Memories of Everway

I didn’t back the Everway silver edition Kickstarter as it’s not my thing, but it prompted me to reflect on the first edition.

Of course, these being 25-year-old memories, there may be some dust in there.

First edition

I bought Everway in the mid-90s when it first appeared. It was revolutionary in several aspects, particularly replacing dice with a tarot-like fortune deck and using fantasy artwork for character creation.

As for the setting, Everway was a world-hopping fantasy, each world (or “sphere”) linked by gates. The PCs journeyed through the gates in search of adventure, and the city of Everway was where all the gates were. (So very similar to how Magic: the Gathering’s background developed, with planeswalkers and different worlds.)

While it was a neat conceit to tie together the very different art styles used during character generation (more on that below), I found it all a bit bland. But then, it would always be a hard sell as, generally, I’m not too fond of fantasy settings.

Although I had Everway, I don’t think I ever ran it. I do remember playing it, once, at a convention. As I recall, Mike Cule was the GM, and while I think I can remember my character, I have no memory of the adventure itself.

The fortune deck

Instead of dice, Everway used a deck of tarot-like cards that the GM had to interpret. There were 30-odd cards, and they all had different meanings, which meant learning what each card represented. I found that was a formidable barrier, which I never overcame.

Perhaps if Everway’s setting had inspired me, I might have persevered with the fortune deck. But I didn’t like the setting, and the fortune deck felt far too fiddly to be worth persevering with.

A touch of genius

Where Everway shone, though, was in using illustrations for character generation.

Everway came with 90 illustrated “vision” cards. During character creation you chose a handful of cards and used them to describe things about your character. It was the first time I’d encountered anything like this—and I thought it was brilliant and shamelessly stole the idea.

In 1995 I played a lot of Illuminati: New World Order, Steve Jackson Games’ trading card game. I had masses of cards, and I took a pile I wasn’t using and used them to create wild, random characters for a modern-day improvisational conspiracy game. (I wrote this up for Pyramid magazine, and in my head, I always thought of it as Illuminated Everway.)

And when I didn’t have the art available, I used “scenes” (much like the vision cards but written out) to create one of my characters in an early Other London game. And because I throw little away, I still have them.

·         Scene: A pavement artist, black beret on the ground collecting coins. The artist is painting directly onto the paving flags with chalks (rather than paper) and is drawing a city scene of London, with a Gothic castle where St Pauls should be. People in suits are walking by. The only person looking at the painting is an old, shabby man.

·         Scene: A man working at a typewriter in a book-lined garret. Through the garret window, Alexandra Palace can be seen. A woman is leaning over the man’s shoulder, looking at what he is writing. Her feet aren’t touching the floor.

·         Scene: A kitchen table. There are two bottles of whisky, one empty and one half-empty, plus an empty glass. There’s a crumpled pack of cigarettes. A pack of newly-developed photos lies on the table. Most photos are of a happy smiling woman. And one of them shows people in black, cowering under black umbrellas in a green place.

·         Scene: A woman in her fifties. She wears glasses and is dressed in layers, topped by an old cardigan. She stands in front of a table, upon which is a strange skull mask and a chain of keys. In the background are artists easels and students watching intently.

I have no idea why games based on licensed properties with lots of artwork (such as Judge Dredd) don’t do something like this. The system and numbers could remain the same, but I bet characters would be more memorable if they were created using evocative artwork.

Everway: more miss than hit

So despite its brilliant character creation, the mediocre background and steep fortune deck learning curve meant I was never going to become an Everway fan.

I don’t expect ever to run Everway, but maybe I’ll play it again one day.

Hope's Last Day - for ALIEN

Hope’s Last Day is the Alien introductory cinematic scenario in the core rulebook. It features a mechanic team returning to Hadley’s Hope (the doomed colony in Aliens) shortly after the alien infestation has occurred (but a while before Ripley and the marines arrive). It’s a short scenario where the characters will do well to survive—but that’s the nature of cinematic Alien adventures.

For a great intro to the scenario, watch this short YouTube video. I wish I’d found this before I’d started playing—I only came across it once we’d played the first session.

Other People’s Adventures: This is another in my series of looking at other people’s adventures. I’ll talk about the adventure, how it played and my thoughts on what could be done better.

Setting it up

Having played in an Alien scenario last summer, I knew I wanted to run Alien using Roll20 as I liked how the character sheet worked for Alien and I wanted to use some background music.

However, that did give me some preparatory work. I had the pdf of the rulebook and starter set, so I made extensive use of the Windows Snipping Tool and grabbed the maps, characters, initiative cards and more and uploaded them to Roll20.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but it feels like there’s way more preparation for an online game compared to a face-to-face game. For example, I would have printed (and cut out) characters and maps for a tabletop game and put them on the table, which is less work.

I created separate Roll20 screens for each level of Hadley’s Hope (and a landing page with the overall map). I also created handouts for the basic setup (with an overall map), the opening briefing (What’s the Story Mother – when I wish I’d had the video above), and the panic table and fast/slow action table.

For the characters, I copied the text from the pdf and pasted it into the characters. I didn’t populate the character sheets – I did that with the players as part of setup/session zero.

I used the GM layer on Roll20 to help me run it (there’s a great Hadley’s Hope Map in the files sectionof the Alien RPG Facebook group that I wish I’d found first.)

Session 1

I ran Hope’s Last Day with my regular two players. They chose union rep MacWhirr and pilot Singleton (I didn’t let them choose the android). I didn’t worry about buddies and rivals as I’ve found that bonds between characters work better with more players.

To start with, they weren’t terribly focused. Although I read out “What’s the story, Mother,” I think the actual goal (get the shuttle keycards and escape) got lost. (I’m sure the video would have helped.) Plus, I think they wanted to discover what was going on… Curiosity killed the cat, and all that.

They wandered into the basement and found the remnants of the battle (they didn’t search and so didn’t find the extra weapons). Then, in trying to raise survivors on the intercom, they raised Wes in Billy’s Bar. So they headed that way and saw a xenomorph trying to get into Billy’s Bar.

They attracted the xenomorph’s attention and ineffectually shot at it. It killed Hirsch (an NPC), and they stumbled back into C1. They hear a thud behind them as Sigg fell to the ground, facehugger clamped over his face. (I didn’t roll for this—I used dramatic licence.) And as our two hours were up, that’s where we ended episode 1.

Alien menace

One of the selling points of the Alien RPG is that it’s set in the Alien universe. On the other hand, one of the problems with the Alien RPG is that it’s set in the Alien universe. Most gamers have seen the movies, often many times. My two players certainly had.

So the monsters weren’t a surprise. I guess I could have changed things a little, but I didn’t want to do that—if I did that, it wouldn’t be Alien.

As a player, I found the xenomorph quite terrifying. With stress dice mounting up, when it appeared in the scenario I played in, we fled. They’re deadly. Sometimes reputation helps.

As a GM, I found the xenomorph surprisingly random. There was no guarantee what it would do once it was in combat—and it even missed a few rolls, including a head-bite.

(Incidentally, here’s a great story about using the Alien RPG to run the Alien movie, with players who didn’t know (or couldn’t remember) the film.)

Between sessions

Thanks to Real Life getting in the way, we didn’t return to part 2 for a couple of weeks. So between sessions, I made a few amendments.

• I found and shared the intro video (as mentioned above).
• I created a summary of the base layout, but I added an overview of what each area contained—because the characters would have known that because they live there.
• I found a summary of the rules on Reddit and shared them with the players.

Session 2

I started session 2 with the mission video, which clarified the mission objectives: find the shuttle keycards and leave. And in essence, that’s what happened. The PCs tried to find more guns but failed. With stress mounting, the PCs found the keycards and headed back—witnessing a near miss from an adult xenomorph, a close-up encounter with a chestburster (nasty little critters, attacked and took out the android), but the survivors succumbed to the facehuggers in the shuttle.

The players said they enjoyed themselves, but it felt off to me. We rolled a lot of dice at the climax. I rolled for the facehuggers actions and then more dice for their attack. And each time the players rolled dice, they added stress, and with so many stress dice, a panic roll was almost inevitable. And the panic rolls, while in keeping, removed player agency by cancelling actions and forcing them to freeze or scream or whatever.

Eventually, they succumbed to the inevitable, and I drew the session to a close.

So no survivors. That’s entirely in keeping with the genre, but I’m not sure how I feel about that. I would have preferred one survivor, but it’s hard to battle the creatures when you have little weaponry to defend yourself with, and you’re at the mercy of a very unforgiving system.

Hope’s Last Day with two players

I’m not sure how Hope’s Last Day plays with more players, but I had only two. (My regular gaming group is just the three of us.) Some thoughts on the scenario with only two players:

Two players results in lots of NPCs. I’m not great at playing NPCs when they are part of the “adventure party”. I’m happy playing them when they’re people the PCs meet, but not when they’re supposed to be part of the team. They hang around in the back, and I don’t play them properly. In Hope’s Last Day they just became meat shields and showed how the monsters worked.

That also meant the agendas weren’t as crucial as they might be. I like the concept of the agendas, but with only two players, I think I needed to tweak them a little.

With two players, I’d throw out the secret android. I’m not sure that helps, and it wasn’t necessary.

And given the lethality of the creatures, I’d either reduce their number or make extra weaponry easier to find. Or possibly both. My players had a bolt gun and a pistol between them, and that wasn’t enough.

I found it interesting that there’s nothing in the characters to suggest that they have lived in Hadley’s Hope before this adventure. There are no links to other (now dead) characters, and they don’t know who the guy in the bar is or anything else. They’re very typical PCs.

Roll20

And I grew to hate Roll20 this time. I had only my laptop for the last session, and I struggled with swapping between characters and maps and dice and everything. Although there’s a map in Hope’s Last Day, it’s not critical, and I think I would have been better with a Google doc and Discord (or even Trello).

One of my players pointed out that Roll20 makes it hard to learn a system because it does everything for you. You don’t learn anything if all you do is click a button to make a roll. It’s a fair point.

How did I find the Alien RPG system?

Overall, the system was fine. However, I don’t yet have a good sense of the dice pool mechanic. While I have “roll 2d6 and aim for a target number” internalised from decades of boardgames (and Traveller and other rpgs), rolling dice and counting sixes isn’t something I intuitively understand.

I found quite a few rules fiddly—Alien is a crunchier system than I am used to. And I didn’t find the rules well presented. In the heat of the battle, it was hard to find the things I needed—the rules summary I found was a great help.

I like the stress mechanic, although it gets frustrating towards the end as panic rolls trigger more stress and more panic rolls, and it’s only a matter of time before the inevitable happens. At this point the players can lose their agency—which is all in keeping, I guess, but I’m not sure how much I like that.

And sometimes, rolling stress is confusing. For example, one player ordered another to do something (using the Pull Rank talent), and both rolled facehuggers. It was easier to ignore the facehuggers rather than make them roll panic rolls and figure out what that meant.

Hope’s Last Day—changes

I’m not sure I will run Hope’s Last Day again. I ran it as written, and I’d want to make changes if there is to be a next time. (And ultimately, I’m not sure I thought it was good enough to make those changes—not when I can spend my time more productively elsewhere.)

So, in no particular order, I would:

• Tweak the agendas. I’d keep some of the PvP aspects of them (although I’d tone that down for two-player play), but I’d also make them multi-stage to push them into parts of the base they didn’t explore.
• Give the PCs other connections to Hadley’s Hope. Who are their friends? Where are their friends? I would need to be careful about derailing everything, but it would be nice for the PCs to relate more to the colony.
• Tone down the stress, giving more opportunities to reduce stress. (I need to revisit the stress rules to make sure I used them correctly.) Or make sure that the PCs know about the Naproleve drug.
• Remove the android. Or at least, make him not secret.
• Think carefully about replacement characters. They need planning more carefully than simply “here, take this NPC”. Maybe plan to send them off to other parts of the colony on missions.
• Have fewer monsters. The adventure starts with four full-size xenomorphs and one facehugger free in the base (along with one trapped facehugger and a couple of chest-bursters waiting to happen). Plus, a facehugger for each player in the shuttle. Now I’ve typed that out, that seems like way too many.

Final thoughts

Hope’s Last Day is basically a dungeon with underpowered PCs and brutally tough monsters. I’m unlikely to rerun it, but if I do I will make a few changes.

ALIEN roleplaying

ALIEN is Free League’s tabletop roleplaying game set in the Alien universe (including Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant). It looks and feels gorgeous, but is it any good?

I dismissed the ALIEN RPG when it first came out. After all, I was an Alien fan before I became a roleplayer, and over the years I can’t imagine how many different ways Alien and Aliens have influenced my games. So I wasn’t sure I needed an ALIEN RPG.

And to be honest, I couldn’t see the point in ALIEN  for several reasons:

• I didn’t need background info when I knew I could take all I needed from the movies, books and comics.
• I couldn’t imagine playing an ALIEN campaign – I couldn’t see how that would work? Wouldn’t it all be a bit samey?
• I’m not excited by learning new RPG systems (as I’ve mentioned before).
• And finally, I don’t buy many roleplaying games. Space here is limited, and I don’t get any joy from hoarding games.

So what happened?

A few things lined up in 2020 that changed my mind.

• I became interested in running other people’s adventures and set myself a goal to run some. Unfortunately, that meant that I needed some, as only one or two of the ones I already had inspired me to run them.
• I played in a game of ALIEN on Roll20, and I enjoyed what I saw. I liked the three-act structure, agendas, and the stress mechanic.
• I learned more about ALIEN RPG – the difference between cinematic and campaign play, the great layout and art, and I heard Chariot of the Gods was a great scenario.
• The starter set and Destroyer of Worlds became available as a deal, and I couldn’t resist.

So I bought the starter set and Destroyer of Worlds, specifically for cinematic games.

I wasn’t interested in the background or creating my own adventures, so I didn’t buy the core book. At least not at first. However, as I was short on Xmas present ideas this year, I bought a copy and gave it to Mrs H to give to me on Xmas day.

I’m in the middle of running Hope’s Last Day (from the core book—I’ll talk more about the scenario itself in a separate post), and I plan to run Chariot of the Gods and Destroyer of Worlds soon.

Core rulebook or Starter Set?

So which to pick? The core rulebook or the starter set?

The core rulebook is 298 pages of hardback rules and background. It contains rules for character creation, background, spaceships and the various monsters. It also includes a short scenario, Hope’s Last Day, set on LV-426. The core rulebook is gorgeous and contains everything you need to run both cinematic and campaign games. (If you’re mainly interested in running published cinematic games, it has more material than you need. Or at least, more than I will need.)

The starter set is a boxed set containing the rules (softback, 104 pages), Chariot of the Gods, large maps, cards, counters and ALIEN dice (10 each of regular and stress dice). It contains none of the background material nor anything about starships or the creatures. Instead, it’s everything you need to run Chariot of the Gods and other cinematic scenarios. The double-sided map has a star map on one side, and starship deck plans on the other.

There are reasons to get both, which is why I have both.

Rules

ALIEN  uses Free League’s Year Zero Engine, which means that to do anything means rolling a pool of six-sided dice equal to your attribute plus skill (and maybe a modifier) and hoping you roll a 6. It’s okay as a system, although I haven’t internalised the probability yet (although the probability table tells me that four dice is just over 50%).

Your attributes are Strength, Agility, Wits and Empathy. The skills are Heavy Machinery, Stamina, Close Combat, Mobility, Piloting, Ranged Combat, Observation (ie perception), Comtech (ie computers), Survival, Manipulation (a sinisterly-worded persuade), Medical Aid, and Command.

Everyone has the same skills, which does lead to the slightly odd situation that everyone can pilot a dropship. Some will do it better than others, but everyone has some ability. I’m not sure that’s strictly canon, but it probably makes for a better game.

I found a couple of the skills interesting, particularly Command and Manipulation.

“Shoot it!” The Command skill encourages officers to bark orders at their underlings (and having those underlings follow them) by giving bonuses for following orders. Often being in command is just a narrative device with no mechanical backup, and Command nicely supports the fiction. (It’s inspired me to create a similar stunt for Fate: Chain of Command: +2 to Cleverly create a “following orders” advantage to anyone under your command.)

“Don’t let them into the ship, Ash.” I haven’t quite got my head around Manipulation. If you successfully manipulate someone, they must either attack you or do what you want. I’m not sure if this makes sense — an example would have helped here.

Stress

The key mechanic, though, is stress. Stress happens when you push a roll (re-roll a failed die roll) or when something terrible happens (lots of examples in the rules). When you become stressed, you add more dice to your die pool, but if any of these stress dice roll a 1 (or the facehugger symbol on the official Alien dice), you need to make a panic roll. A panic roll means rolling 1d6 and adding your stress level—so that you may drop something, freeze, scream or even go catatonic.

This creates a lovely tension. Your chances of succeeding are greater when stressed, but you also risk panicking. Having played ALIEN , the stress mechanic is certainly very effective and helps to increase the tension as almost every die roll can cause panic and chaos.

Along with these, there are detailed combat rules and rules for things like vehicle combat and lots of different hazards (there are lots of things that can kill you in space).

Actual play

As I write this, I have run Hope’s Last Day, the cinematic scenario contained in the rulebook. While it went well, I found the rules surprisingly fiddly and sometimes struggled to find the rule I needed amongst all the text.

I guess that’s an advantage of having a GM screen (not something I usually use), so I found a summary of the rules online for the second session. (This is still six sides of A4, so it’s not the kind of system-light game I usually prefer.)

Unfortunately, my players hadn’t played ALIEN before, so they couldn’t help.

So there were unfortunate pauses for things like the power consumable rules for the motion tracker (which I only hazily remembered from playing ALIEN last summer) and checking whether rolling a facehugger in ranged combat means the shot misses. (The shot still hits, but you panic and empty the clip—I found that surprisingly hard to check.)

So while Alien looks gorgeous, it hasn’t overcome the challenge of making games both readable and easy to use at the table. For the latter, get the rules summary above.

Character creation

Character creation starts with choosing a career before personalising it to suit. The careers are Colonial Marine, Colonial Marshal, Company Agent (Burke), Kid (Newt), Medic, Officer (ie Dallas, Kane, Ripley), Pilot, Roughneck (Brett and Parker) and Scientist (Ash).

So this is mostly like the movies, although I’m not sure how you’d create Lambert (yet another officer?).

The limited skill list creates some oddities—for example, the Scientist doesn’t have a science skill. On the other hand, I’m not sure you’d want a longer list—Lambert probably has a “navigation” skill, but it wouldn’t ever be used in a typical game of ALIEN .

The skill list is augmented by talents, which for the Scientist are Analyst (insight into strange artefacts and creatures), Breakthrough (auto-success on Observation) and Inquisitive (allows additional push on Wits rolls).

Buddies and rivals

I was pleased to see that ALIEN creates bonds between some players by having rivals and buddies. Each character has a rival (someone they don’t trust) and a buddy (someone they trust). Unfortunately, it drops the ball here by doing nothing to build on that. I would have liked to see part of character creation ask the players to explain why that person is a rival/buddy. (Session Zero is discussed for campaign play, but I would like to see the buddy and rival relationship deepened for all games.)

I will do this for my cinematic scenarios. Once characters have been selected, I will ask my players questions along these lines:

• Why do you trust your buddy? Describe a recent situation where you put your trust in them.
• Why do you distrust your rival? Describe a recent situation where they acted against your interests.

(There’s some psychology behind this. Robert Cialdini’s Influence explains that getting people to commit to something by saying it aloud makes it much more likely that they will follow through. The same goes here—getting the players to say why they trust their buddy and don’t trust their rival makes it more likely to carry through into the game. And saying it aloud means that everyone else at the table can act on it as well.)

Starships

And then ALIEN goes all Traveller on us.

The section on starships includes several ships, including prices for buying your own. Plus starship combat rules, despite that not being a part of the movies. (Maybe there are starship battles in the novels or comics, I don’t know.)

Anyway, I only skimmed this section as it’s not something I can see using.

Your job as Game Mother (GM advice)

While much of this focuses on creating your own scenarios and campaigns, there’s good stuff about the game principles: creating dread, terror and horror. I guess it’s expected that the published cinematic scenarios will bring out the key principles anyway, but the section on Stress and Horror is good, and it seems a shame that the starter set couldn’t find room for it.

Game background

As I said above, I don’t enjoy reading RPG backgrounds. That’s doubly true of a licenced property as I’d rather watch the movies or read the books instead. So I’ve only skimmed the sections on governments, corporations and worlds.

I don’t know how much of the background is taken from the “Alien extended universe” (as I haven’t read many of the novels or comics), but the Alien universe consists of four governments (the Three Worlds Empire, the United Americas, the Union of Progressive Peoples, and the Independent Core System Colonies), the Interstellar Commerce Commission (last seen grilling Ripley over losing the Nostromo in Aliens), and three major corporations (Wayland Yutani, Lasalle Bionational, and Seegson). Plus, there are a dozen smaller companies.

Then follows sectors and worlds, including summaries of key worlds in the canon LV-426 (Alien, Aliens), LV-422 (Prometheus), Fiorina 161 (Alien 3) and their current state.

Although I’m unlikely to make much use of it, the background does contain a good mix of tensions (corporate and national), rumours and hooks to create a campaign game.

I enjoy reading equipment lists even less than other parts of the backgrounds, but I was disappointed to see that the motion trackers operate on ultrasonics rather than “micro-changes in air density”.

Alien critters

The alien critters (the Engineers, the Neomorph, the original Xenomorph, and a few new creatures) are only described in the core book. They’re not described in the starter set, as any cinematic scenario will contain the creature stats and descriptions it needs.

As with the movies, the creatures are unpredictable. Instead of making a normal attack during combat, the GM rolls 1d6 on that creature’s attack table. They may pause and hiss, or they may go for the kill. When they do go for the kill, they’re deadly.

This randomness makes them very unpredictable—not your normal RPG monster.

Alien does a good job of wrapping up the inconsistencies around the movies (and presumably the books and comics). It stresses that the creatures are new to science and that new species or varieties may be encountered (which nicely leaves things open to both the GM and allows for other movies).

Alien canon, myths and legends

As I’ve said before, everything after the first movie is basically fanfic. So someone needs to figure out what’s canon and what isn’t. And while the ALIEN RPG doesn’t explicitly state what is and isn’t canon, author Andrew EC Gaska has explained his rationale on his blog, treating the less-canon stories as myths, legends and tall tales.

But it’s your game, and if you want to change things, you can.

Campaign games

My main problem with a campaign game is that if I’m playing a game called ALIEN, I want the alien to feature in it. Wisely, the GM advice for campaign games is to use the creatures sparingly. But from my perspective, that turns ALIEN into a fairly standard SF background.

So as I’ve said, I don’t plan to run an ALIEN campaign. I will run cinematic adventures instead. Having said that, the campaign advice isn’t bad, with three campaign frameworks presented:

Space Truckers: This is where you play being the crew of a ship like the Nostromo, seeking jobs and hauling cargo. It gets a bit Traveller again, with tables for jobs and cargo.

Colonial Marines: Aliens-inspired bug hunts and more. There’s an upcoming campaign sourcebook devoted to the Colonial Marines, but I haven’t decided if that’s my thing or not.

Frontier Colonists: This oddly-named framework is about exploring new planets to extract raw materials or salvage abandoned technology.

So the campaign section is full of tables – tables for missions, complications, encounters and more. That’s not my cup of tea, but I can see they would help if you were running a sandbox campaign or needed some inspiration.

Cinematic games

Cinematic games, or one-shots, as they are often known, do things differently. The key differences are acts and agendas.

Acts: Each cinematic game is broken down into three acts (like the movies): the setup (Act 1), the tilt (Act 2), and the showdown (act 3). (There can be a prologue and epilogue as well.) Ironically, the example scenario, Hope’s Last Day, doesn’t have any acts (it’s all act 3), although Chariot of the Gods and Destroyer of Worlds do.

Agendas: Pre-generated characters are provided for cinematic games, usually with a mix of agendas that create PvP conflict. So you can expect slimy company types (hoping to secure a specimen), ordinary joes (just trying to do a good job), union reps (looking out for their people), troopers (follow orders), and more. Agendas also change during the acts – as events escalate, agendas may change from “find out what’s going on” to “get the hell out of here!”

I’m a fan of character agendas (or goals or objectives or whatever you want to call them). They work well in a one-shot (cinematic) scenario by giving the players character reasons to continue through the adventure. Conflicting agendas also make for excellent dramatic choices. If things escalate too far, then the rules suggest that the players resolve the current situation and then the character who “turned traitor” becomes an NPC, and their player takes an NPC.

I’ve not seen a three-act structure applied to a roleplaying adventure so explicitly before, and I’ve played in quite a few convention games. And while I often use agendas for my one-shots, I’ve never thought about them in terms of acts. Perhaps I should.

I suspect for ALIEN, based on a cinematic property familiar to many players, three-act agendas are a great way of keeping the players focussed on playing their characters rather than just running away and nuking the site from orbit.

Too many words?

Often I find that RPGs have too many words (I’ve said this before). I don’t enjoy reading backgrounds, I don’t enjoy reading complicated rules, and I don’t enjoy reading equipment lists. Much of that is just padding: my head is filled with invisible rulebooks, I’ll get background material from the movies, and I don’t care that much about the difference between this gun or that gun, or this autodoc or that medpod).

Worse, most RPG layouts present you with vast blocks of text (sometimes in tiny font) broken up with variable artwork. So not only are there words I don’t enjoy reading, but they are presented as an intimidating wall that I can’t get through.

In a 398 page rulebook, ALIEN still has a lot of words—but it’s laid out in such a way that it never feels overwhelming. (And equally importantly, it’s easy for me to see the bits that I need not read.) So I had no problem reading it—although there was plenty I didn’t read (such as equipment, weapon and starship descriptions and the space combat rules).

As I said above, 398 pages are still too many without a rules summary.

So, a lot of words, and more than I will read, but maybe not too many. (As long as I have a rules summary.)

Overall summary

ALIEN is 398 pages of SF horror roleplaying, set in the iconic Alien universe. The book is beautiful and well laid out, and the rules, especially the stress mechanic, help ratchet up the tension. The creatures are terrifying and powerful, the corporations evil and manipulative—just as they should be.

It’s a more complicated system than I’m used to, but I’m having a great time running it.

The Highgate Club - online using Discord

In January 2021 I ran The Highgate Club, a freeform I co-wrote back in 2010 at Peaky. I’m fond of The Highgate Club—It’s a place where the people of hidden London (vampires, werewolves, sorcerers, immortals and more) gather. There are various plots involving Atlantis, a volcanic island up for auction, the return of King Arthur, Russian cyborgs, the last of the elves, and more.

Discord

I updated The Highgate Club a couple of years ago and Covid happened before I could run it in person. Given the success I’d had with other freeforms online, I thought I’d try it out using Discord.

The item bot

The Highgate Club uses items. A lot. Happily, one of my freeform pals was developing a Discord bot to manage items, and they got it ready in time for me to try. A week before we were due to run the game I had a crash course in installing Discord bots, and we tested it beforehand—it was a success and hopefully development will continue.

During play, I inadvertently installed it in the wrong channel, which I don’t think caused me any problems, but next time I’ll know better. We also found that the locations weren’t working properly, so we had to manually sort them out.

If the bot hadn’t worked, our fallback was for one of the GMs (probably Alan, my co-GM) to be dedicated to managing a huge spreadsheet.

Problem #1: Discord

While overall I think the game was a success, it wasn’t without a few issues. The first was that one player failed to join. We carried on without her, but it was frustrating. We’re not sure what happened—she struggled with Discord despite rebooting her laptop. (One thing we didn’t try was to check whether she could have used Discord on another device, or using it through a browser rather than the app. Or through a phone.)

I don’t know if the problem was her setup, or issues with her local internet connection. We had 16 people present, but nobody else had any difficulties.

Problem #2: The Decision

During the game there’s a joining ceremony and two characters apply join the club. Unfortunately, one of them was refused entry, and this upset her. I sympathised with her (I couldn’t quite see where the decision not to allow her entry had come from) and she carried on playing, albeit her game was spoiled as a result.

Mechanically, it didn’t make that much difference (as she wasn’t barred from the club) but it obviously affected her game emotionally. I’ve since tweaked the writing to make it less likely that either character will be blocked from being accepted.

As a side effect, I noted that it also affected me as well. It upsets me when players aren’t enjoying playing my games—I want everyone to have a good time. And I may have been more sensitive than usual, as it turns out I had Covid.

Problem #3: Covid

A few days after the game, I tested positive for Covid. While I didn’t have any of the classic symptoms I had been feeling below par—I thought I was fighting off a nasty cold—in hindsight I realised that I was suffering from Covid the weekend of the game.

Covid also affected my mood.

Normally after a game, I’m quick to write up my notes and reflect on how the game went. While I did sort out typos to sort out some of the smaller issues, I didn’t feel like reflecting on the session. It’s taken me over a month to write this up.

And my view of The Highgate Club was soured as a result.

Minor niggles

We had a few minor niggles.

Late starters: A couple of the players misread when the game was due, and thought it was the following day. So we started about 30 minutes late while we got in touch and waited for them. It didn’t occur to me to send reminders in advance, but maybe that was also Covid.

Discord rooms: I set up a few small (2 or 3 person) channels on Discord for people to have quiet conversations. Unfortunately, that made it hard for some people to get hold of others, as they were often in those rooms with other people and there was no way of getting them out. (Not everyone was paying attention to direct messages, which didn’t help.)

In future, I will have more channels but set the minimum number at four to make it easier for players to talk to each other.

Reading the room: From a GM’s perspective, watching the game being played is a lot less satisfactory on Discord than in person. It’s hard to “read the room” online, and I had little sense of how the game was going.

As a player, I find it distracting when you’re conversing with another player and a GM suddenly appears. All they’re doing is listening in, but it’s still distracting. So I tried not to do that—but that meant not seeing as much of the game as I would otherwise have.

Make it longer: A casualty of not reading the room is not knowing when to stop the game. I had originally planned to run from about 7:30 to 10pm, but we started late (as described above) and at 10:30pm I was flagging. I called the end of the game at 10:30, but I know that players were still busy and had I been able to read the room I would have let it carry on for a bit.

I think that’s an inevitable consequence of online play, but for The Highgate Club at least, I’ve added another 30 minutes to the run-time.

Once more with feeling

So my memory of The Highgate Club is tinged with Covid. It's probably time for me to run it again, but ideally face-to-face rather than Discord.

Not in the rulebook

Recently, I’ve been paying attention to the things I do when I run a roleplaying game. Some of those things aren’t in the rules…

I don’t know why they’re not in the rules. Perhaps they’re so obvious they don’t need to be.

Anyway, this is the first.

Making decisions

When I run a roleplaying game, I roll dice for one reason more than any other—and that’s to decide.

These decisions include:

• Answering player questions: “Is there a phonebox nearby?” “Does the store sell wellingtons?” “How far is the nearest river?”
• Deciding how difficult a challenge (such as the scalability of a cliff-face) should be.
• Deciding how cooperative an NPC will be.

If I don’t already know the answer, I let the dice decide. And I make these kinds of rolls more often than for any other reason.

If I roll high then it’s in the players’ favour. If I roll low, it’s bad for the players. And if I roll in the middle, then it’s complicated (ie, good and bad).

Sometimes I’m open about the roll and will explain why I’m rolling and the consequences, and sometimes I do it secretly. I don’t think there’s any logic to this—I do whatever feels right, although as I get older I’m more likely to be open about the roll.

In a recent example, the PCs went to visit a theatrical impresario. I knew nothing about this character, so I grabbed a name and rolled to see how cooperative he would be. I rolled high, so the players found him in good spirits and happy to help. Had I rolled low, he would have been uncooperative and the PCs would have needed to work harder (a skill roll, maybe a bribe) for his help.

The players are not the characters

I know that should be obvious, but sometimes we act as if it were so.

I certainly have done it when creating Call of Cthulhu scenarios. For example, I’d present clues and expect the players to figure them out. Or I’d expect the players to blag their way past a stuffy butler through sheer “roleplaying” alone.

I don’t do that any longer. (At least, I hope I don’t.)

After all, I don’t expect players to use their real-life fighting skills or their real-life lockpick skills. So why would I expect players to use their real-life persuasion or investigation skills?

Characters and players know and experience different things. Characters may be scared; the players may not be. The players may know that someone is lying, the characters don’t. The characters know how their world works; the players may not. The characters may understand the clue; the players may not.

So now when I present a clue, I also explain its context and what it means to the characters. (Assuming I’m not running something with a different approach to investigations like Brindlewood Bay.)

And if a player simply wants to describe how they are persuading the butler (and then rolling the dice), that’s fine too.

The players are not the characters.

Derailed by poor dice rolls

I try not to let a poor dice roll derail an investigation.

For example, during a recent session of The Dee Sanction, the players tried to extract information from an NPC—and rolled poorly. However, they were on the right track, so I said, “Mrs Brisket won’t tell you that—she either doesn’t know or won’t say. But you’re sure that there’s more to find out here, but you’ll have to try something else.”

If I hadn’t said that, the players might have thought there was nothing to find and headed off in a very different direction.

But the players aren’t the characters—the characters can put two and two together even when the players can’t.

An alternative to this is to offer success at a cost. (Fate does this.) So the PCs succeed but at some penalty. So in the example above, I could have offered the players success at a cost, such as Mrs Brisket seeing through their disguise (although ideally, I would let the players tell me what the cost was).

Wanderhome

 I’ve been playing in a few sessions of Jay Dragon’s Wanderhome recently.

Wanderhome ought to be lovely. It’s a gorgeously illustrated game about anthropmorphic animals journeying. Wanderhome is sort-of PbtA-lite—while there are no moves, the characters use playbooks and have a PbtA feel about them.

Locations are built up collaboratively, and it’s easy to develop evocative places. My favourite location was the Forest of Tumeric and Shadow, a mix of graveyard, forest (something the GM had created as that’s not in the book), and farm. We had silent gravestones, an armoured sloth, ants farming giant aphids, and a lost god.

Everything is very collaborative. While Wanderhome can be GM-less, even with a GM the players are encouraged to play NPCs (although we didn’t do this).

But…

I found Wanderhome dull. While it’s all evocative and lovely, it’s also very aimless. There’s lots of wandering around, interacting with NPCs and the scenery—but without any point. And unfortunately, I found myself bored.

I was playing a moth tender, a kind of postman. So I had packages to deliver—and I was the only character with any kind of goal. But it wasn’t a meaningful goal - and as soon as I delivered one letter, I was tasked with another. So that wasn’t particularly satisfying.

Aware that I wasn’t having a great time with Wanderhome, the group discussed how our game was going at the start of the last session. While some players were having a wonderful time with Wanderhome, others were less excited by it. (I was enjoying it least, though. I need plot and meaning in my games, I realise.) We agreed to play a few more sessions, and the GM has introduced a plot regarding a rogue wizard that will hopefully give our game more focus and will let us end on a high.

Peaky 2021

It’s been over two years since the last one, but in early October I attended my favourite gaming weekend of the year: Peaky.

And yes, still my favourite.

Thanks to the pandemic, we had fewer people than usual. That meant Peaky was a little more spacious than it had felt in the past.

And for most of us, we haven’t socialised face-to-face much lately. And while meeting 20+ other gamers simultaneously in the same space took a bit of getting used to, it wasn’t too long before it all seemed normal again.

Organising the games

As usual, I organised the games for Sunday. We had fewer games this year – we had more players than games. I think that was another effect of the pandemic – more groups were happy to start work on a game rather than get something ready for Sunday. (We also had a request from Consequences for bigger, 20-30 player games, so that had an impact as well.)

As a result, while we split into five groups, only two were writing games that would be ready for Sunday. We played three as we also ran Culture Crash, which was written at Virtual Peaky earlier in the year.

So while previous years have usually involved trying to work out how to ensure there are enough players for each game, this time I knew that we would have players spare and that most people would need to sit out at least one game.

As usual, organising this took a fair bit of Saturday for me to arrange, which meant I didn’t contribute to The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle Meets Tonight as perhaps the others would have liked me to.

The writing team hard at work. (Well, the others are hard at work, I’m just messing around taking a photo.)

The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle Meets Tonight

Based on the ribald works of singer Jake Thackray, The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle Meets Tonight was written by Phil D, Kevin J, Suey L, Christi S and me. And although I’ve put the team in alphabetical order, it was definitely Suey and Christi’s game. (I had not heard of Jake Thackray until Peaky, so it was educational for me.)

The game is a horde game for around 13-15 players. A magic ritual has gone wrong, and the main characters are the Castleford Ladies Magic Circle, and the horde are ghosts summoned by the ritual. (It’s so tempting to call them players and NPCs…)

We tried to structure the game so the ghosts had plenty of reasons to talk to each other rather than just the main characters (which is a fault of other horde games we’ve played). Our experience on Sunday suggested that we had succeeded, and little polishing will be needed before it is rerun.

Some thoughts:

• It’ll need a content warning. There’s a fair amount of filth/smut/innuendo, which is very true to the source but isn’t very modern.
• Most of the characters are women, which is a pleasant change.
• The two above points mean it isn’t for everyone.
• I would have run the horde slightly differently than Suey did, but I didn’t make a big deal of it as it’s her vision, not mine.

The Coolham Caper

Roger G, Helen J, Charlie P, Rich P and Julie W wrote The Coolham Caper, a light-hearted game of misunderstanding and misappropriation, gangsters and garden produce for nine players.

I didn’t play in The Coolham Caper, but I heard good things about it from the players.

Other games

Games that were started but not finished:

• The Shining Ones (provisional title), a Fae game for at least 30 players.
• Casino Royale, a Bond-inspired game about spies, glamour and gambling. For 30-ish players.
• An unnamed game set in Restoration Britain for 25-30 players.

Hurrah for more games!

Culture Crash

Our last game was Culture Crash, by Jeff Diewald, Roger Gammans, Heidi Kaye, Richard Perry, and Julie Winnard. It was started at Virtual Peaky 21 but has had some work done since, and this was its third outing.

I played Quilh, Watcher of Stars and I was an alien in a first contact situation. (I didn’t think of myself as an alien, of course.) The game was splendid fun, with lots of mysteries and misunderstandings.

In full costume as Quilh, Watcher of Stars

Some thoughts

• Culture Crash was long by Peaky standards – it took around three hours. It started with a workshop for the alien cultures to sort themselves out, which added to the time.
• The character sheets need some work. They’re very long, and I found it hard to find key information during the game. Some condensing/restructuring is required.
• The ending suffered from the one-big-plot problem (once the big plot arrived, everything else became irrelevant and if you weren’t involved you had nothing to do). The ending was also very GM-intensive, and as a player, I felt I had little agency. But we gave the writers some feedback which hopefully they will consider. Despite that, I thoroughly enjoyed Culture Crash, especially the first two thirds.

The Culture Crash website is here.

Looking forward to Peaky 2022

And as always, the weekend was over much too quickly… But Peaky 2022 is already in the diary.

Brindlewood Bay

 Brindlewood Bay is the PbtA game of cosy murder mysteries by Jason Cordova. The players are members of the Murder Mavens book club and are all widows in their 60s and 70s. Think Murder She Wrote combined with The Golden Girls.

While play is episodic (each episode features the players solving a murder), a darker theme emerges in campaign play as a larger, overall mystery introduces occult elements.

Brindlewood Bay takes an emergent approach to solving the mysteries. The solution to each mystery isn’t predetermined; it is uncovered during play. Key to this are two moves:

• The Meddling Move—used to find clues
• Theorize – for determining whether the PC’s solution is correct.

(Jason Cordova explains how the investigation works here.)

From a distance, Brindlewood Bay looks very similar to other investigative games: the PCs go from place to place and find clues to the mystery. They then work out the solution. But I found it runs quite differently.

I’ve now played Brindlewood Bay twice. Unfortunately, for me, there are more misses than hits.

Dad Overboard

We took about four hours to play through Dad Overboard in two sessions. We followed the process, the players did their investigating, and we solved the murder.

My two players (Jon and Terry) enjoyed playing little old ladies solving murders. But while Jon bought into the “play to find out” approach, Terry hated it.

Terry struggled with the concept that the solution to the mystery was whatever they invented. He prefers RPGs where the GM has a world or scenario for him to explore. He had no problem with the system or other concepts, but he hated that I (as GM) didn’t know the solution.

I found running Dad Overboard surprisingly unsatisfying. It was easy to run—it needed virtually no preparation, and all I did during play was react to what the players were doing and offer them clues. But it was too easy—there was no sense of struggle or challenge. Moreover, when I did put obstacles in the way, they were never significant and easily overcome.

Jingle Bell Shock

Although I came away unsatisfied by Dad Overboard, I thought I’d give Brindlewood Bay another shot. Maybe things would be different with another group. So, I ran Jingle Bell Shock (a Christmas episode) for Becky, Jon (again), Liam and Thomas.

Character generation was more involved with four players and took longer, but we still took about four hours to work through the mystery.

Again, the players enjoyed being little old ladies investigating a murder—that core premise is delightful.

I struggled with some mechanics. For example, if a player rolls a 7-9 when Meddling, they receive the clue but there’s a complication. I struggled with complications, as I couldn’t immediately think of any that were relevant. And so I stored them up, and when I got to four complications, I killed off one of the suspects. (I also locked one investigator in the basement.)

And while four players are better than two during character generation, the investigation feels heavy-handed with four. For an investigative game, I much prefer smaller groups (also more genre-appropriate).

When it comes to solving the mystery, Brindlewood Bay felt like a parlour game. Once you have collected sufficient clues (such as a secret crawlspace, a bottle of pills that has been tampered with, unpaid bills), then the players merely have to stitch them all together to create a coherent(ish) story—and then roll Theorize to see if they are correct.

Once again we had a successful investigation, but once again, it felt flat.

What works for me

There’s plenty to like in Brindlewood Bay. Things I particularly liked:

• Playing little old ladies solving murders.
• Items from your Cozy Little Place. The last step of character generation is for other players to name one object that can be found in your home, and these were effective in how they changed how the players saw their characters.
• Lovely establishing questions for the locations. For example, What do you see in the grand dining room that shows just how lonely Amelia truly was? I’ll use that in other games.
• Very easy to run. Running Brindlewood Bay is almost effortless—the most straightforward published scenarios I’ve run ever. (But running a game well? I think that’s harder.)

What doesn’t work for me

• Emergent mysteries. I didn’t really enjoy running Brindlewood Bay—I didn’t like not knowing what was going on. Maybe that’s my lack of experience, but it didn’t work for me.
• Mechanics such as complications (which were fiddly), conditions and the moves I didn’t use as while they made sense when I read them, they didn’t seem relevant during play.
• I was disappointed in the occult element that Brindlewood Bay bolts on for campaign play. Nobody tries to justify the high murder rate in Oxford or Jersey or Midsomer, and giving it an occult spin felt unnecessary and not at all true to the source material.)

In summary

I doubt I’ll return to run Brindlewood Bay. However, I’d happily try playing it—perhaps it simply doesn’t suit my GM style.