Laying Some Groundwork for Necessary Evil

 

As much as I am enjoying the DCC campaign - and being a player for a change - I did commit to running NE as the next big game so it's time to start digging into it. I have tried to run it twice before - my notes say 2010 and 2014 - though we did not finish it either time. 

The first one we made it maybe halfway through. It was a lot of fun with an interesting mix of characters and encounters. The concept is glorious and everyone was enthusiastically on board with it with the brutes going around bashing objects and aliens and the vampire charming everything in sight. Most of them went into City of Heroes and made character portraits . This was one of our earlier runs with Savage Worlds for a longer term campaign and it worked really well. We eventually had too many schedule interruptions and had to put it on hold.

The second run was shorter and I was distracted trying to adapt it to Paragon City, the City of Heroes MMORPG setting, as we had all played it and had a ton of screenshots and would give us a reason to revisit something we all loved after its shutdown in 2012. Most of the players were the same and we carried over a few of the same characters but generally treated it as a reboot of the campaign. Looking back through my notes had me tempted to try the same thing for this new run but I'm going to hold off, run this one in its original setting, and see how it goes. If I get a chance to run this another time with a different mix of players then I might give that option a try. Plus with the game back online screenshots would be easy to work in as needed.

For this run though I am going to focus mainly on the adventure in the book and in the setting as it is written. Now the core of the campaign is the set of 11 Plot Point adventures that form the links that connect the whole thing together. You need to work them in as they are the spine of the game. Beyond that there are 25 other "Savage Tales" that can be worked in during the campaign to really flesh it out. Then of course there are whatever side adventures or shenanigans you cook up for your players or that they cook up for themselves. I don't feel the need to use all of them so I will pick out 10-12 that I like and start figuring out how to work them in - some might fit better in a certain sequence, others might be useful as a reaction to something else in the campaign. Assuming we're looking at each of these taking around one session then I'd like to start with around 25 sessions worth of material reviewed and ready - a rough outline for how the game might go. If the players are really into it then I can always work in more and if it starts to drag I can drop some side chapters and focus in on the main event. 

Action-wise the PCs start off being "recruited" to join a resistance movement against alien invaders in Star City, an island city with some unusual qualities off the east coast of the U.S. As things progress they get more deeply involved, make some friends and some enemies, and become more and more of a concern to the local alien warlord. There is a lot of freedom in that middle part of the campaign. They are super-villains so things can get pretty ridiculous but trying not to pull down the entire alien invasion force gives an incentive to keep some of it quiet at least. Eventually things come together and a confrontation is inevitable. 

I'm going to be running low on "generic superhero art" before I even start this campaign ...

Now I will say here that I do not like the official finale of the campaign. I never have and part of what I will be noodling on is coming up with some other options for it that I like better - we will just have to see how that goes.

So as I finish up reading back through the material I need to put together an initial outline, get the bad guy stats printed out, look at my cheat-sheet options, review my properly themed Savage Worlds assets*, get the players minds rolling on their characters, and think about how I want to kick things off. Also have to think about doing an online recap or not like Obsidian Poral. 

Anyway, more to come here. 

*I'm not a big "props" guy with my RPGs but Savage Worlds does draw me in a bit with the trappings built into the game system itself just begging to be themed for a campaign. Plus cards and bennie-type trinkets are cheap and widely available. 

My RPG List Ten years On - 2016 vs. 2026

 

I keep track of my RPG and miniature purchases as I go each year and I have done this for more than a decade. I was updating my list for this year and it occurred to me I ought to go look at what I was buying and what I was playing and compare it to now plus mix in some hindsight.

What I was playing:

• The year started off with some Marvel Heroic
• Most of it was spent running my Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous campaign into the ground
• Lots of talk about the new Savage Worlds Rifts books that were getting Kickstarted back then. Lots of Savage Worlds talk in general from cards to using it with different settings.
• Managed to work in some Deadlands and some d6 Star Wars
• Later we managed to work in some FFG Star Wars
• Holiday time meant it was time for the Time of Crisis in Mutants & Masterminds!

It's funny that it took me ten years to finally finish Time of Crisis - at least it was with a couple of those same players! Otherwise this year it's been playing DCC and then hopefully in a bit it will be back to some Savage Worlds. I do have some consistency I guess even a decade later.

Miniatures-wise it was Eldar ... so much Eldar. This was the year I built what is still the core of my Eldar army.

What I was picking up:

• Perhaps not surprisingly it was a lot of Savage Worlds stuff
• There was also quite a bit of Pathfinder
• A fair amount of d6 Star Wars
• A little FFG Star Wars - they were still putting out new material then
• Some Mutants & Masterminds books
• Some DCC books and dice
• A few 5th edition items

It is good to see that most of what I was adding was being driven by what I was playing or thinking about playing. This year was effectively the end of that Pathfinder campaign as it just ran out of gas after 3 + years. I officially ended it in January 0f 2017.  Both Star Wars games and M&M and Deadlands remained intermittent occasional games for years.

For 2026 so far it's been a few DCC books, catching up on some 5.5 D&D books, and then weirdly picking up some old GURPS books. I don't know exactly what bit me there other than some long talks with Blaster about old school non-D&D grittier systems where I mentioned GURPS as a very different flavor of fantasy campaign compared to modern D&D. I then went to look for it on my shelf and at some point, maybe in a move, I lost half of my old GURPS books - I didn't even have an old 3rd edition core book anymore. So I went on a tear for a bit here recently filling in some of that stuff - you know Magic, The Grimoire, High Tech, Ultra Tech, Supers, a core book or two. They are not particularly pricey especially if you can find several of them in a lot and I wanted them back on the shelf.

Considering how much of what I am doing now is similar to (or the same damn thing) I was doing then I guess I can claim a "consistency" medal. Some might whisper "stuck in a rut"* but I prefer to think of it as being at a point in my life where I know what I like and I prefer to spend my time there. I still do a little exploring now and then. We try new games via one-shots or short limited campaigns, get a consensus on them, and then either put them aside or consider them for a bigger campaign down the road. I see people online struggling to find people and places to play - well, I have time, a place, and a group of friends that are interested so let's spend most of that time playing stuff we like. It makes sense to me, anyway.

* Considering the number of games I've run and played over the last few years it's a pretty wide rut.

Deadlands: Dark Ages Crowdfunding in September

 

So they have been talking about this one for a while now but Pinnacle made it official this week: the next setting for Deadlands is coming next month. Weirdly enough I have mixed feelings about this one. First, let's review what's out now:

• Deadlands: The Weird West - this is the original setting and the one where we met the whole concept of the Reckoners creeping in around the edges of reality, Servitors helping them do it in exchange for power, and a need for people to take a stand against them. It's one of the greatest settings in RPG-dom and one of my personal favorites. It gives a good set of reasons for cowboys and other old west types to fight monsters without having to transport them to a D&D campaign and it is brilliant. We've had original flavor, a second edition of that, a d20 version, a GURPS version, and then a couple of editions for Savage Worlds. There is a ton of supporting material, much of it with a regional focus so you can pick up the core book, figure out what area of the west speaks to you, grab something on that and get to rollin'. I've run multiple campaigns with it and will run more in the future.
• Deadlands: Hell on Earth  - The other original system game and the one that bumped Gamma World and Twilight 2000 aside as my favorite overall post-apocalyptic RPG setting. It was also ridiculously well-supported and made the jump to d20 and then Savage Worlds as well. I haven't run nearly as much of this as I have Weird West games but I want to. I suspect it has been overshadowed a bit these last few years by Rifts as the other big post-apoc setting that seems to get a lot more attention. I ran through the basics here, Reloaded here,  and then the supplements here, and here.
• Deadlands: Noir - In my opinion the first big misstep for Deadlands. It's the 1930's as the future of the Weird West setting which seems on the surface like a fairly rich vein with gangsters and weirdness (to start with) but from what I've seen it largely ignores the world-hopping Indiana Jones type options which would really amp it up. This is in keeping with the Deadlands games as a line being focused on America, particularly western America, and not really going beyond Canada or Mexico as the more distant parts of the setting. It makes sense in the prior two games but here we have a functioning society, the potential for international intrigue, and airplanes! This is the one setting book for Deadlands that I do not own as the concept just never clicked and never pushed my buttons for wanting to run a campaign - given the chance I'd rather run either of the two other games. There are only a few supporting products for it so I assume I am not the only one who felt the same about it. I remember thinking it sounded super-niche-y when they first announced it and I've seen nothing since to change my mind.
• Deadlands: Lost Colony - A spin-off from Hell on Earth that is set on a distant space colony that is dealing with ... a lot of the same problems we were dealing with in Weird West and the Wasted West. It's pretty self-contained as it's cut off from earth - it's more Weird West with lasers or tech guns instead of six-shooters and native aliens instead of native Americans, plus more Reckoner trouble. I appreciate it's potential for being the place where you finally finish off the Reckoners but I always saw it as more of a supplement for HOE than as a setting on it's own. I've never run this. I likely only would as the finale to a Wasted West campaign where you could really close things out. 

Such a great take on this genre

So there we have two great settings and two less-great settings in my eyes. Now we get the apparent awakening of the Reckoners in the new prequel where we're going back to Camelot to fight them:

From the Weird West to the Dark Ages

Dark magic rises in the time of kings and knights.

Ride with Merlin’s Paladins, battle Morgana’s minions, face the Great Wyrms, and confront horrors from beyond history. From Pictish undead to the Cult of Dagon, the Reckoners are stirring for the first time -- and Britain’s fate hangs in the balance.

Dynamic melee combat, legendary heroes, ancient ruins, and terrifying abominations await in Deadlands: Dark Ages, a brand-new setting for Savage Worlds from the creators of Deadlands, Deadlands: Noir, Deadlands: Hell on Earth, and Deadlands: Lost Colony.

Well, I am just not sure how to feel about this. Sure, it's a new Deadlands setting and there will probably be some cool stuff in it but ... it's a fantasy campaign. The very heart of tabletop RPGs! Calling it "saturated" is an understatement. My initial question is "what makes it different from all of the other fantasy rpg's out there and especially all of the other Savage Worlds fantasy games out there? Hellfrost, Beasts & Barbarians, and Shaintar are off the top of my head, not to mention Pinnacles own Pathfinder conversion line! I get that it's "Deadlands" so we will be fighting Reckoners and Servitors on some level but is that enough to really set this one apart?

I'm also not at all sure about that note on "Merlin's Paladins" - I don't think I've ever seen it phrased that way. Is this post-Camelot's fall? But it sounds suspiciously like a forced PC-aimed do-gooder organization which is something I am not a fan of in my games. Hopefully it's not "the PC organization" but we will see. 

Such a great update on the original

I know they've been working on and wanting to do this for a long time and Mordred does tie in to some other Deadlands history - don't ask, but it's a thing - so I get the need to get it out there. Speaking as a longtime fan of Deadlands and Savage Worlds too I'm just not all that fired up about this one. I'm also not lit up with anticipation for yet another Pinnacle crowdfunding effort - especially when I am still waiting on the last Deadlands campaign for "The Abominable Northwest" which was supposed to deliver books this month but has been delayed, and still waiting on "Rifts Europa" for Savage Worlds as well which is supposed to deliver in October. Then there is their about-to-complete Kickstarter for Doom Guard which I did not buy into but which is still being managed by this same team of people along with a couple of other efforts. I know crowdfunding is the way things work these days for small publishers but it still feels like there are a lot of balls in the air right now.

It's also up against the "if I decide to run a new Savage Worlds campaign am I going to run this over Deadlands, Hell on Earth, Rifts, Necessary Evil, or one of the other campaigns I already have on the shelf?" Not to mention other RPGs in general.

Maybe as some details emerge I will feel better about it. Time will tell.

Deadlands: The Flood - Things I Could Have Done Better as a GM

I had one last topic I wanted to cover here after running the latest Deadlands campaign to completion - what I could have done better. Anytime I have a campaign wind down I inevitably think of some things I could have done differently - and likely better. Some of this is perspective looking back but sometimes I realize things and try to course-correct while the campaign is still running. 

• System Mastery - I've been running and playing Savage Worlds to a lesser or greater degree since it was published over 20 years ago. Casually, I know it like the back of my hand. When it comes to certain details though I rely heavily on my players to share their knowledge as things come up in play. I could be better at this and next time I will be.
• There are some general rules that get tweaked when a new edition comes out like Shaken, the various conditions that can be imposed, or how backlash works, and those tend to catch me the first few times they come up. The chase rules change with every edition and those take a while to re-learn each time. 
• Edges and Flaws are where a lot of the chrome comes in with this system and they get revised in every edition - sometimes even within a single edition - and more than once I have run a monster or NPC as though one of these worked like it did the "old" way. 
• Powers are another area that gets tweaked quite a bit. The power itself may not be dramatically different but the extras and options often do and I should really pay more attention to these kinds of details before I start throwing dice with them.  

Lots of good pics from movies and TV out there for a western campaign

• NPCs - I made an effort to individualize NPCs in this campaign and made sure to have images to show my players for many of them and this campaign was good about having names for almost every NPC one could encounter, but I am not sure many of them really stuck with my players. This is strictly a thing in my head, not something they have mentioned, but I do wonder about it after the fact. Anywhere the party is going to spend a lot of time it would be beneficial to work on more of this in advance.
• For example, the Shan Fan run has a lot of distinctive NPCs built-in as it's a core part of the storyline here and I think it went pretty well but the Perdition election arc is presented in much less detail and I did not really fill out the townspeople beforehand like I could have done. It would have made for some more memorable characters at least.
• That said my own award for "unusual NPC of the campaign" goes to Born in a Bowl's severed finger which had a definite personality while it was with the party. Holding a grudge against the character who botched the knife work that created it gave us some humor opportunities that most campaigns don't see.

• The Setting - Deadlands has some very distinct qualities as a setting, both mechanically and just as a supernatural old west campaign. I think I hit a lot of these in play but I could have done more.
• I did not emphasize the classic tale-tellin'-to-offset-the-fear-level part of play that figured a lot in old (and in some new) Deadlands adventures. I don't think my players missed it but I could have paid more attention to he fear levels of various areas and made that a bigger part of things. 
• The Flood in particular is also heavily affected by Famine and I could have played this up more too as it's supposed to permeate the whole region. It was a factor in one of our adventures regarding the only decent ranch in the area, and it did come up in talking about the appeal of Lost Angels food program to the common man, but I don't feel like I made it ever-present as they were traveling through the state. I don't know that the campaign suffered from it really, but it's a part of the flavor of the campaign area that I could have used more frequently.

Those are my take-aways from this one - now on to the next game!

Savage Worlds - Deadlands as a Game Setting

 

I wanted to make one more point after wrapping up our campaign and that was to discuss Deadlands as a setting for an RPG because after running these 30+ sessions I am  somewhat unexpectedly - not tired of it. I've thought about why so let's talk about that.

I've been picking up Deadlands books since the game was released in the late 90's - 1st edition, 2nd edition, and multiple Savage Worlds editions. There are a lot of Deadlands books out there with campaign material in them but each edition has done a pretty good job of presenting the whole setting in just one of the core books. It was "The Quick and the Dead" first, then the Marshal's Guide, Then Deadlands Reloaded covered it and added some updates, and now the current "Weird West" book paints a nice broad picture with some more timeline updates and some changes to the past as well. 

The early material had a healthy dose of that popular 90's thing "The Metaplot". In this case the Reckoner's machinations to turn the world into a deadland by upping the fear level everywhere over time. This would enable them to enter the world and do even worse things to it directly. 

One of the fun parts of the Deadlands settings is that the Deadlnads: Hell on Earth campaign is a depiction of what happens if they succeed and it's rare to see a game company put that kind of thing out as a real product. 

The general direction in a Deadlands campaign is the idea that the PC's will become aware of this larger scheme at some point and take an interest in opposing these plans. That's the big picture, anyway. In the meantime your PC's can do pretty much whatever they want. 

• Want to do classic western things? There's a campaign built around a cattle drive (Blood Drive). There's a big adventure built around figuring out what's going on in one town and solving their problem (Trouble at Headstone Hill). Plus there are various shorter adventures that involve tracking down criminals and getting into gunfights.
• Want to focus on particular parts of the west? The four big plot point campaigns from Reloaded edition each focus on a different region of the U.S. with various complications tied to both the power groups in the area and the particular reckoner casing the most trouble. The Great Maze is awesome but classic Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City are all pretty amazing too. 
• Looking for a particular type of adventure? Gunfights are certainly easily available but there are creepy horror encounters, political intrigue, and chases/hunts out there too. A little bit of online research can guide you to an adventure that will likely cover a variety of opportunities for any determined posse out there.

Just as an example in our Flood campaign we opened with a gunfight, then got involved in a train derailment and robbery, tangled with some religious fanatics, did a prison break, defended a ranch from raiders & rustlers, spent a fair amount of time involved in Shan Fan triad politics, snuck into a pirate city and blew up an ironclad, came in 2nd place in a martial arts tournament, helped defend an area during a local warlord's invasion of a city, and helped set up and run fair elections for mayor in a new and growing town on the coast of the maze! Note that this is outside of the main plot of traveling Deadlands California to set up the conditions for the Flood that will wipe out a major evil - these were the things that were happening "along the way".

To me a good setting should get a GM excited about the opportunities they see and Deadlands does this every time I dig into it thinking about running a new campaign.  A lot of what I have listed above is tied to published adventure material but that's not a limiting factor. Just looking at the general setting notes followed by a flip through the critters section has me jotting down notes for future runs and it has been this way for years This last campaign let me finally pay off some of my notes like this from years ago.

The last point I will share is that I ran this game for about two years and there is still probably a third of the "Flood" book that I didn't even touch. It's full of cool stuff and I ended up not having a good place to use some of it as the campaign developed - but I still want to. That, to me, is a sign of a strong adventure. I think of all of these creatures, locations, and NPC's I didn't use and I can't help but think that we need to revisit this one at some point, even if we wait a while in between.

So there's my ringing endorsement of Savage Worlds as a system, Deadlands as a setting, and The Flood as an adventure. I normally am tired of a setting and a campaign by the time I wrap them up and ready to move on but this time I was not and it's a very welcome surprise and I am looking forward to my next walk through this world.

Savage Worlds Combat

 

I'm pretty happy with Savage Worlds as a system and I am glad that it seems to be more popular than ever now. One area I do see people questioning online is combat - particularly initiative and the damage system. Typically these people are coming over from D&D and don't really grasp that there are other ways of doing things but let's talk about these two things:

Initiative is done in Savage Worlds with cards. The GM deals out a card to each player and the high cards go before the low cards. This is a holdover from original Deadlands and Rail Wars but it just works. It's a physical reminder of when you go - once you go you toss in your card. Want to delay? Just hold onto it until you want to go. The game supports this mechanically through related edges - want to be faster? There's an edge that lets you take 2 or even 3 cards when initiative is dealt and you keep the best. For a level-headed character you can take an edge that lets you trade in your card if it's below a certain value. 

And yes, initiative is dealt every round. No it's not a big delay and yes, we played D&D for at least 20 years this way until 3E changed it to static initiative so it's not some radical new idea.

Finally the cards are another physical object that can help enforce the genre for your game. I've posted about it before but there is almost always some kind of card deck out there that is thematically related to whatever your running - pirates, cowboys, soldiers, superheroes, well-known space setting IP's ...

As an example of the impact this approach has on play I typically had 5-6 players per session in the Deadlands campaign I just finished. One started off with the Level-Headed edge, then pretty soon another one had it, and by the end one had the basic edge while two had the improved version and one of them had Quick as well. This means on a combat round with only 5 of them I am dealing out 10 cards for the players, plus (typically) 1-3 for the opposition, with one player possibly re-drawing several more cards. Jokers are an important card in Savage Worlds and this approach let my players mill the action deck by 10-15 cards per round from a 54 card deck. This is double what a normal party would be doing and it meant those Jokers popped up very quickly. Every Joker drawn is a package of "go first", "+2 for all actions that round", and a bennie for everyone on top of that! Towards the end there were combats where both Jokers were drawn in the same round - and that was not a good round for the bad guys. The existence of these mechanics opens up an interesting set of options for a player to explore that you don't see in other games. 

Damage in Savage Worlds is the other "rough spot" I see - mainly because it's not like D&D and does not use hit points. There is not a direct "wearing down over time mechanic" like that really. A deliberate design goal was that combatants would be up, down, or off of the table with no tracking of hit points or health. Most opponents are taken out by a single wound. Only Wild Cards, a status reserved for the PC's and major opponents, can take up to 3 wounds and still be standing. There is a "Shaken" status to indicate some kind of degraded status and there are optional rules for an intermediate type of opponent that can take multiple wounds but is not a wild card but that's it. 

Attacks involve a hit roll which, if successful, will generate a damage roll - so far just like D&D right? The next step though is to compare that roll to the target's Toughness. Meeting it or exceeding it = Shaken, exceeding it by 4 or more = a Wound for each increment of 4. It's that second part that really throws people at first. There are some nuances to it but it's really not -that- complicated.  

However this sometimes freaks people out as they bang away on an opponent and seemingly do nothing for several rounds. You might Shake them, or inflict some kind of condition with a power, but it bothers some people that there's no counter ticking down with every hit. This despite the truth that in D&D those hit points flying off have no impact on most NPCs or Monsters either - until the last one. In Savage Worlds if you are fighting an opponent who can take multiple wounds then each one of those will inflict a penalty on actions that creature takes. There are edges to offset these penalties, and powers that can do the same thing  -"Numb" was a regular player in our campaign - but again that's another way to flavor a character or monster. 

The closest thing to hit points in a Savage Worlds game are bennies. When someone takes damage they can spend a bennie to try and soak the damage - it's not a sure thing - and the supply of bennies is limited. Over the course of this campaign  I was reminded again and again that the GM's bennies are effectively the big bad's supply of hit points as once those ran out the bad guys tended to drop fairly quickly. There is always the temptation to use them as "rage bennies" to reroll an attack or damage roll, but most of the time you want to keep your opposition around for another round of troubling the party. 

This just seems to be a hard thing for people coming in from D&D in particular to get over. Shadowrun and Mutants & Masterminds have some similarities to this approach where you are comparing damage to another number and then generating results based on the comparison. It's different from D&D for sure but it works just fine and is a lot of fun.

So in my opinion combat in Savage Worlds does live up to the Fast, Furious, and Fun tagline. 

• I don't think I had a fight last more than 7 rounds in my entire campaign and once players have a little bit of experience the pace of those rounds is pretty quick. D&D 3E and Pathfinder in particular tended to have long combats made up of long rounds where players might get bored waiting for their next chance to act. That was never a problem here. Also, in spite of this faster flow, combat is still rewarding as many different approaches and tactics can be tried - it's not a static regimen of "hitting for X damage" round after round as you whittle away at the dragon.
• Furious comes into it when characters are doing things every round - there's not a lot of need for multi-round actions. Also, the rules allow for multiple actions beyond the basic move + act as much as a player wants to push things by imposing a -2 cumulative penalty to additional actions with no actual cap on how much one can try.
• Fun is a factor with interesting abilities from Edges and Powers plus mechanical things like manipulating the cards and facing tough choices on how to spend those bennies when things hit the fan. Also, exploding dice - particularly damage dice -  add some excitement and occasionally some despair, depending on which side of the roll you are on. 

It's just a really strong system that runs smoothly and is fun to play. I've run it many times over the years and I expect I will be running it again fairly soon. 

Savage Worlds - Post-Campaign Thoughts on Characters

 

I wanted to write this post because I was expecting that after running Deadlands for two years - and having played in a 50 Fathoms campaign before that one - well, I was expecting to be feeling some system burnout. That feeling when the mechanics of a game system start to grate, characters and monsters start to feel samey, and the game's possibilities narrow down to what you've already done. It's a feeling that means it's time to change games for a while. This has happened to me with various versions of D&D, Pathfinder, and Traveller, among other games. Often it comes up near the end of a long campaign.

Unexpectedly though I do not feel this way about Savage Worlds. I've run or played a lot of Deadlands, a little Hell on Earth, quite a bit of Necessary Evil and 50 Fathoms, and a fair amount of Rifts - and that's just the published campaign stuff. There is a bunch more that I want to run from books on the shelf to homebrew ideas that demand attention. The system really does hit a sweet spot for me between playability and flexibility and having characters that are just detailed enough to feel unique. A lot of lighter systems are either OSR where one low level fighter looks a whole lot like another low level fighter or else they use such light mechanics that some kind of trait or tag system is the only differentiator between characters and mechanically they tend to all do the same thing. There's a place for all of these of course but a lot of times I end up wanting a little more crunch to build on for both my players and my NPC's and creatures. Savage Worlds apparently hits that just right for me. 

That said it's not a skinny rulebook anymore. The current Adventure Edition is 200 pages long BUT the biggest section is for building or advancing characters at about 60 pages. The gear section is about 15 pages and that covers from medieval weapons to guns to vehicles to armor. Combat is 10 pages. The powers section is about 30 pages and that's where a lot of the chrome is for certain character types and monsters too. There's a whole section called the Adventure Tool Kit which covers special cases - chases, mass combat, travel, wealth rules - stuff that won't come up every session but is useful to have.  So around half of the book is character-focused rules and the rest is running the game - I think that's a solid balance. Earlier thoughts on it here. 

The main thing for me is that it just runs well - the playability factor is high. Characters have a lot of options but you typically do not need to consult a long list or a long chapter just to do what your character does. Despite being simpler in a lot of ways characters still manage to feel unique. My Deadlands party has a Shaman, a Martial Artist, a Mad Scientist, a Hexslinger, and 3 non-magic using gunslinger types that have each specialized in an area: one is the "put a lot of bullets in the air" guy, one is a sniper (and a bounty hunter), and one is a pistol-focused gunfighter (and a Texas Ranger). That means three of my players could be stepping on each other's toes constantly yet they don't. There is some occasional friendly competition between them and comments when the dice are just not with someone but no one has complained about a lack of options or a lack of mechanical individuality.

The only time there was some mention of a lack of options was at Legendary as there were not a ton of Legendary-specific edges. To be fair though this is where most games will spend the least amount of time - in my experience, anyway - so it's not nearly the problem it could be. Still, there's an area that could be improved. I would especially like to see setting-specific Legendary edges as that would give players something to aim for within a specific  campaign and show what the heavy hitters in a campaign world are supposed to look like. It would also help with flavoring them at the higher tiers.

The way characters are structured and advancement is handled is also a part of this. There is a rough level type structure in that there are 5 character tiers from "Novice" to "Legendary" which are based on the number of advancements the characters have received and stat advancement and certain edges are gated by tier. So while it is pretty open and loose it is possible to gauge a group's power level this way. Also, while there are definite Archetypes in most of the published settings there is nothing as formal as the way classes are handled in most class and level games. There are benefits to specializing in certain skills and combining certain edges to enhance whatever area you want to excel in, but there is nothing mechanically making you do this. The closest thing you see to 3E-style Feat trees are that some edges may have a prerequisite and there may be an "improved" version of a particular edge so you're looking at a string of 3 edges at the most to really dig into something. This means that your character can be good at more than one thing or in one area! Not all games accommodate this. 

The one area the game does restrict to a notable degree is Arcane Backgrounds. This is the magic/psychic/super option where you can have special powers and you can only take one. So your Mad Scientist cannot also be Blessed or a Huckster. I have no problem with this as it serves as both a balancing control (no getting around the particular trappings or restrictions of on AB by taking another), a playability control (no having to figure out any weird interactions between spells or magic items when you're both a wizard and a cleric), and it also enforces some niche protection in a game that is pretty open otherwise. It's one of the absolutes in the system and I've never had a player complain about it. Considering that there are typically few or no restrictions on the kinds of powers you can take with each one, it's not terribly restrictive mechanics-wise. Flavor counts for a lot so under these rules a Blessed doesn't have to be the party healer- he can throw holy fire or turn invisible or whatever else he wants to do.

So throughout this campaign my players never felt constrained in their options and neither did I when it came to NPCs and critters both. Edges, Hindrances, and Powers all provided enough variety, when skinned the right way, that there was plenty of flavor to go around. 

More on some other aspects of the game tomorrow. 

Deadlands: The Flood - Our Finale

 

The City of Lost Angels ... up until Saturday night anyway ...

This weekend we managed to wrap up our Deadlands campaign with an epic finish that I believe left everyone satisfied. The only thing left for the party to do was to shed some blood on the doorstep of Reverend Grimme's grand cathedral in Lost Angels and that's exactly what they did ... eventually. 

If you've read or played the adventure the final piece is presented as a bit of a set run - once the party drops the blood in the right spot Grimme and his 13 ghouls and some fallen angels all rush out of the cathedral and start a fight that has a 13-round timer ticking away before the flood finally hits the place. 

This is not how it went at all ...

My crew was very concerned with trying to survive the earthquake and flood they were about to start and spent quite a bit of time running through various plans to achieve this. Boats were purchased, ironclad acquisitions were contemplated, a ridiculous amount of math was done to calculate how much weight the shapeshifting Indian shaman could carry in his most extreme form - and for how long, and at what speed. I joked that he had turned into a Vulcan at one point because he was "communing with the spirits" quite a bit in this effort. 

There was a whole lot of recon in and around the city too looking for "safe ways in and routes to help them keep a low profile along the way. I emphasized that this was a city open to land and sea trade and not a tightly guarded fortress and eventually they calmed down about it.

In the end they decided they had done all of the planning they could do and said "well we have to go in" and did so.

The Approach ...

To summarize, they used the quiet, stealthy approach to get to the cathedral and then obliterated the exterior guards in two rounds of gunfire, magic and dragon flame - more on that in a minute. Smashing open the front gates they moved through the main space of the church and broke open the rear doors to the inner sanctum where Grimme and his allies were having their annual feast. This is where the fight broke out and where it stayed for about 9 rounds as they blew away the ghouls, the summoned demons, and eventually beat down the Reverend himself ... 

"Sir, there is a dragon in the cathedral ..."

Then they went outside, spilled the blood, flew off towards Perdition, and watched the mighty power of the ocean wash away the center of Grimme's power. 

Yeah it was seriously flipped from the projected finale but it still felt epic and it still worked out. They had no idea what the expected approach was so they did it their way and I loved it.

Grimme's Last Stand (upper left part of the map)

A few points of explanation:

• Unfortunately for the reverend my posse was a couple of advances into Legendary by the end and were both ridiculously powerful and damn versatile. "Only hurt by magic" on the demons didn't mean much when my shootists were using magic bullets (Smite from the Mad Scientist) from a .50 cal rifle and the Hexslinger was throwing her usual ammo-whammy'd shots. 
  
  
• The party had discovered Grimme's original walking stick in the course of their travels and this started off in the hands of the martial artist with his ridiculous skills and super-boosted 30" of movement. This was not super-effective given Grimme's toughness so it was handed over to the dragon during the fight.
  
  
• The dragon ... sigh ... yes my Indian Shaman had the shape change power and at Legendary you can turn into any living creature up to size 10 ... and dragons are size 8. This seems like at least a bit of a limitation but he realized this during on of the last rune-marking efforts where they encountered an undead dragon - which I had placed as it seemed like a wild opponent for one of their last challenges. However, once I had established that dragons could be a thing in Deadlands he immediately jumped on that and I had a PC dragon for at least a little while in each of their last 3 fights. I could have blocked it but it felt a little heavy-handed and they were "legendary" and this was the thing that had wiped out the rest of his tribe so I allowed it. The player loved it and that's rarely the wrong call.
  
  Effectively this meant that the party had a second decent melee combatant as thus far only Wu the martial artist had been filling that role and as the finale approached I thought it wouldn't hurt to have another HTH fighter available. 
  
  Something I did not foresee at the time was that the Reverend's Strength + 1d4 walking stick - the only thing that can actually hurt Grimme as he is immune to physical and magical damage - would end up being wielded by a Strength d12+8  dragon in this final encounter! That said, it was still very much a challenge for even the dragonized shaman to land real wounds on him for a while. Managing to score a single wound meant I would just bennie it away. I eventually ran out of bennies and then the concentrated attention of six legendary characters was more than even the Servitor of Famine could withstand.
  
  
• I had a total of seven players during the run of the game and six of them were present at the end. That was very satisfying. Everyone was on time, in a good mood, and invested in the challenge as they knew this was, one way or another, the end of the campaign - that's how you finish a campaign! We may revisit these characters a little way down the road for a coda but this was the big finish.
  
  
• We managed 33 sessions from September of 2021 through December of 2023. There was a six month gap in there while I packed up, moved, and then unpacked, plus the annual convention crew pause this year, but it works out to about two sessions a month during that time otherwise. That's a nice, sustainable pace I find. Knowing we run 5-6 hours per night that's 150-200 hours of Deadlands and I am not tired of it yet!
  
  This also gave me time to run some other games in between when I had free off-weekends and interested players and that keeps the GM's wandering game-eye satisfied - in this case with d6 Star Wars, FFG Star Wars, WFRP 2E, the Sentinel Comics RPG, the new Marvel game, and ICONS.
  
  
• No PC deaths! I do not think I've ever run a campaign approaching this length without at least one character buying the farm. And I don't mean they were raised from the dead - no one got to the point of needing it in this campaign. The downside is that this denied us the chance to explore the Harrowed rules - ah well, maybe next time.
  
  I chalk this extraordinary resilience up to a group of very experienced Savage Worlds players in this case - there was a Deadlands Japan game one of them was running on a different night that started before and was wrapped up during the run of this game. Plus there was a 50 Fathoms campaign that ran from 2018-2021 that many of us played in as well. I have also run multiple games going back 10+ years from other Deadlands runs to Necessary Evil. System mastery is still a thing and knowing how to make a mechanically effective character in a limited number of advances can be a game-changer.

The Aftermath ...

Over the course of the campaign they fought bandits, undead, corrupted religious fanatics, maze dragons, and some transformed mages ... helped a ghost, ran into Big Trouble in Little Shan Fan, came in second in a martial arts tournament, survived a train crash, blew up an ironclad, and even ran an election for mayor in a small town - that was a first for any campaign I have run!

So there it is - this is the first campaign I have run in quite a while that had a definite end point and it feels good. This is not always my style but I do like having the option and I still think Pinnacle's Plot Point approach is the best way I have found to set these up. 

I have some more things to say in other posts about the system and the setting and some things I could do better if I was running it again but those are for later in the week - for now it was a blast and I am very happy with the whole thing.

Deadlands Campaign Catch-Up

 

Well I have run 29 sessions of my Deadlands "The Flood" campaign and we are close to the end, likely finishing up at session 33 or 34 in the near future. It's been a lot of fun and brought in some new players even as old ones stepped away and one of my challenges will be maintaining that energy with whatever we do next.

We started in September of 2021 with an easy opening, moved into "Comin' Round the Mountain" (an adaptation of the original Deadlands starter adventure) for a couple of sessions to get our feet wet, then rode the rails into California and have been there since session #3. The funny thing is I feel like there are still large areas we could explore further, both inland and in the Great Maze. That said the characters are about to hit Legendary status and so it is time to wrap up their story ... for now anyway.

One interesting note: no character deaths so far! Outside of superhero campaigns it's rare for one of my games to go this long with no one dying. This is especially true of a game where bullets and magic are flying in nearly every session. This has also deprived my players the opportunity to dive into the whole "Harrowed" section of the rules which is unfortunate. Oh well, maybe in the next Weird West campaign!

Now there have been gaps - moving last year and various holiday schedule conflicts have gotten in the way, alongside my determination to run different RPG's on different weekends. I did drop that last part recently as once I realized we were close I decided to let the other games go to ensure we used every opportunity to wrap up the main campaign properly.  

It's been a good run.

Campaign Planning 2023

 

I say 2023 because I am betting this will start later this year though you never know with schedules and complications and I'm not going to rush the Deadlands game to a conclusion. It's good to have a plan though. 

Fair warning: this will pretty much be me thinking out loud about various options, many of which I have outlined before, sometimes years ago on this very blog.  Hopefully it all makes some kind of sense.

I have been running Deadlands "The Flood" since September of 2021with 25 sessions completed. That sounds light to me but there was a 3-month gap at the end of 21 and start of 22 then a 6-month gap last spring/summer as I went house-hunting and then moved into a new place. So when we get going we are pretty consistent but we do have gaps here and there. It has been the main game for the last three years so Savage Worlds has been our main system.

This year I have also run some FFG Star Wars as a side campaign and ran a Sentinels of the Multiverse kick-off session that has thus far only been that one session. 

When we finish the Deadlands game that's probably enough Deadlands for me for a while though I do have plenty of material to run more. After running a particular setting for an extended period I like to  switch to something else even if I know I'll be coming back to it later. It helps me to change perspectives and assumptions.

System-wise I do like Savage Worlds and I have since it was first released but I'll probably change that out too. System mastery is nice but there are a lot of cool games out there and I'd like to spend time with all of them so rotation is important.

That said let's talk about Savage Worlds options: it's probably Rifts. I'd love to run Weird War II, and for some reason Slipstream has been calling out to me lately, but if I turn right back around into this system it will probably be for Rifts. Even now, 30+ years later that game calls to people with all of the character options and setting weirdness and I should probably take another run at it. I have plenty of ideas and there is more than enough setting material new and old for a nice long run. I had a thought recently about converting some adventures from other games that I like to see how it might go - from D&D to Traveller to Twilight 2000. It's definitely a candidate. 

Another candidate would be some kind of old school D&D type game. The Black Hack looks like fun, with Labyrinth Lord or OSE as more traditional options. I might run this as a traditional Town + Wilderness + Dungeons/MegaDungeon setup. I haven't run a fantasy game aside from a one-off last year in a long time and this might scratch that itch. The other thing here is that I don't see this being as much of a long-term campaign as some of the others. Make characters, get our hands dirty running through a few levels, and then consider rotating out. There tends to be less system overhead with games like this so in my experience you get more done per session than some games. I'd play this pretty loosely and let the players choose their path of course, as sandboxy as they want, and try to have a suitable stopping point in mind. 

A smaller contender for a fantasy game would be a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign. This would probably be 2nd edition as I have all of the books and between published adventures and stuff I sketched out years ago I could run for quite a while. It's a fun system and it's not like I don't have the miniatures ... it's just a matter of getting people to try it. 

The other fantasy contender would be a 5E game that would take the classic path of Temple of Elemental Evil-Against the Giants-Drow Series with a finale at Queen of the Demonweb pits. There are good 5E conversions of most of these so the technical side is easy enough. I've wanted to run these for years and this would be that effort. looking at the long term there are several built in stopping points too - maybe if we completed ToEE my guys might have had enough 5E for a while so we rotate to something else and then come back to it down the road to play through the Giants series. I know I tend to burn out on 5E so if it takes a year I may well be ready to do something else myself. There are enough monster books out now for it that I can probably make them interesting at least and If I do run 5E again this is the most likely path.

Getting away from fantasy campaigns the dream would be to finally have a superhero game as the main campaign for the first time with this crew. I like Sentinels after trying it out and there are a lot of other good supers rules but for a longer-term campaign I would go with Mutants & Masterminds. Tons of support both books and online , tons of characters and villains both, locations ... it has everything I would need. I'd probably go with my own setting rather than Freedom City but I might still include a lot of FC elements. This is the dream but I have to make sure my crew wants to commit to it before I start going nuts.

Star Wars will always be an option and I've run enough now that I feel like it's a real campaign but I kind of like it better as the side/backup option. Everyone's familiarity with the setting and the visuals makes it very easy to drop in and out without missing a beat and I'd like to keep it going in that role. So I'm not ready to move it into the main spot right now.

Other Space type games would be some version of Traveller or Stars Without Number. I'd love to run a post-apoc game like Gamma World or Mutant Crawl Classics but I think Rifts would take precedence. Maybe Hell on Earth makes it in next time as a compromise. Star Trek would be a blast but will probably never make "main game" status. 

So there are my thoughts on the Next thing. More to come.

Magic Items in Deadlands - I Handed Out a Few

 

Now magic items in RPGs are fairly common but not all games use them the same way. In D&D and similar games they are built into the game's assumptions - and the players' as well. If your character has few levels under their belt and you don't have a magic item of some kind ... well that's an unusual game in my experience. 

Yes, Deadlands does have magic items. In general though they are not run-of-the-mill things one finds and then replaces as one "levels up". They tend to be fairly powerful for a character and retained regardless. Nor are they 100% beneficial as most of them have a "taint" which inflicts some negative effect on the character while they retain the item. There are roughly 3 tiers of unusual items in Deadlands:

• The Steampunk level stuff that is somewhat mass-produced. These are things that can be found in the Smith & Robards catalog. These are not overtly magical but they are a bit more than conventional physics or engineering would allow which is typically explained by "ghost rock" - powered by, shavings of, steel forged using ... etc.  Many of the more complex devices have a malfunction effect to remind players of the risks of pushing the envelope.
• Mad Science Devices can be created by a mad scientist is you have one in your party or know a really benevolent NPC. These can often do more - basically replicating a power - but tend to be limited to a fixed number of charges or a hard time limit. They are unique and cannot generally be sold or traded. They operate similarly to supervillain gadgets in a superhero campaign in that respect. 
• Relics are the permanent big time magic items in the Deadlands setting. They generally are not "crafted" but are instead created in the heat of a catastrophic or tragic event. They are not really something one can buy or sell and there is no known list of common relics because they are not common!

So now that we have that breakdown I can explain that although I have been playing around with Deadlands in various forms since the 90's when it came out I have never placed a relic in my games. There have been mad scientists whipping up flamethrowers and the like, and Smith & Robards has done some business, but I haven't dropped a single relic ever. It's a little strange for me and once I started thinking about it I wondered if I had developed a blind spot for them in this setting.

The reason for this realization is that after 20 sessions of The Flood campaign we were finishing up the Shan Fan arc (if you've played it you'll know what that means) and there comes a point where the party helps to defend a secret society's vault of artifacts. The suggestion is to reward your players with some unusual items or a bunch of money for doing this. As I contemplated how this could go I realized my lack of prior relic drops. As I dug into them with the aim of making it like a traditional D&D treasure horde where you conveniently find a range of items tailored to the party or at least generally useful for a D&D party I realized this might not be the best approach. 

No, there is no "random relic table" in Deadlands. Sure, I could make one, and as much fun as that might be it didn't really feel right either. 

So I went full 4th edition D&D: I let my players tell me what they found in the vaults. 

Each one got to pick one item from the relics list or from the S&R catalog, subject to GM veto if they got way too ridiculous. I told them to think about their character, both how they've played them up until now and also where they want to take them in the future, both mechanically and conceptually, as this could be a turning point in their life. They have insight into the big picture of Deadlands now and they just survived a war between triads - things might go in a different direction for them after this and finding some relic or infernal device could be a part of that change. 

I trust my players and they did not disappoint. No one tried to break the game.

• The very practically-minded bounty hunter took Owl-Eye Goggles - steampunk night vision goggles - they're not even a relic but they fit the character perfectly.
• The mad scientist chose an Epitaph Camera, which is an in-universe thing that is used by the Tombstone Epitaph to publish pictures of unusual events and this totally fits with his interest in making moving pictures for education and entertainment purposes. This is also not a relic.
• The huckster/hexslinger finally got a decent Book of Hoyle. She's been searching for one the entire game and finally got what I believe is about the third best type in the game, the 1801 version. This is a major way for this type of magic-tosser to learn new powers and her capabilities will expand quite a bit now. 
• The martial artist had a really hard time deciding but ended up taking a lucky jackalope's foot. This basically just gives him 2 extra bennies per session (which can be super useful) a the risk of making critical failures a whole lot worse if (when) one happens. It is a relic but is pretty generally useful. Considering he is the stealth guy, the melee guy, and their liaison to the Chinese community I am sure he will find them useful. 
• The gunslinger of course had to pick a gun - in this case the Guns of Jericho ... which are bad ... but also kind of awesome. It's a cursed Gatling rifle that stains the wielders hands black, make the user Greedy and Mean (these are Hindrances in-game), and on a critical failure the guns disappear and reappear somewhere else. Oh, and the evil hombre that created them is still out there looking for him and might show up if word gets out that someone is using his guns somewhere - what GM doesn't see the potential in THAT kind of setup!

So I am very happy with this set of choices and for now I think my decision to let them pick instead of picking for them or going random was a good call. We are already into the next adventure which involves a haunted island that may have one of the marks they need to find so I will update as the game progresses.