Star Trek: Vanguard - 5 Years After

Here's a blog post by one of the authors on what is easily my favorite set of Star Trek books so far. It's a nice little read even if you haven't read the books as a lot of it is about what they are not going to do. Vanguard is a series that covers the characters and happenings around a new starbase in a new sector of space around the time of the original series. The authors position is that story is done - there will be no direct sequels and no follow-ups on the major characters in particular. Now some of the lesser characters do show up in other books, particularly the "Seekers" series but the Vanguard story is complete and will not be opened up again.

I really like that stance - "here is a complete work, it needs nothing further" is a rare thing these days where the brand and the franchise are king.

As a final take, if you're ever thinking about running a Star Trek RPG campaign, the series is worth a look just from that angle. Set it in a particular area of space with a recurring cast of ships, characters, enemies, colonies, and mysteries that they can get to know in detail. The traditional Trek campaign tends to be episodic and not very connected session to session but there are other ways to approach it and this series is a good example of what that looks like.

40k Friday - Iron Warriors Chaos Spawn

The last piece of this current round of Iron Warrior additions is my "Chaos Spawn".  The GW chaos spawn mini is basically a mass of tentacles or insect parts with legs. It's fine for general "chaos" but it seems out of place for this particular legion. The IW's are builders and make quite a few of the Daemon Engines that show up in chaos armies. While they have the chaos mindset, they do not have a ton of the physical chaos expressions. Why not take a theme of "spawn" as minor daemon engines? It sounded more interesting to me and that's how I ended up here. Those are Pathfinder miniatures Gorgons. They come already painted silver and washed in black (and have tiny red eyes!) so all I did was add the IW contrast colors of copper/brass - in a different pattern for each one - do the snow bases, then clearcoat the finished beastie.

In the game spawn are a cheap and expendable unit that is fast, tough, unpredictable, and fairly dangerous if they get into close combat. I think raging metal demon-bulls fit that perfectly. I like the rules and the look of these guys enough I may build another unit or two - a whole herd to unleash!

Technical Note: Current GW spawn base size is a 50mm round base for 40K. These bases are 50.1 mm. In my world that means "perfect match". In a tournament someone might complain, but I've rarely found a bigger base to be an issue - usually people whine about old mini's on smaller bases if things go that way. Regardless, I'll be darned if I'm going to grind down a circular base by .1mm!

Quick, easy, inexpensive, and looks good. Plus they can still be gorgons in a D&D game if needed!

The next unit on the table for the Iron Warriors is (finally!) the chaos biker squad! originally intended for my Death Guard army, I changed my mind as I was reviewing both forces and decided they were a better fit for the silver guys. They are gathered, partly built, and basecoated black at the moment so I may be able to show them off next week! That will finish out the Fast Attack element of the army so I am looking forward to that milestone.

40K Friday - Thursday Edition - Havocs!

Another entry in the 'Finishing up the Iron Warriors" list - a squad of havocs with autocannons. These are the old 3rd edition metal guys but I like the shoulder-mounted look just fine. For most battles they will be parked in a ruin somewhere dumping Str 7 death onto the enemy from 48" away. That's the plan at least. Autocannon havocs are one of the best heavy support options for a Chaos Marine army and one of the few options that the loyalists do not have so I am pretty happy to have them finished.

The paint here is another round of my quick and dirty IW scheme: black basecoat, drybrush silver, pick out details in bronze/brass/copper, then do the snow base and wrap it all up with a clear coat spray.  It's not going to win big tournament painting contests but it's consistent across the army, looks how it's supposed to look, and is pretty quick to execute. This squad came out a little grungier than some but I'm OK with it.

I added a piece of hazard stripe decal to the squad leader as that's another Iron Warriors thing. I think when it comes to that look that less is more so here only the squad leader is getting that kind of extra detail. They did all get the IW "skull" decal but considering that it's silver and on a silver background it's hard to spot unless your fairly close to them.

The squad leader is giving a "come at me bro/kung fu challenge" type wave. It gives him a tiny bit more character and fits considering that a) he's almost always going to be the first guy in the squad to buy the farm and b) if he doesn't this is still a long-ranged squad and the path to ascension involves beating people in melee challenges so if he's not dead by the end of then fight he's damn frustrated.

While putting this squad together I picked up the Traitor Legions book and discovered the IW havoc squads get some nice bonuses. I had one missile launcher in a regular CSM squad (which I was going to swap for a plasma gun anyway) and one more in a box. Why not pick up another pair and make a missile-havoc squad? So that's the next project.

Campaign Concept: Rogue Trader as Guardians of the Galaxy. Also: Starfinder

A few weeks back I described my inspiration for a Rogue Trader campaign driven by Black Sails, Starz amazing pirate series. Over the weekend we watched Guardians of the Galaxy for the first time in a long time and I think I have found the inspiration for the opposite of that other campaign concept.

Black Sails is serious, gritty, full of scheming, betrayals, and violence.

Guardians is far less serious, not nearly as gritty, does have some betrayals, and does have violence. The movie does involve dealing with powerful artifacts and overly powerful opponents so it's a better fit than I thought at first glance.

Rogue traders do have less chance of being put in jail ...

So there are some common elements, enough to make a good game for sure, but the tone would be completely different. I think "grim and serious pirate" Rogue Trader would be significantly different from "comic book movie" Rogue Trader, to the point they might not even feel like the same game.

It's OK Captain Flint, let's talk through this.

Key elements of a GotG Rogue Trader campaign in my mind:

• Characters are in slightly over their heads, despite being basically competent. Maybe they just recently fell into their positions and the campaign starts on "Day 1" of this new life.
• Less concern about details, technology, and "realism", looser style
• Action over plotting and scheming
• Focus on organizations
• name
• goal
• leader as recognizable NPC
• one or two lower level members as recognizable NPC's to put a face on things
  (example of what this means: Guardians RT would probably be more "that's Zolo's ship!" than "that's the Red Fury!" when identifying a new arrival)
• More emphasis on "doing the right thing", even reluctantly and less on "personal gain", comparatively
• Humor - this would be accepted and encouraged as part of the feel of the game. The closes "other thing" to this kind of feel is probably Firefly - there are serious consequences to actions of the PC's but that's no reason we can't be funny in getting to them.

Organization + recognizable member NPC

There are some differences in the scenarios. A Rogue Trader has a massive crew - they would probably have to stay mostly in the background. It's a massive ship but it's still smaller than serious warships so there are still things you will need to run from. Just think if the Black Sails crew was put in charge of the Enterprise or a Battlestar vs. the Guardians crew - how would those two stories be different? 

Also as I started to think through this I wonder if GotG might be better 'adapted" to a Starfinder campaign. We don't know much about the game yet but a lot of Pathfinder and D&D games start with "out for gold" and end up "doing the right thing" not far into the campaign. 

Yep, that looks about right for a "First Contact" for a lot of my games ...

So I may have talked myself into thinking through a Rogue Trader-like campaign that may end up using Starfinder instead of RT rules to help keep the right tone. I suppose we will just have to see how they fit together when the rules come out.

Skill Checks, Degrees of Success, and Savage Worlds

Since skill systems became a near-universal thing in RPG's, most of them have been pass/fail. From Runequest, Star Trek,  and Hero through GURPS on into the d20 games, most games are only concerned with whether you succeeded or not. Some have a critical success or failure element, but most of the time that's tied more to combat than typical skill checks. A lot of the time, that's enough.

There are outliers.

• The One-Roll engine covers both the "height" and "width" of each roll and those mean different things depending on the circumstances.  
• FFG's Star Wars game adds various other factors in with their own dice so that interpreting a dice pool for that game is something of an art all on its own. The knock on it is that it's sometimes more information than you need on the routine stuff.  
• Dice pool games form White Wolf to Shadowrun often include rules for multiple successes that indicate relative success or failure. This is definitely something to build on.
• The old TSR Marvel Super Heroes had one of the cleanest systems: One roll gave you a white (failure) green, yellow, or red to indicate increasing levels of success. 

My interest in this springs from my current immersion in getting the Deadlands game off of the ground. Savage Worlds task rolls are dice vs. a target number of 4, and for every increment of 4 over that it's a "raise".  Now this most directly applies in combat but the mechanic is the same for everything.  In reading through the published adventures though there are a lot of handy notes like "on a success the characters find X, with a raise they also find Y".  

Given that you have, effectively, 3 levels of result from a skill or stat check: Failure, Success, Raise. Because of this I've been trying to think of results in terms of these three levels. Some typical examples where this comes in:

• Perception Checks - probably the most overused skill in every game I've played, most of the time it's "you see the bad guys" or "you don't see the bad guys/trap/etc."   So what does a raise or an extra success get me here? 
• Maybe a normal success is "you hear something" while a raise is "you see something". Especially in a night encounter or inside a dark cave. Maybe some kind of nightvision makes that "see" result possible with just a normal success.
• Maybe a normal is "you see 5-6 guys standing around the campfire" while a raise is "let me put their miniatures out on the map in their exact positions. 
• A lot of times these are opposed rolls vs. someone else's Stealth type skill so sometimes a higher result is its own reward. 
• If the idea is to make it more interesting maybe a success is "you see these guys" while a raise is "you hear them talking about x". It might give your players a reason to listen a little longer before the inevitable gunfire or charge.
• My 3 degrees here go like this (typical sneaking up on a camp scenario)
• Failure = smells a campfire and that they're cooking something, maybe hear some voices
• Success = There are several guys around the fire talking about how bad the food is and how they can't wait to get back to a real town
• Raise = There are 4 guys around the fire, all wearing gunbelts and a 5th guy standing over by the horses with a shotgun

• Knowledge checks - this is where I've seen some effort made in a lot of different games. 
• Pathfinder sometimes has a little table: DC10 = some minimal knowledge about a topic, DC15=  more, and DC20 = all that plus more even more details. That's a toally playable system. 
• This is an area where even failure should probably yield some knowledge. If nothing else I like to give the party a name of someone or something that could help. It's kind of a sideways local knowledge check too - "no, you can't recall anything in particular but you do recall there's a local mage/ranger/dog groomer who's supposed to know all about elven magic swords/the red eye orcs/ dire poodles. it's more interesting than a dead end and might give other characters a chance to contribute too. This could also be an organization or a location (like a temple) or an object, say a book.
• My 3 degrees here go like this: 
• Failure = don't know myself but I know how we can find out
• Success = know enough to be useful, could go ask someone else given time and enough concern
• Raise = know all that's useful or relevant to our situation, all someone else is going to do is confirm what we already know. 

• Crafting checks - this doesn't come up as often as the others but when it does it's relatively easy to adjudicate
• Failure = you're not done yet - needs more time. Critical failure  = you are done, you just broke it/ruined it/have to start over
• Success = you made the bare minimum quality and/or amount that is supposed to come from the check. 
• Raise/additional successes = it took less time or you made more of it than expected (or it has more charges if that's how it works)
• Another option: A lot of computer games use quality levels for gear, typically something like White for basic, then Green, then Blue, then Purple, then Gold for increasing levels of quality. That's fairly simple to incorporate if you think it's worth the trouble. For something like a D&D potion, maybe it lasts one additional round for each quality level, or bumps the die type up for say a healing potion. Permanent gear gets a little trickier but there's usually some way to account for a really good roll. 

• Physical checks - Sometimes these are the hardest to judge as far as extra success. "I want to leap from this balcony to that chandelier" is a fairly straightforward task.
• Failure - A simple "you fell" on a failure isn't all that exciting. For a game like Savage Worlds I'd say this means you do it but you're hanging on by one arm, dangling in space and off balance. A critical failure or botch type result  = "you fell and looked clumsy doing it". 
• Success = you made it, looked like you knew what you were doing, and it only took your normal move - what else are you doing this round?
• Raise - you made it and swung it just enough to be in reach of the object you want to handle in a single impressive move. That might be a stab, a grab, or a drop to a slab.

Now I did not do nearly enough of this with Pathfinder, so I feel good that the new game is spurring me to pay more attention to this. I also am a big believer in that not everything needs a roll, and one roll should be enough. You shouldn't need a perception check to see non-invisible creatures moving around a well-lit area, and I don't care what the movement rules say you don't need 5 stealth checks to sneak up on the guards at the front door. Make one roll and get on with it!

Wrapping up - as a DM it's good to have something in mind/up your sleeve/in your notes beyond simple success or failure. I tend to prefer the "failure  = partial success" option, with a critical failure meaning no success and a negative impact as well, to the traditional pass/fail result. I'll try to point out some more examples as we play our way through The Flood. 

Something New (-ish) for Monday: Old D&D Adventures from Goodman Games and WOTC

I'm a little surprised they're being this direct. Goodman Games is going to be doing "collector's edition" reprints of B1 and B2 (at least) with all of the original material plus 5E stats and some other additional material.

I'm ... impressed.

I thought we would be seeing more of the "re-interpretation" we've been seeing with their campaigns so far. It's an approach that covers both the nostalgia angle while still being "new" to a large degree. Handing it off to Goodman Games, the "retro" publisher (they print Dungeon Crawl Classics, among other games) means that WOTC isn't "wasting" their limited resources recycling old material. They're allowing and encouraging the kind of stuff some of us wanted for a long time.  It's remarkable how far we've come.

Yes, I will probably end up getting some or all of these. I've converted some of the old adventures for every single D&D campaign I've ever run and I think you could run a perfectly fine 5E campaign using nothing but converted AD&D modules.

This is a really cool development.

The Challenge of an Old West Campaign

It's always been a problem with the western game - what do you do? Kind of like Traveller* it inevitably descends into one of two main types: it seems to be either bank robberies and mayhem or something "weird" like when our old Boot Hill campaigns used that section in the DM's Guide and started going into D&D modules. They may start as a Roy Rogers movie but they end up a Tarantino film.

It's a strange problem considering how much old west media is out there, until you consider a whole bunch of that deals with lawmen vs. criminals and that the criminals are usually having more fun. You'd think that the TV series would provide a decent model for a western campaign but nobody seems to want to play a location based campaign like "Bonanza" or "Gunsmoke" or even "Deadwood"- they want to play Butch and Sundance roaming about the country having adventures.

I had thought Aces and Eights would solve this by putting in actual game systems for things like running a ranch or managing a cattle drive but it has not taken off here. Maybe if I presented it more as a "Cowboy Kingmaker" campaign it would strike more of a chord with players. That's actually an idea worth some additional thought.

For now Deadlands is the best western option for us - fight monsters  and have adventures with magic and steamtech seems to be the ticket. I pondered one type of campaign years ago but never got to run it. I am going to try to keep each session as one episode though, with a clear ending, to avoid player attendance issues. The way the campaign is structured in the book makes this fairly easy to do as most of the individual "plot points" look like a session's worth of action. There are roughly 15 episodes directly related to the big story, add in some interesting side trips in the Maze and the rest of 1880's California and I easily have 20-24 sessions. If we stick to the once-a-month plan I should have 10 sessions the rest of this year so I'm looking at wrapping this up end of next year. I'm kind of hoping though that we find chances here and there to work in an extra session. Not because I want to rush through it but because we're already having a ton of fun and I'd like to get deeper into it quicker.



*in my experience Traveller games almost always go merchants, mercs, or mayhem, and even if they start as something respectable, it almost always goes criminal at some point. The published adventures almost universally promote this so it's not just a reflection on the players. 

Building a Deadlands Campaign

I've wanted to run a sustained Deadlands campaign for a long time, but the opportunity never really came about. Now that it has, I had to start figuring out what I wanted it to be. Free-form, open range, sandbox type game? Could be fun, but I'd like a little more structure to the thing. There are a bunch of short adventures out for the game, and at least one town-based long adventure (Coffin Rock), but there are also four full campaign books which are similar to an adventure path for other games. Since I didn't have a specific concept in mind already I decided to go with one of those.

Which one though?

• The Flood - California after the "big one", San Francisco, lots of steampunk tech, lots of Chinese culture
• The Last Sons - The Dakotas, Deadwood, lots of Sioux culture and shamanic type magic
• Stone and a Hard Place - Arizona and New Mexico, Tombstone, and it's the most "classic western" of them all, probably spaghetti western in particular. 
• Good Intentions - Utah err, "Deseret", Mad Science, and a lot of action around Salt Lake, aka the "City of Gloom"

I have all of these (the last one was Kickstarted last year and is PDF only until the books come later this year) and they all have definite points of attraction. I was initially set on either The Flood or Stone and a Hard Place, so I re-read both of them. 

Stone and a Hard Place is really good, and while reading it I had pretty much decided to run it first. It starts with Tombstone, the Earps, the Cowboys, and yes you do get to be a part of the OK Corral situation. Being a huge fan of the "Tombstone" movie it's definitely a very attractive adventure, and it gets better from there. If you want a very "western" campaign with your party in pursuit of a single major antagonist, one where it gets very personal, this is a great campaign. 

Then I read The Flood and things started to turn. While Stone is awesome, I don't think it is as good as The Flood as an introduction to the Deadlands setting. The Flood makes a great effort, particularly early on, to give players a sense of what's going on and why with the Weird West. It's not something I had really considered before, but I've been reading and occasionally running Deadlands stuff for 20 years and never really had the chance for my players to see the big picture. There is evil in the world, but it's evil you can fight. It's a big part of the setting and there are even mechanics for what your party can do to roll back the damage. Once you understand this as a player, you can make plans for it. it and make a big difference in the world beyond just shooting monsters. It's a cool aspect of the game that I've never been able to use but I think I will get to do it now.

My concerns with the Flood are that it's a little more "out there" than say, Stone. The Maze is a great setting for a game but it means you may be spending a fair amount of time on steam-powered boats in the maze fighting Chinese pirates using martial arts weapons and not riding horses chasing bandits as you might expect in a western type RPG. There's room to add in more of the traditional elements for sure, but the backbone of the campaign involves a fair amount of deck time, martial arts, and magic. I don't want my players asking where the "western" went halfway through the game so it's something I'm going to have to keep an eye on.

The Flood also sets up some things nicely. Early on the PC's meet Dr. Darius Hellstromme, one of the big movers and shakers in the setting. He figures prominently in Good Intentions, so by doing Flood first my players will know who he is if we get the chance to play that one. They also meet some other known setting NPCs who are threatened or play another role in some of those other books.   

So I have settled on The Flood for this campaign and I am very happy with it now. Our first session is complete and went well and I am very optimistic for the future. 

Sorry guys, we're going to California - maybe next time!

Bonus: This is also good refresher training in running an ongoing Savage Worlds game which a) makes me happy anyway as I love the system and b) helps me figure things out that will make the inevitable Savage Rifts game that much better.

Mood-setting media ideas: For this campaign I'd say Tv shows The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., Kung Fu, and the classic film Big Trouble in Little China (originally conceived as a western) set the right tone. Heck, just being able to cite those as relevant to a game I am running makes me pretty happy.

Weekend Update

We had a pretty good weekend here - got to run another session of the Star Wars campaign Friday, ran session 2 of the Deadlands campaign Saturday, then saw the new Kong movie on Sunday. Also managed to dive back in to Star Trek Online. Time off is good! There's more to come on each of these but it feels good to have the momentum going again with multiple campaigns.

40K Friday - Mayhem Pack Complete

I finally finished up the trio of helbrutes that forms the Mayhem pack for my Iron Warriors. Each is painted somewhat differently, but I think they look they still belong to the same force. They have some custom bases (to help them stand out), with snow (to help them blend in with the rest of the snow-themed army) and while I don;t think these pictures quite do them justice it'll have to do.

Nothing like deep-striking multiple crazed chaos dreadnoughts into the enemy backfield to stir up some trouble. I may get to field them in their final state as soon as this Sunday.