my own, some of which were written for D&D games a long time ago. I could dust one of them off and see where it goes. 
• Wild cards: Eberron? Probably not. Dark Sun? Nah. Primeval Thule? That one does look interesting. 

Beyond all this I still have other stuff I want to try. I'd like to introduce the boys to Traveller and Gamma World. I'd like to run through an old Marvel Super Heroes adventure. I'd like to play some old DC Heroes with the crew. FASA Trek sits there staring at me on the shelf. Champions awaits a rebirth for at least a one-shot. Then by next year we're going to have the Mutant Crawl Classics stuff from that Kickstarter, Freedom City for M&M 3E, a new Star Trek game, and I'm sure there will be a Savage Worlds Kickstarter of some kind because they seem to have at least one every year now. 

Then there are the mini's and the boardgames.

Man, I need more time.

Anyway, there's the present and the future and at least as many questions as answers. The good thing is that in between all of the grown-up stuff, work. relationships, and all of the kid stuff we still manage to find time to have fun with this stuff too. 

Themed Card Decks for Savage Worlds

With the likelihood of some Savage Worlds games in my future I started looking over my cards and bennies and decided it was time to expand my horizons. One of the overlooked fun elements of Savage Worlds is the physical objects that are part of the game - cards for initiative (and occasionally other things) and some kind of tokens for the bennies. I decided early on to have different decks for different games but I've let it slide as our SW playing time has gone down. Recently, though, I've started looking again.



For Deadlands:

This is really just the backs and the jokers but it looks right at home in a wild west game. Deadlands uses poker chips and a slightly different system for bennies so it all goes together nicely.



For Deadlands Hell on Earth:

These distressed cards look right at home in a post-apocalyptic game. Top of that list with Savage Worlds is Hell on Earth. They would work well for a Fallout or Savage Twilight 2000 game too. Twilight 2K uses a card-based NPC motivation system so they could be used nicely with the original game in that way too.  I especially like that the effect is front and back, though Lady Blacksteel just looked at them and asked why you would pay money for a deck of cards that look like you just picked them up off of somebody's dirty floor. Not everyone appreciates great ideas...



For Weird War II:

There's a story behind these involving WW2 POWs and smuggled maps on cards which is cool. I also think it's interesting that the backs look like a typical deck of cards but the fronts are the difference here. My main interest is the extra military look which adds to a military game like Weird War 2 or Tour of Darkness. These would work for Twilight 2000 as well.



For Supers:

There are a ton of superhero decks out there, villains too. The face cards are all Avengers but the number cards have a nice effect on them too. Plus, they're JUMBO!

For super types I like to use larger than normal cards. I had a giant deck for Necessary Evil but it wasn't themed. These are about 1/3rd wider and 1/3rd taller than a normal deck - enough that you notice it but not game show sized and awkward to handle at the table. I've been thinking about dusting off some Atomic City Stories for a run in Savage Worlds and these cards would be perfect. For NE I am looking at some other options.



For Savage Rifts:

Waterproof cards have been around for a while but if you don't spend time on a boat you may not know about them. They're made of plastic - thinner than a credit card but still with a different feel than normal cards. They also have a silvery, high tech sheen to them when you stack them up. I think they would fit well with Rifts and its heavy tech themes.

I also think they would work well for Star Trek. There are a bunch of Trek decks out there if you want pictures from the shows and movies, but if you want something less series-specific that still looks like it might be from the Trek universe, I think these are a good choice. They're probably good for any science fiction game.

Now none of these are essential for running a game of course, but for a system that has a tactile element to it why not go that extra step and tie it all together. This is one of the cheapest ways to add some flavor to your game. These card decks run around 5 bucks and are all over Amazon and eBay if you can't find some locally. I'm looking at some dice and bennie options as well for certain games to complete the theme - more on that next week.