High Weirdness Campaign Generator

Having been in a bit of a pulpy mood lately, I was pretty pleased to come across this generator over at HeroPress:

True, it does have a few elements that lend themselves more to The X-Files than Indiana Jones, but there's a lot of overlap in those elements, especially if you up the gonzo quotient in your pulp. And while you can use the name-initial method to run the generator - "Fairies Ran the New World Order" sounds kind of like the start of an urban fantasy campaign - it's also perfectly situated for dice.

What's that? You don't have a d26 handy? Actually, neither do I. Happily, d20s and d6s are both standard, and if we use both that just gives us more elements to work with. For example, if I roll 18 + 3 on the top half that gives me Nazis, Dragons, and Gnomes (. . . maybe this is also a fantasy generator), and 14 + 4 on the bottom "Ruled the Hollow Earth", "Built Atlantis", and "Created the Nazca Lines". These all have possibilities by themselves, but you can't tell me that Hollow Earth Nazis fighting ancient Atlantean dragons for control of places of gnome-made power doesn't sound amazingly off-the-wall.

Thanks to Tim Knight of HeroPress and the original maker of this generator!

Fate Core 2: Electric Boogaloo

Following up on their amazingly successful Fate Core Kickstarter from a couple years back, on Monday the folks at Evil Hat debuted Fate More Part One: From Bits to Books. But don't let the title scare you - while the focus is indeed on printing paper editions of material already available digitally, like last time there's a $10 all-digital buy-in - and it's already worth it, as in less than two days not only has the original goal funded, but the first stretch goal as well:

Yep, a Majestic-12 sourcebook for the Atomic Robo RPG, based on the now-webcomic of the same name. Now, while MJ-12 are, in the comic, presented as the enemies of our favorite wise-cracking robot, this book sounds like it will present them from their own perspective, which should be pretty interesting, and useful. For example, I bet you could easily match it with the fluff from the Monster Hunter International game to do Fate of the Monster Control Bureau.

This revelation also goes to show that there'll be new material available through this Kickstarter in addition to the new printings, and indications are that, like the previous outing, the final results of this are going to be incredible. And of course, if you're new to the system the Fate Core book, as well as a bunch of others (including Spirit of the Century now, I see), are all PWYW on DriveThru.

BREAKING: As I typed this up, the next stretch goal for the Kickstarter was announced - a hardback version of Young Centurions, the nearly-released YA prequel to Spirit of the Century.

What did I tell you? Incredible.

Three TimeWatch Campaign Ideas

As the Kickstarter for TimeWatch enters its final few hours, I've been looking over the Jurassic Edition playtest rules and pondering - specifically, pondering how to tweak the rules for various already-established-but-official-RPGless settings.

The Legend of Zelda

Although it would seem that the more well-known fantasy rules would be most suited for adventuring in Hyrule, some of the games do have an element of time travel to them. Mostly these are hops from one set era to another, but the idea of taking action in one time to set up a success in another translates quite well.

For the adventure itself, I can see the PCs being a cross-section of various Hyrulian races banding together on account of Link disappearing, probably on account of temporal shenanigans from Ganondorf. In an amusing twist on the normal tropes of the series, releasing him would involve exploring a single location multiple times, in multiple times.

Assassin's Creed

Art by chadf

Honestly, it would only take the slightest bit of of reworking to turn TimeWatch into the Assassins and the autochron into the Animus, with Chronal Stability representing Synchronization. Or perhaps the Animus could be re-imagined as an actual mental time-travel device - this would be especially useful in explaining how more than one Assassin can travel to the same era.

In any event, this sort of game would probably draw quite a bit from Night's Black Agents as well as TimeWatch - you'd at least want to put together a Templar conspyramid, and all the better for one spanning multiple eras. 

And with the added element of actual time-travel, there's opportunity for both sides to try to re-write history to their own advantage. Players could even, theoretically, travel into the minds of their future selves, of course to find a dark, Templar-dominated cyberpunk or post-apocalyptic landscape. The big finale of this campaign would probably end up being killing the creator of time travel.

Which brings us to -

Back to the Future

All I really want from this is to have the characters from these movies stated out and set loose on a Tourist campaign. As things progress, they'd meet other iconic time travelers - I have a feeling Doc and Marty would get along great with Bill and Ted - and, of course, evil terminating robots:

Rumor has it that of these characters might get show up in the final edition of the TimeWatch book, bit if not you can probably expect to see them here in about a year or so.

Transmission Resumed

You know, of course, about the Suppressed Transmission.

But just in case this is the first you've heard of it, I shall Illuminate you. Back in 1998, Kenneth Hite, an all-around expert on conspiracy theory, Lovecraftania, and High Weirdness of all varieties, was given a column in Steve Jackson Games' Pyramid magazine for the purpose of writing about, well, conspiracy theory, Lovecraftania, and High Weirdness of all varieties. The column, Suppressed Transmission, became wildly popular, and a fraction of the columns were collected, annotated by Ken, and published in two highly-recommended collections.

Unfortunately, those collections represent the only currently available examples of the Transmissions, and official word is that further collections are not forth-coming (this based of the sales of the PDF versions of the books to date, hint hint), at least not this year. There is, however, another source for those desperate for a semi-regular, bite-sized pieces of weird brilliance - for the past few months, Pelgrane Press has been publishing articles by Ken under the precise, if prosaic, name of Ken Writes About Stuff - said Stuff consisting largely of (all together now) conspiracy theory, Lovecraftania, and High Weirdness of all varieties.

Now, I don't want to give anybody the wrong idea - despite my choice of post titles, there's no official continuity between the two projects. And indeed, there are a few significant differences - most striking, if not especially surprising, is the occasional reference to the GUMSHOE system rules, especially in the monster-centric ones. Lovecraftian monsters, of course - the one of these that I've read is "Hideous Creatures: Deep Ones", and a significant portion of the document is spent showing various ways that different skills could be used to detect Deep One activity. The ideas for giving different Deep Ones a variety of powers and motifs also tend towards the stat-specific, although they're quite useful apart from the system as well. Of course, there's plenty of ideas that aren't system-specific, too - the "world tour" of fish-men myths given a Lovecraftian slant felt especially close to the spirit of the Transmission.

The other KWAS that I've read thus far, "Die Glocke", is a much better example of the effect - Ken has himself described it as "essentially a double-length* "Suppressed Transmission" on" a lost (if it ever existed, which is in considerable doubt) Nazi science experiment. What, exactly, it might have been - options range from a nuclear testing device to a time machine - and where, exactly, it may have ended up is investigated in the typically far-ranging manner, with the system intruding only in the last few paragraphs which custom-fit the ideas into the various GUMSHOE settings.

Much like its Suppressed predecessor, the various KWAS installments cover a wide range of subjects - the "Hideous Creatures" sub-series is the most frequently recurring element, with articles covering not only Deep Ones but also Shoggoths, Ghouls, Mi-Go, and the Hounds of Tindalos - and that's just the ones that have been published or announced. There's very GUMSHOE-centric ones, under the "Zoom" sub-title (Martial Arts or Mind Control, anyone?), and more setting-heavy ones like the newly available "Moon Dust Men", which looks like it'll be all about the Cold War, UFOs, conspiracies, and the secret veil between the mundane and the fantastic.

A typical Ken Hite product, in other words.

BREAKING NEWS: Just before posting this, I have discovered that the entire first year's worth of Ken Writes About Stuff - including the ones yet to be published - is available as part of this week's Bundle of Holding collection. Ordinarily I would say that the ability to pick and choose the most interesting articles is, for a collection like this, an improvement over the subscription model. Given the Bundle's set-your-own price methodology, however, this week may present an opportunity to check out the whole range at a bargain price.


*He's being a bit modest here - the average Transmission takes up about three pages in the PDF collections, while the KWAS articles are 10 - 11 - counting the cover and title page, of course.