Monday, February 5, 2018
Facets in Retrolock
Friday, February 2, 2018
Exploration
With the magic of triangle tables, about five years ago I put together some random tables for post-apocalyptic exploration. I've noticed a few tweaks I want to make still, but I figured I'd put them back out there again. These are intended for modern-ish or post-apocalypse settings. Hopefully, they have some semblance of logic (IIRC correctly I pulled percentages of land use area for multiple cities and based the distribution on that). That means no top secret research facilities in residential areas; it also means that (hopefully) buildings that are out of character for an area will be rare. The intention is to only roll as deep as you want. Sometimes all you need is a little kick in the noggin; sometimes you're just completely stuck. These tables should be an aid, not a crutch.
For those unfamiliar with the triangle table concept, you roll xDF (in this case, 5DF) and then count over for every "+" or down for every "-". For these tables, the general area is either determined or rolled, then the second table comes into play to determine the building category. Finally a specific table is referenced for the building type. Entries marked with a (+) or (-) denote adding an additional "+" or "-" result when rolling on the next table. The idea is that building categories different than the area's (like a Commercial building in a Residential area) are skewed more toward certain types of buildings.
You can grab the PDF file with the tables here. Enjoy!
Monday, January 29, 2018
Actions in Retrolock
I missed updating last week, so figured I'd make up for it by writing a post with some meat to it.
Previously I had mentioned that I was working on a kind of Interlock retroclone called Retrolock. While stripped down to the mechanical level it runs very similar to Interlock (roll d10 + stat + skill), games like Fate Core have wormed their way into my gaming DNA to such a degree that I can't really look at any rpg-related without having that particular brand of "fiction first" lens tinting it. So I set out to try to make something that honors the crunchier, "Let the dice decide" philosophy of games like Interlock while still having some newfangled bells and whistles. Without playtesting it's difficult to say if I succeeded, but I like what I have so far.
Basically, like most narrative-focused games everything starts out with what the player is trying to accomplish; how they are going to accomplish it; and what happens if they succeed or fail. This doesn't have to be some long and drawn out negotiation between the player(s) and GM, but it is there to help reinforce that there should be something important, or exciting, or interesting, happening when the dice come out.
From there, it looks like most every other game of its ilk - roll, add stat and skill, compare to the Risk Factor (more on this in a minute). If the rolls beats the Risk Factor the action succeeds, if it's lower the action fails. The kinds of things that you see in games like Fate (success at a cost, boosts, etc.) are kind of there, but more rigidly defined. Rolling a zero results in things Going Sideways, which increases the Risk Factor of a subsequent action logically connected to the failed roll. Rolling a 10 gives a Bonus Effect, which decreases the Risk Factor of a subsequent action.
Finally, the character can Go For Broke, which entails intentionally increasing the Risk Factor of an action in order to reduce a follow-up action's Risk Factor if they succeed (with the chance of getting a stacking Bonus Effect to boot).
Another twist compared to most systems like Interlock or Silhouette is there aren't supposed to be any modifiers to dice rolls, and the Risk Factors are intended to be raised and lowered in clean increments of 5 (matching the Interlock scale of 10 = easy, 15 = average, 20 = hard, etc.). There will be some room in there for instances of smaller adjustments to Risk Factor, but those are going to be the outliers and not the norm.
Finally...what about this Risk Factor thing? Initially, it was intended to be a kind of detour from the idea of basing the target of rolls on "difficulty" but in the end, it just looks like difficulty does in every other system. I'm keeping the label Risk Factor though, because risk is definitely a component of how difficult an action is - along with the capability and skill of the character attempting it, the luck of the die roll, external forces working against the character, etc. So, in that light, the Risk Factor is just one "factor" in the equation of whether the character succeeds or not.
Hopefully things will start to settle down a little bit more at work and home, and I can put some more time and polish into this little project. Of course, that's along with the half a dozen other projects I want to work on as well.
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Post Apocalyptic Location Inspiration


Atlas Obscura actually has a nice page for the graveyard with a gallery of some of the structures.
Monday, January 15, 2018
Could Ingress Be A Decent RPG Setting?
There's potential for a decent RPG buried in the Ingress backstory. The premise is that there is "Exotic Matter" (or XM) that when certain people ("sensitives") are exposed to it they can do awesome stuff. XM is the catalyst for inspiring artists, scientists, thinkers, innovators, etc. throughout history. But there are some extra-dimensional entities that have an interest in the stuff, who have been meddling with humanity's affairs for a very long time. Once the knowledge of XM leaked out of the original lab researching it, two factions arose to battle over how the XM was used - one trying to help the extra-dimensional entities and the other trying to stop them. Beyond that, various research companies have started privately experimenting with XM to create new technologies. The macguffin is the "scanner", a mobile app that was leaked out to the world that allows regular people to interact with XM on their smartphones.
In the end, it's psionic secret agents allied for or against extra dimensional beings, corporations, and each other, for the fate of mankind. Or something.
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These agents often look something like this |
So now we have a mobile ARG that is using tabletop games to play out stuff that would happen in the ARG.
When I first heard of the rpg sessions, I admit thinking it was kind of a neat idea. A lot of the action that happens in the backstory isn't expressed in the game itself - for all of the cool spy-stuff-with-powers that goes on, the actual players are just nerds staring at their smartphones. So I tracked down the rules for the rpg sessions, at least what there are of them.
They're pretty incomplete, which is to be expected (this isn't published or anything). It's basically a d20 clone with some tweaks here and there. It's not balanced in any way - just looking at the stat bonuses for various character choices I see the min-maxing potential. It has a couple novel things such as an option to generate stats based on your Ingress game profile. Likewise, advancement for the characters is tied to Ingress game advancement. Unfortunately, Ingress itself has no roleplaying element (unless you count trolling) - and advancement boils down to how much time you put into the game versus any kind of skill. So that retiree who spends eight hours a day running around town playing Ingress? They could totally have a kickass character in this.
And for you non-Ingressers out there who are surprised someone would spend hours and hours every day playing, it happens more often than you think. I went through a phase myself where I was playing 3-4 hours at a time, nearly every day. Fortunately, I got better.
Oh yeah, and apparently characters don't die, they "recurse" and come back. This is likely tied to some backstory thing within the RPEs that isn't explained in the document (again, I play Ingress but don't follow the meta stuff). It seems that at least a few of the sessions involved some kind of remote viewing into the past so the recursion kind of makes sense. There are also hints throughout that actions from the mobile game - capturing portals, building them, hacking for gear - are directly represented in the game sessions. While this is a big part of the mobile game, in an rpg.....meh. This would be the equivalent of roleplaying gold farming in WoW or something.
So Smartass, How Would You Do it?
So a high-tech thriller, corporate espionage angle seems like the way to go, with the PCs being XM sensitives - either agents of one of the factions/corporations/etc. or on the run from them (or the government, because who knows where the fuck the government is in the official storyline). System-wise, Fate Core or FAE would seem to be good fits (because to me they're always good fits). The XM and Dark XM from the existing RPG adaptation look a lot like stress tracks to me; the Archetypes/Anti-Archetypes look like good candidates for Aspects, which give permission to stunts based on the already described abilities.
From a mechanical perspective, I'd ditch the direct correlations between mobile game actions and how they're represented in the fiction. The routine of capture portals, upgrade portals, hack portals, link portals, create control fields is mindlessly repetitive and great for when you're commuting to work or standing in line at Disneyland. And if you don't get what any of those things means that's okay - just imagine doing the same thing every day, day in and day out. So, kind of like life. Doing that in an rpg isn't exciting.
The first step there would be to make sure that those actions are important. Reducing the size of the "portal network" is a first step - hanging out at Jamba Juice or a memorial bench isn't particularly thrilling. These are supposed to be places of power. Similarly, linking or upgrading the portal (again, if this makes no sense to you just think of an RTS or something where you can improve on towers or whatever) should be meaningful. Occasionally Ingress has special events where objects called shards manifest at certain portals, and they have to be moved on to target portals so that the shards can be brought together into a complete set. That kind of thing should be the focus of the portals in an rpg setting. Now you get globe-hopping psionic secret agents fighting for control of places of power in fantastic locations. That tagline has potential.
The whole thing would obviously require some fleshing out, but that's the beginning of how I'd do it for an Ingress rpg. At some point in the future I might take a more complete crack at it.
Thursday, January 11, 2018
My Vimary
H'lkar and the Skyrealms
The Pact of the Dome
The Fallen and Hom
But like Hl'kar, having a "thriving" Fallen community right under the Tribals' noses feels a little off. Especially since Fallen are portrayed as sneaking into Vimary (Bazaar in particular, notably in the introductory scenario), this would mean crossing a lot of hostile territory with a very high risk of being caught. An explanation, one that I've used myself, is that the general population are at the worst ambivalent to the presence of Fallen and at best sympathetic - but it always felt clumsy.
As a result Hom doesn't exist in My Vimary in the same form as canon. It's flooded with only the tops of the tallest structures breaching the surface. It won't become the Hom of the main rulebook until Children of Lilith. The Fallen population subsequently is a lot lower than the estimates in the Tribe 8 Companion, and the majority of them live underground. This provides some neat opportunities, from giving them a believable means to sneak into Tribal lands to providing opportunities to interact with Keepers, Z'bri, and other inhabitants of the underground. It likely would change the details, but not the intent, of the Tribal actions against the Fallen in Children of Lilith and make the end of the Cycle even more dramatic than it already is.
I think these changes to the setting keep things in the spirit of Tribe 8, while making things a little more interesting and add some more dramatic possibilities. I know there's a few things that I've thought of and forgotten, but those can always be for a later time.
Monday, January 8, 2018
RetroLock
Character-wise, it has 10 Primary Abilities and 5 Composite Abilities that cover about everything you'd expect from a medium to high crunch system. The abilities are rated 0-10, but in a break with most implementations of Interlock 0 and 10 don't represent the absolute floor or ceiling of human ability - a character with Strength 10 is really strong, but not the strongest human on the planet.
There are about 40 Skills, which I've tried to make general enough to not require a separate skill for tying each shoe, but not so broad as to bleed over into other skills. To allow specialization the skills are tiered - Generalist, Specialist, and Polymath. Specialists can get a bonus when using the skill within their chosen specialty, while Polymaths can get a bonus from being able to tie other skills into the action they're attempting. I also have some wordage around performing everyday tasks. Basically, unless there's a good reason why a character shouldn't know how to drive; or use a computer; or whatever you would expect the average person to know how to do, they don't need the skill to do it. It only becomes important when they're attempting something risky. The skeletal character creation system is rounded out by an Aspect-like optional system called Facets for tacking descriptors onto abilities or skills - albeit more limited in scope than say how Aspects are implemented in Fate Core.
I have yet to decide if I'm going to plug in some kind of archetype or role system.
Actions use the tried and true base resolution of roll a d10 and add Ability and Skill. There are some instances (being unskilled, having a tiered skill) where more dice may be rolled, generally to the tune of picking the highest or lowest result. That's my little nod to Silhouette and Synergy. From there the roll is compared to broad levels in increments of 5 (basically CP2020's difficulty levels). There is room for more finely grained adjustments to the Risk Factor, but the dice are always read as rolled and compared to that number and not adjusted themselves. Conflicts are going to use a Condition-like injury system but (at least for physical conflicts) paired with random hit locations. I discovered that the area percentage of various parts of the human body map nearly perfectly to a 2d10 roll.
My goal this year is to actually turn this into a thing - whether that be just a freebie on Google Drive or something that I actually try to turn into a product, I don't know yet. As I continue to develop it, I'll post updates and thoughts.
Thursday, January 4, 2018
Welcome To Tribe 8 Thursdays
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No, not that Tribe 8 |
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Oh, that's just my Tribe 8 collection |
Monday, January 1, 2018
It's a New Year, and a new start

So what subject am I going to kick off the New Year with?
Friday, August 18, 2017
Some first impressions of Blades in The Dark
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When we go camping, we put everyone to work |