There are times that I shouldn’t be allowed to indulge in listening to music. In particular, songs that encourage me to design characters for games I’m unlikely to play, but in the off chance that other Capes players actually stumble by my blog and because I really, really need to get back into the rhythm of writing …

Edwin Maelraith

Love-Struck Mastermind

Abilities

Powers

• 1: Minions!
• 3: Global Conspiracy
• 2: Big Bad Lieutennant of the Hour

Styles

• 2: Friends in High Places
• 4: “I did it all for her/you!”
• 3: Untouchable
• 1: Voice of God

Attitudes

• 5: Obsessed
• 4: Love-Struck
• 2: Driven
• 3: Resigned
• 1: Controlled

Drives

• 4: Obsession
• 2: Pride
• 1: Power
• 1: Despair
• 1: Fear

Background

Middle management in one of the smaller global conspiracies is actually a pretty nice gig, if you’re in your mid-twenties and fresh out of Yale with an MBA. Nice office, important work, knock off the books of a small African nation this week, organize the contacts with the insiders in Gotham’s corrupt police network the next. Almost no chance there’ll be some costumed do-gooder busting through the skylight. Edwin Maelraith was pretty comfortable at having risen to his level of incompetence thanks to the Peter Principle and a very marginal level of personal motivation. He had a number of researchers and a small office of desk drones under his purview and he saw no reason at all to work any harder for ULER. In fact, he had no idea what ULER was even supposed to stand for, and really couldn’t find much reason to care.

That is, until he met Amber-Lynn Sprayberry, the daughter of one of the researchers under him. It should have been a no-brainer, right? She was beautiful, honey-blonde hair to her shoulders, funny, cute, late teens and very much interested in her father’s work. Really, he should have been a shoe-in for her to fall for, marry, and raise 2.5 kids with in a small suburban apartment with a dog and a conspiracy-mandated tap on every phone.

But he just couldn’t seem to catch her eye. Part of the problem was that he was just too comfortable. In an organization filled with dashing figures with ambitions and not a little insanity, he was an accountant, a little bit of a people-person and just a touch bland. In fact, he didn’t work his way up to his place in ULER by planning a bank robbery and getting away with it, or running a small criminal group that stole a plasma-laser. He just consistently, calmly, even blandly made sure his division kept turning a neat profit, didn’t stand out too much, and kept the folks under him in the hierarchy happy. Dr. Sprayberry enjoyed working for Edwin more than any of his predecessors; not once had Edwin attempted to abscond with a piece of technical gadgetry or accidently leaned on something and blew up the lab. The budget was even balanced!

Edwin tried everything he could think of to try and woo Amber-Lynn. Flowers? Nice dinners? Charming conversation? Nothing. Oh, it wasn’t that she was unkind to him; she was always unfailingly pleasant and seemed to find Edwin if not titilating, a “good friend.”

Trapped in the Friend Zone, Edwin despaired. Until he saw Amber-Lynn hanging on the arm of one of his superiors in the organization at the Christmas party (with a Titanic theme) that Edwin had planned! It was at that moment the future of ULER as an organization was set.

Edwin Maelraith had decided to get promoted.

Do you know what happens when you give a man with solid middle management skills a burning, searing obsessive motivation to succeed for the love of a woman? In twenty years, he rises to the very top, runs the whole show with the comfortable disinterest of an expert accountant, and … he’s still a guy with an MBA from Yale who might be one of the most powerful 100 men on Earth (though he’d be the first to tell you he’s among the bottom of that list), and wears white shirts and sensible slacks. He just happens to order hits on powerful-yet-obscure people, run three small African nations, and launder the entire national income of Guam.

And he’s still trying to catch Amber-Lynn’s eye and hold it.

Dr. Amber-Lynn Sprayberry

(Mad?) Conspiracy Scientist

Obsession Exemplar for Edwin Maelraith.

Issue

“I need Amber-Lynn to love me, but she’s just not that into me.”

Free Conflict

Event: Edwin and Amber-Lynn share an intimate moment.

Abilities

Attributes

• 3: (Mad?) Science
• 2: Analyze
• 1: Research

Styles

• 3: “That can’t be right!”
• 1: Examine Sample
• 2: Miss the subtext
• 4: Smile lights up the room

Attitudes

• 5: Shocked
• 4: Self-Involved
• 2: Curious
• 1: Confused
• 3: Jaded

Drives

• 5: Undifferentiated

Background

Ever since she was in high school, her father’s boss, Edwin Maelraith has been trying to take her out. Most girls would be a little put out at his increasing fixation on them, going from nice dinners and lovely movies to promises of the ownership of Australia and a ring made from the largest diamond in the world, stolen from the core of the orbiting super-laser. Truth is, Amber-Lynn enjoys the attention and has no intention of putting Edwin off, but she’s just not that into him.

Doctor Sprayberry the elder died while she was finishing up grad studies at MIT and it was a natural transition for her to take his place in ULER — scratch that, Maelstrom — in the R&D department that Maelright used to run before he started moving up.

Still cute, perky, and a little bit scatter-brained in her thirties, Dr. Amber-Lynn Sprayberry only vaguely gets that she’s the reason the Maelstrom organization moves on some of its more audacious plans. But she’s flattered. And Edwin’s precious. Such a good friend.

So, I’ve been reading CthulhuTech on and off for the past couple days as the mood catches me, and I’ve wandered happily through the weirdly beautiful backstory, marveling in happy awe at how they’ve integrated the Cthulhu Mythos and various facets of anime geekdom (particularly The Guyver and Neon Genesis Evangelion, perversely). I find myself scratching my head at the sheer amount of thought that went into the process and smiling at the results.

And then I wandered on in to the first bits of the mechanical system, checked out the means by which conflicts were resolved, and felt it all go painful before my eyes. I took at least three Insanity points, there and then.

Let me lay it out for you:

1. Look at your skill ranking (Novice to Adept to Legendary, roughly 5 steps), convert that rank into a number of d10s.
2. Roll said d10s.
3. Look for one of the following:
   • Highest single die, or
   • Add die roll multiples (4, 4 = 8; 7, 7, 7 = 21), or
   • Sum the dice in a “straight” (3, 4, 5 = 12; 1, 2, 3, 4 = 10)
4. Add value derived above to your controlling stat for this Test
5. Compare to difficulty target, where Diff is approximate 8 for Easy, and increases by 4 for each stage of improvement until it hits 28 or so for Impossible tasks
6. Margin of success determines degree of success
   • If more than half the dice were 1s, it’s a Crit Fail
   • If value exceeds target by 10, it’s a Crit Success
   • If the Stat + 7 > TN, don’t bother to roll, take auto-success

Maybe I’m getting old, but that just seems like too much damn fiddly dice-throwing and counting, especially given it’s d10s. You have to figure out what your best value is, in what combination, then compare to a not-very-neat value (which has some slop between the areas; I just gave you the average target values for the band).

Too much fiddly for a guy who’s become used to “OK, roll FA or NFA; I’ll count down the actions, go!” This may have spoiled me.

Then I got to the weapons list. Now, I know that modern games with weapons of range in them are obligated to have long tambly tables of weapons which differ in only slight ways and have exotic names so the grognardy hardcore can prove their dick-size by memorizing it, but really — do you really need more than a handful of traits with ratings and maybe a Special to describe weapons in general?

• Range: Poor / Mediocre / Fair / Good / Great / Superb

• Power: Poor / Mediocre /Fair / Good / Great / Superb

• Penetration: Poor / Mediocre / Fair / Good / Great / Superb

• Special: Can stun target one round per success rank / hits multiple targets within range / causes unresistable sexual longing in the target for the firer / whatev.

There, I’ve reproduced their entire four pages, small print, of weapon stats in a fisrfull of lines with possibly even better detail. And not only that, but mapped it to use Fudge while I was at it. This can only be an improvement.

Maybe I’m getting old and crochety. Maybe I’m the lineal opposition of James M at Grognardia, the new wave curmudgeon who has distaste for the old ways of doing things because they’re clearly inefficient, crufty, and marginally functional and instead prefers the ways of the new, indy games because they’re streamlined, fast, and focused. (And I like D&D4e (a lot) and I can’t wait for someone to invite me to play in a game so I can run my Halfling Warlord, fo realz. But I digress.)

Something in me that was tantalized by the ideas of the background and the way they’d worked out a future history that combined humanity facing their darkest hour with it being one of the most resolute and optimistic times for man — that which loved those aspects cringed hard when the crunchy hard mechanics rolled out and I felt a desire to actually run or play in the game actively withering. And then I started working out what systems would actually capture the feel of things better, more tightly, more evocatively, stripped of a lot of the cruft.

(Hell, I’d gotten half-way through reconstructing an example combat from the book in Capes before I caught myself, and that only because I was wondering if Tagers/Dhoanoids are two different characters or only one …)

I think this might represent another of the genuine schisms in the hobby population. I know, like it needs another one. The ongoing differentiation between games which leverage direct, clear, simplified mechanics and unified resolution systems represent an interesting new ecology of solutions. Choosing to function within the auspices of one doesn’t preclude but doesn’t actually encourage functioning within the other and certain members of each tribe have a bested interest in expanding that rift.

Just some random thoughts before bed. This is how my mind works.

Looks like they’ll offer me a free badge to AWA if I’ll run a few games. I had a few moments of inspiration, and this is where the madness took me:

Friday

3pm

PS666: Finals

System: Wushu

The characters are students at PS666, a school for young sorcerers, their children, or other supernatural beings. Finals are here! Can the students make it through to the other side with decent grades?

Chargen will be on-site. No experience necessary.

5p

Invaders

System: Capes

Players assume the roles of both aliens and humans as interplanetary invaders attack the world of 2175. The unique nature of Capes means everyone gets to play every side of the conflict. Who’ll fall in love, who’ll destroy a city, and whose giant robots will reign supreme!?

Chargen will be on-site. No experience necessary.

Saturday

1:30p

Rikanishu Chu-Chu

System: Capes

Rakinishu was just an average guy, fresh out of high school, trying to deal with college, and holding down a part-time job as a a data entry clerk at the bank. That was until the Chu-Chus showed up, mischievous spirits that make your dreams come true. Unfortunately for Rak, he dreamed of the beautiful girls he wished were in his life. Can he find happiness in the Chu-Chus’ projections or is the real girl of his dreams elsewhere?

Chargen will take place on-site except for Rak, who’ll be pre-gen. No experience necessary.

3:30p

PS666: Prom Date

System: Wushu

The characters are all students at PS666, a school for young sorcerers, their children, and other supernatural beings. Can they get through prom with their hearts intact … and in their chest?

Characters from Friday’s PS666 strongly encouraged to return.

Chargen will occur on-site. No experience necessary.

I realize two hour slots per game might be pulling it kind of tight, but I’m wagering there’ll be so little interest one or the other will get dumped. Luckily for my evil planning, both Wushu and Capes can really easily add people as the game goes on, so it’s not a huge burden if folks want to jump in or out.

Now, the real question becomes “is it worth billing these games as run by the co-author of Hearts, Swords and Flowers?” On the one hand, it’s completely true. And I’ve definitely constructed all four premises to have definite shoujo overtones (or, in some cases, whole palettes). On the other … well, is that even a selling point? Are there HSF fangirls/boys? One shudders to think.

Assuming these games get approval, next step’ll be doing plot and character/relationship graphs for the Wushu games and a fist-full of characters/situations for the Capes games.

I’ve written of Dragonstaff before.

The original idea was a totally over-the-top fantasy setting, roughly inspired by the kind of insanity one finds in DragonLance, but expressed through Capes mechanics. The possibilities for comedy and pathos were always massive in such a thing and the original plan was just to go the whole 9-yards and let the madness flow.

But we can do better.

At Dragon*Con, I plan to go somewhere out even beyond that far outpost of limitation. Just as Marvel has created the Ultimate line of comics to bring their characters into the 21st century, and largely managed to screw up everything that made the originals cool, so I plan to bring Dragonstaff into the modern era and screw up everything — OK, no one but point5b and I really saw it, so no one can really be horribly disappointed, but that’s not the point! The point is that I’m fully intending to bring the most bizarre mix of crazed over-the-top-ness ever to a gaming convention.

I want people playing in the RPGA Living City games to look over and wonder what in th’Hell we could possibly be playing … and how they can get in on it! I want it to get rowdy and disturbing and bizarre by turns. Sometimes all at once.

We can do this.

Ultimate Dragonstaff takes what few limits there were on the Dragonstaff setting and throws it out the window. Ultimate Dragonstaff will make Exalted look like pikers playing in a sandbox. Ultimate Dragonstaff takes a look at Nobilis and scoffs at such a low-level campeign!

OK, maybe not that last one. But close!

Ever wanted to play Fistandantilous / Raistlin? How about The Scarlet Empress? Drizzt Do’Urden? Elric of Melnibone? Conan? John Carter of Mars? John Galt? Elminster the Wizard? The Black Adder? Arthur? Lancelot? The Lady of the Lake? That Guy on the Dead Wagon?

You can do it all in Ultimate Dragonstaff, and probably should!

But you can’t have a Capes game without a Comics Code, the list of things that cannot come to pass … and, which, incidentally, the villains and sometimes heroes of the piece try to do constantly, since almost achieving them gives Story Tokens as a pay-out.

So, let’s rough a little something out. This can be refined as we go, but as a first pass:

• Characters with Powers cannot be permenantly killed.

  The distinction here is any character with Powers. That’s heroes and villains alike. Falling off a cliff to your “certain doom” pointedly does not count as being permenently dead, nor is being left in a deathtrap. If neither of those happened, there’d be no fantasy novels!

• Exemplars cannot be permenantly killed.

  Well, if we’re giving Powered folk the out, might as well give it to Exemplars. This pretty much just means your Exemplars will be constantly in some kind of danger, as folks go for the Gloating pay-off.

• The root conflict between characters and their Exemplars can never be resolved.

  • Corollary: Unspoken love can neither be revealed nor abandoned.
  • Corollary Exemption: A character in love with a villain must make it repeatedly, brutally obvious to everyone but the target of their love.

  Those pesky root conflicts. It’s just no fun if Aunt Mae tells Peter she’s OK with his web-slinging and hires a goon army to protect her from his rampaging rogues’ gallery, and neither is it fun when the cute red-headed wench the burly Adventurer is smitten with but too shy to tell has it all ruined if he confesses his undying devotion like a sane, smart person. Just doesn’t happen. Ergo, can’t.

  Why the thing with the villainous love interest, you ask? Because it’s necessary.

• The world cannot be destroyed.

  Pretty obvious stuff, that. Can’t blow up the setting. Note what’s not covered, though: political revolutions, murdering heads of state, ruining economies … and that you’re intended to be playing characters that can do such things reasonably on a whim. Feeling a bit unconstrained yet?

Blame Eric the .5b for making me think of how to translate the Mage setting into Capes characters. Damn you, Eric.

Time to break out the latest incarnation of the Vrai line.

Alison Vrai is the descendant of a long, long line of House Tytalus magi. Unfortunately for the House, her tastes ran neither to leadership nor to direct conflict with others. As a result, she hovers at the fringe of the House's involvement with magic, which suits her just fine. Appearing to be in her late 30's, Alison has been an active mage since the late 20's. She always dresses more for comfort than for show, tending toward well-worn sweats and flannel shirts.

Sorcerously, Alison has spent her academic life exploring the mutability of perception and illusion in general. Her grasp of transformation is near the top of her field.

William Albacastle looks about 45 and is 38. He's been confined to a wheelchair for the entirety of his adult life. Luckily, he discovered an affinity for constructing complex electronics when he was three and by the time he'd finished elementary school, had designed and built a complex waldo system to aid his failing muscles. Albacastle was offered a full scholarship to MIT's online degree program by an organization called "The Brotherhood of the Virtual" which eventually recruited him at graduation into the Virtual Adepts. Albacastle worked with the VA for several years but eventually became disenchanted by their fixation on the mystical experience of technology while he believed less and less in any supernatural agency not explicable by rational science. His recruitment by the Technocracy's Iteration X was a welcome change.

Albacastle has no patience for those who lack mental agility, engage in willful foolishness, or in any way measure up to what he considers a worthy being -- ie. doesn't aspire to be more like him. He considers his wasted body an annoyance and a burden to be ignored at the best of times. His powered wheelchair contains an interface rig for his omnipresent set of drones and waldoes.

[21:59] point5b: http://i11.tinypic.com/4pmxyeg.jpg
[21:59] point5b: And the excellent comment:
[22:00] point5b: Jesus plays SHADOWRUN??

Guess that makes sense, you need patience to count all those d6's.
"Okay, this is a simple run. You go in, locate the poor and downtrodden and unload some hope and salvation at them. If you run into any crippled or blind, heal the bastards without thinking twice. The means of exctraction are as usual: martyrs death while spreading the gospel of the lord to the unbelievers. See you in heaven."

[22:00] exopilot: [laugh] OK, Old Testament as Shadowrun. There's a Nobilis game waiting to happen.

Or, at need, Capes ...

I've already done God, Jesus, and Lucifer in Capes, which is undoubtedly going to send me right to Hell. I'm horribly, horribly tempted to go pull Nobilis off my shelf and start statting out God as an Imperator, and Jesus, The Holy Ghost and Lucifer as Powers thereof. (This is, technically, wholly at odds with the original Nobilis setting write-up, but since I'm responsible for injecting a dose of yaoi romanticism between God and Lucifer in there, I feel comfortable further mangling things horribly.)

Jesus as Shadowrunner, though ... This could be fun.

Joshua Christi
Son of God and Ass-Kicker

You know, it was a lot more straightforward in the New Testament. Things were simple. No Aztechnology, no magic reawakened in the world, no two-guns-akimbo street sammies running hither and yon without giving two-farts-in-a-whirlwind about the Message of God. Honestly, Joshua had no real inclination to even come back. A few more centuries and the bone-headed morons on Earth might get some of their heads on straight.

No such luck.

Instead, Josh gets sent back to the world with nothing but the fact he's doing the Will of God and His Son, a charming affinity with summoning the spirits and powers of the air, a Holy Writ for the angels -- who are feeling kind of pissed and ignored, anyway -- and a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder from the last time he dropped in. All that and a Desert Eagle in each fist.

The Son of God is back. And, boy, is he pissed.

Well, Hell, the last issue of Superdrunks was a fair hit. I might as well write up the Exemplars ...

Jimmy Ho
Child Kung-Fu Prodigy

Jimmy was just a dirty street kid in Hong Kong when the Drunken Master found him. Honestly, not much has changed about him, except DM has sunk a couple years into teaching Jimmy some of the most incomprehensible martial arts known to man. For his part, Jimmy's remained the prank-loving hard-charging kid he always was, albeit now with a Hell of a left hook.

Jenny Spark grew up the next house over from Billy Burner; their families had known each other for years even before they were born. It really wasn't much of a surprise when Billy fell for Jenny's girl-next-door charm in elementary school and they dated through High School. The only reason their relationship was broken off was that Jenny found a position working on her uncle's pit crew and, eventually, as the primary racer on the circuit. Jenny's racing often ends up taking her to places which coincide with trouble Billy has to deal with -- much to his discomfort.

The universe is a perverse place, perverse enough that it requires an Avatar of some inherent concepts. One of those concepts is alcohol. Avatars aren't always extant, but their presence strengthens the concept that they're linked to even as it provides a point of vulnerability. Tres is not Alcohol's Avatar yet, but destiny is gathering itself around him. Almo sees it as her duty to usher him through the inevitable trials which little the path to ascention.

John Fayetteville
Third Lord of Fayetteville

Fayetteville's family immigrated to the States not long after the state of Georgia was established and immediately invested heavily in cotton production, securing a lifestyle that provided them the luxury of clinging to aristocratic traditions and dual-citizenships for the next two hundred years. Luckily, John has inherited all the best traits of the family, an open, friendly attitude and a tendency to be able to get by on his looks -- and no reluctance to do so. He still has a few old-school beliefs about privilege and law that gives some friction with his friend, the Black Swan.

Thanks to Eric the .5b for this reference to something well-related to the subject, how to self-induce an alcohol coma.

Next ish, villainy!

I've been sitting on this idea for too long. Unfortunately, it was originally inspired by my buddy and fellow intern, Chris Swan, over on MySpace, but ...

The Superdrunks
Defenders of the Liquid in Life

Not every super-team can be the Avengers. Nor can they be the Legion of Substitute Superheroes. Sometimes the best they can hope to be is the Superdrunks, who may not be the most impressive bunch of guys, but they know how to have a good time.

Drunken Master
Master of Drunken Boxing

The Drunken Master is leader of the Superdrunks, generally because he's the only one sober at any given time. DM's powers originate from a self-induced state of hypnosis which mimics drunkenness without the actual toxic effects of alcohol, lending him preternatural dexterity, a truly incomprehensible gait, and inhuman resilience. Unfortunately, he also tends to speak in philosophical Oriental jibberish, making it difficult to always know his intent.

DM's kung-fu action is mighty indeed, his inner center allowing him to put his fists in the most vulnerable areas with strange joint-aching strikes, to roll on the ground in unpredictable directions, to waver on his feet in the most elusive ways, and pop up behind a threat before they know what's happened. He instinctively seems to know, simply by looking at it, where something or someone is most precariously balanced. Like many older men, his taste for young women is marginally unhealthy.

Billy Burner
Alcohol-Burning Cyborg

Born to a family of NASCAR enthusiasts, young Billy dreamed of being pit crew for Dale Earnhardt. When his genius with all things mechanical came out with his first high-torque engine designed in elementary school, his place in the record books was all but assured and Billy went off to Metro State University with the desire to build the fastest, loudest, most powerful funny-car of all time. Unfortunately, an accident in his senior year -- possibly sabotage -- cut his education short and put him on an entirely different road.

When the experimental engine Billy had on the block exploded, his body was thrown through a nearby brick wall. Mortally broken, Burner barely made it into a suit he had designed previously to keep drivers alive in the event of deadly crashes. When he came back to consciousness, Billy discovered that most of his body was useless and without significant hardware support, he was nothing but dead flesh. Turning his mind to the immediate threat, Billy replaced bits of his body with machinery, making himself into the very icon of speed he'd always wanted, all smooth curves and brightly-colored metal. Inside, he's still a young man who wants to be normal -- but not so much he'd give up his alcohol-fueled jetpack!

Animists believe that everything in the universe has an animating spirit or guiding intelligence. Perhaps it was their collective desire, or maybe they're on to an essential truth; Almo does not know. What Almo does know is that she can remember the last ten thousand years -- sometimes, hazily. To suggest she spent the whole time being "drunk" is somewhat of an understatement. The naive understanding would be that she came into being with the first deliberate fermenting and has been pleasantly buzzed ever since.

Almo appears to be a young Hispanic girl of sixteen years or so, perpetually inebriated to lesser or greater degree. She never quite understood humanity outside religious rituals and bars, and often confuses life in general for a drunken brawl or party. She's everyone's drunk little sister, which can be a little strange when she really lets loose as an empowered ancient manifestation of physical truth. When she wills it, almost anything can burst into flames as if it were doused in pure alcohol.

Black Swan
The Immortal Drunk

It's said that God looks out for drunks and little children. What happens when you become aware of this seeming immortality? What if you found a way to permanently induce a state of chemical inebriation on yourself? For the Black Swan, you decide that the world needs a saviour -- even if that saviour is pretty well in the bag and a bit unstable on his feet.

Having used his background in chemistry to alter his neuropeptides, Black Swan is almost entirely unstoppable, when not weaving unsteadily and peering through bleary eyes. When in the midst of combat against the evil in the world, he usually finds himself untouched amidst a pile of rubble and debris.

You can blame She That Is Wicked for this one; I take no real responsibility.

Name

Jason Mullins
Mullet Man

Background

Jason Mullins was just a normal, everyday redneck, living in a trailer-home in rural north Georgia, drinking entirely too much Pabst Blue Ribbon and watching NASCAR whenever he could catch the time between working hard for his uncle's house framing company.

But that was before the rock fell.

Jason was the first on the crash site of the supposed "meteor," and so it was only he who saw the Grey crawl from the wreckage. Being a hospitable sort, Jason helped the dying creature free of the crater and, in gratitude, the alien creature passed it's life-force into the stunned good ol' boy. That power was somewhat incompatible with the human biology, however, in that Greys simply don't have hair. Instead, Jason's hair took on the powers of a Grey's intestinal cillia, becoming highly extensible, flexible, and able to act as additional grasping limbs. In addition, Jason's natural knowledges and abilities were magnified. He became a better race driver than Dale Ernheart (may he rest in peace), a better wrestler than the Undertaker, and the fastest redneck alive!

Jason was never the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but his simple-man ways and honest belief that life can be better for everyone if "we just sit right down and have a beer together" makes him one of the most hopeful and comfortable hypermen for the common man to sit down with.

When "in costume," Mullet Man wears a worn brown duster over a white strappy t-shirt, worn blue jeans, and worn brown boots. Embroidered on the back of the duster is a glow-in-the-dark stylized Grey head which is typically half covered by his mullet.

Heather's right. It's unfair to offer people a good, hard gaming and then not let them have it. It's just darn impolite, at heart, and I should avoid being impolite.

So, here's the call-out. I know Heather's going out of town on Sunday for two weeks. My social calendar's scant, and I'm pretty sure most of the folks I know are in similar straits, so ...

This Present Darkness. Saturday night. Starting around, say, 7p - 8p Eastern. If you're an old hand in here, you know what the URL for the wiki is. If you find yourself free and want to join in, Capes is good in that we'll have to be putting together characters on the fly half the time anyway, so it's not so big a deal.

For those folks with PDFs, brush up on your mechanics and be ready to go. For those without, well, we'll work something out.

This will be a Skype moderated event, so that means you'll need to have the right hardware and software hooked up to do the deed. Make it happen.

If only there was an easy way to model laying 3x5 cards on a shared desktop. Ah well, can't have everything.

As Prime Operator, I'm taking it on myself to setup the first Scene. Which just means things will be strange right out the gate. Just as we like it.

I get the damned oddest spam.

Universal Psychic Guild is a world wide organization devoted to making
your life happier and more successful. "Voted the Number 1 Psychic
web site in the world" The Universal Psychic Guild's guarantee: If
you are not happy with your psychic reading, if you did not receive
accurate answers, if you did not receive an answer to any of your
questions, we will give you your money back as well as a FREE psychic
reading. That's right your money back PLUS a FREE psychic reading.
Try our online Psychic Reading now at
http://www.psychicguild.com/readings_email.php

OK, so ... you want me to contact an entire guild of professional psychics (possibly led by the Soverign, David Bowie), and if I'm not happy with the answers I get, you'll give me my money back plus a free psychic reading from the psychic guild that already left me unhappy.

As one can say about pretty much every psychic scam, "Didn't they see that one coming?"

That said ... I feel a perverse inspiration.

Name: The Guild of Psychics

Description:

Composed of dozens of psychic mediums worldwide, the Guild of Psychics act as a clearinghouse for insider information on the Average Joe. Using their thousands of contacts, they map the demographics of developed nations in immense detail, turning it into the most potent tool for advertising and political manipulation on Earth. Oh, yes, and they can see the future. Sometimes. Kind of.

Italicized entries are Powers.

Just as a note to myself, and sort of referential for everyone else, I really need to sit down and respin the Battlestar Galactica space combat between Starbuck and Scar that I originally did in Capes with Universalis. Mainly as an exercise for myself to see if I understand the architecture well enough to write it out, and also to see if I can figure out exactly how the Complications differ from the way Conflicts in Capes play out.

(I'm not doing it now because I just took my Ambien and it does me no good to try and write unconscious.)

Just as a gloss, my gut suggests the Capes Conflicts are a lot more "active" than Universalis Complications, mainly due to the fact that Conflicts can activate Powers repeatedly at the cost of more Debt, but Complications can only activate a Trait once for each time it exists on a Component. I suppose you could buy additional copies of a Trait if you wanted to go on using it multiple times in a given Complication. That'd move the Debt idea to an up-front cost instead, which is kind of interesting. A character which started with the Trait "Laser Cannon" who gets in an intense fire-fight might have it bought a few more times, ending up with "Laser Cannon x4" at the end. In the next Complication where it might be useful, it's already bought up and can be used 4x for free.

I wonder if that wouldn't actually better mimic the arc by which a character begins a story fairly loosely sketched out, and develops not only peripheral abilities and breadth, but the facets of their character that get brought into play a lot dynamically get invested in, making them ever more important.

Side thought: Could this be an alternative approach to the Hero's Journey that D&D rather sadly attempts to mimic via levels? Traits that get branched out and built upon as stories go, making the character ever harder to remove from the narrative and establishing more things about them that have to be Challenged to essentially change them? Remind me to try a fast-sketch of how a "First-Level Character" might change over multiple stories."

Well. We'll just have to see how this sort of thing works out in auto-play before I actually try it with other people.

Source: Elephant Sack

Source Interest: steampunk

Iron Fist
Cybernetic Aristocrat

Wilhelm van Morgenstern was born to a wealthy Prussian family and given the best education a Prussian nobleman could hope to receive. By the time he was ten, he had mastered the forms of saber fencing his grandfather had nearly beaten into him since birth and his family's wealth was on the rise due to their investments in steam-weaponry. The Great War was looming on the horizon and the cunning could turn that to their advantage. Unfortunately for Wilhelm, an accident during a match against an older rival left him without a left arm, his dominant. The Morgenstern family could not be dishonoured by having a crippled son, so their fortune and technological contacts were pressed into forging a new left arm for him. Now given a powerful weapon and fueled by the desire to be seen as competent, Wilhelm devoted himself to representing his family's interest in the economic centers of Europe, while carving a swath through the fencing circles, fairly and not.

Drives

Dragon*Con is coming.

Let me repeat that with the proper emphasis and effect. Let me turn on the distortion mic.

Dragon*Con is coming.

And, of course, just like every year, I really, really want to run some kind of game. Predictably. These things just happen.

On the up-side, the move toward "antagonistic narrativism," as it were, means that I can actually get to play as much as I run. The advantage thereof is incalculable, because, damn-it, I want to get to enjoy the give-and-take as much as the players. Ergo, I'm pleased thereby.

The question becomes, thus, what should I run?

Luckily, I think I have a plan. There are two things I really, really want to run.

• Capes

Well, it is kind of obvious, right? Adversarial narrativism, relatively fast character generation, you get to play with index cards and my hungus oversized d6s. Its an utter win.

Setting: Demon City: Atlanta. If you haven't read the script, well, probably all for the best given I wrote it six years ago and my writing has increased at least marginally since then. But still, probably a good background briefing if you're interested in playing. Just assume that none of the events in the script are important to your characters, and we're talking a whole new side-story. Call it ...

Megalanta.

Well, I like it.

I'll probably be looking to run this on Friday afternoon, around 2p or so, after our lunch schedule, in Open Gaming. If any of my readers think they're interested in getting in-game, let me know and think about a few characters you think might be interesting. Hades knows there's enough info linked from my blog to do chargen beforehand if you want, or just catch me on-site, or wait 'til the game. Whatevah.

• My Life With Master

Oh, come off it. You guys know I've been dying to run this, forever. While it doesn't do adversarial narrativism, as such, its so formulaicly structured and so mechanically simple that I don't think it'll be much of a hardship to run.

Besides, who more than I was born to play the role of Master to a group of horrid, socially and physically warped Minions?

Right, s'what I thought.

Again, we're looking at an early afternoon session, Saturday around 2p, Open Gaming, yadda yadda. We will be doing all chargen in this session, because chargen in MLwM is so bloody fast and easy.

Both games will probably have a max run-time of 3.5hrs or so, simply because nothing is so much fun I intend to miss my scheduled dinner for it, and nothing is so important that I can't pick it back up after dinner if, you know, there's no concert or other evening occupation that seeks me out.

So, who's up for gaming?

UrsulaV just keeps providing me fodder from which to create these bizarre, pseudo-mythic Capes characters. I'm starting to get really resentful.

Indri
Greatest of the Lemurs

Abilities (all P)

3 Dexterity
5 Lightning Quickness
4 Sharp Teeth
2 Elegant Fur
1 Blue Eyes

Styles

4 Mythic Heroism (P)
1 Not That Bright (P)
3 Vain Beyond Reason
2 Arboreal Understanding

Attitudes

1 Proud
2 Vain
3 Brave

---

Cloud Fossa
Cat-Mongoose Made of Boiling Cloud and Lightning

Abilities (all P)

5 Lightning Claws
1 Intangibility
2 Dark Shadow
4 Predator Quickness
3 Keen Hearing

Styles

3 Mythic Predator (P)
2 Grace of Heaven
1 Generally Lazy

Attitudes

3 Hungry
2 Aggressive
1 Lethargic
4 Intent

Description

Cloud Fossa are inhabitants of heaven formed of cloud and lightning. Typically, they laze about, being both predators and not needing to eat to live, they find little to rouse them in heaven normally. But when someone steps into the tree-lined savanna of their domain, they take a territorial stance and seek the interloper.

Damn you, UrsulaV, for creating art I feel obsessively compelled to create Capes character write-ups for.

Tongka
Lemur Warrior of the Sky Tribe

Skills (all P)

3 Prehensile Limbs
2 Grasping Tail
1 Foliage Stealth
4 Archery
5 Millipede

Styles

4 Drunken Boxing (P)
3 Arboreal Acrobatics (P)
1 Cute and Fluffy (P)
2 Vicious Aggression

Attitudes

3 Wasted
1 Confused
2 Vicious

Description

Tongka is not old, as the Lemurs of the High Reaches go, but he is wise in the ways of the shaman and the warrior. He knows where the millipedes which bring the warrior-trances live, and the 'pedes which excrete the poisons for the dire arrows, and the 'pedes which are simply good to lick. He likes to lick 'pedes, does Tongka.

Yes, its more Capes geekery. Of course its more Capes geekery.

I've been playing a fair amount of Auto Assault lately. Unlike World of Warcraft, you really don't have to be on a few hours to complete a couple missions; you can generally do some decent farming or run a couple missions in an hour, which is part of why I appreciate it so. I can pop on, go butcher some Pikes or Scavs, ram head-on into vehicles and crazy huge monsters to watch their ruined, burning forms go hurtling through the air, and roll on with a big ol' smile.

But AA wasn't the first game to involve putting on the armour of Mad Max, arming up with your railgun, and heading out into the wasteland. Car Wars burned along the highways of North America long ago, and Autoduel Quarterly was one of our favourite reads. We were slaves to the wheel, strapped in and burning hard with nitro injectors and crazy-huge arenas full of jumps and deadly traps, which we bump-and-jumped around and over while blazing away with machinegun fire and flames, missiles and plasma arrays. Or we were on the highways and by-ways of a dead and mutated America, picking up resources from bombed-out cities for our Arks and subterranean bases, fighting off muties and worse in the ruins.

Well, Hell, how could I get so wound up over such a concept without translating it into the goodness of Capes? But why do it the usual way?

Car Assault Wars Auto Double-Zeta takes the Capes mechanics and leverages the click-and-lock system to let players jump in, throw together a vehicle, then hit the arena or the highway, looking for a good time, and more than a little carnage.

( Car Assault Wars Auto Double-Zeta Rules )

This has been your free Capes mini-game broadcast for the week.

Poor UrsulaV. She made the mistake of inspiring me, and I made the mistake of following that inspiration.

An excerpt:

Description

The Battle Hamsters of the Northern Gardens are well-known for their cold brutality, their incisive berserker mentality, and their adorable cuteness. Seldom appearing in groups of less than thirty, they swarm and chitter and kill amid the icy wastes. Their battle-lord, Helm Eriksson, is the foremost of their mighty ranks, and epitomizes all that which they aspire to. Few cross him and live.

National Geographic provides lots and lots of squid-based news footage, but this piece on the evil and capricious Humboldt squid reminds me of where my DNA is sourced. A six foot long tentacled monstrosity that's been known to attack humans, sharks, and even each other if opportunity arises speaks to the best in all of us.

Which, of course, has its own demands:

Giant Squid
Destroyer of Ships and Entire Cities

Abilities

3 Sharp Beak (P)
4 Grasping Arms (P)
5 Ink Cloud (P)
1 Powerful Jet (P)
2 Enormous Eyes (P)

Styles

3 Tangled Up In You (P)
2 Hit and Run (P)
1 Surprise Attack
4 Collateral Damage (P)

Attitudes

3 Aggressive
1 Shy
2 Hungry

Description

Its a giant frickin' squid! Whaddaya want?

Of course, for extra spicy gaming, bring this into a Scene on land, and watch the head-scratching begin.

Ah, Discovery Channel. Not only do you provide wonderful TV for we geeks, but fascinating bits on things like terrestrially-sourced gamma ray fonts. Naturally occurring. And then you embed things like this into the text:

It appears, perhaps, that TGFs are created at various elevations, said lightning researcher Steven Cummer of Duke University. Those that are higher can be only detected by RHESSI and those that are lower can be detected only on the ground, as was recently detected in Florida by lightning researcher Joseph Dwyer.

Stanley and his colleagues were also able to refine the timing of the events and in one case found that the gamma rays detected by RHESSI might have preceded the lightning, which was a complete surprise, he said.

"In every way this was unusual," said Stanley.

Until now it had been assumed that the TGFs were a product of the lightning initiation process. Now it also appears possible that they could play a role in triggering lightning as well. How?

"It's really not at all that well understood," said Cummer. Despite centuries of research to unlock the secrets of lighting, including Benjamin Franklin's discovery of its electrical nature, "Nobody really knows what starts a lightning stroke."

For decades, we know that Mad Scientists, those crazed bastions of all that is holy in the universe, have been cackling madly and experimenting with their green-glowing radiation, while electrical arcs dance in the clouds over their ruined castles. Now we have mainstream science beginning to understand why. The Hulk is often presaged by thunder and lightning, before now simply believed to be his big feet or enormous claps as he leaps about. No more. The truth will out.

Which, of course, begs the following:

A Dark and Stormy Night
NPC: Environment

Abilities

2 Lightning
1 Rain
3 Thunder

Styles

5 "Its alive!"
2 "Not fit for man nor beast!"
1 Dangerous Weather
3 Transport Breakdown
4 Environmental Destruction

Free Conflict

Goal: The protagonists take shelter.

Description

No horror camp or mad scientist's lair is complete without a dark and stormy night. Fraught with washed out dams and roads, cars breaking down at the slightest provocation, and folks driven to comment on how the weather is fit for neither man nor beast, the dark and stormy night best serves to push our protagonists into the disturbing shelter of a place they'd rather not go.

(As a bone thrown to our fruiter contingent, "Its alive!" can be replaced with "Asshole, slut, asshole, slut, asshole, slut ..." or Audience Participation without additional fee.)

Sean insists this insight should be recorded:

[06:30] exopilot: (Unrelated, but Lost is just Gilligans's Island without the coconuts.)
[06:30] jackslack@mac.com: *SNICKERS*
[06:30] jackslack@mac.com: Dude, that should go in your Livejournal.
[06:31] exopilot: [grin] Possibly so.

I have fulfilled my duty to blog comedy.

No, I'm not going to post Capes write-ups of the Gilligan's Island crew ... tonight.

OK, maybe just one:

The Professor
The Professor

Abilities

4 Science! (P)
1 Sexual Imperviousness (P)
2 Charm (P)
3 Mary Ann (P)

Styles

3 Coconut Obsession (P)
1 Techno-Fetishism (P)
2 Hyper-Rationality

Attitudes

4 Obsessed
1 Distracted
3 Concerned
2 Focused
5 Witty

Drives

1 Justice
4 Truth
1 Love
1 Hope
2 Duty

Description

Tall, inspiring, just a bit square-jawed, the Professor is like Doc Savage without quite the degree of two-fisted. And he's way more obsessed with coconuts. With his faithful, and beautiful, assistant Mary Ann by his side, he can build a radio out of coconut husks and salt water, but can never seem to construct a floatable boat.

You know, I'm probably going to Hell for this.

Eric the .5b and I should probably be restrained, since every time I come up with an idea, we both just keep coming up with endless, disturbing riffs on the idea that takes it in a wholly different direction.

Witness, Dragonstaff's newest additions:

( Dar Haken, Necromancer of the Second Age )

Background

Dar Haken has been a name to conjure with for thousands of years. In some portions of the world, particularly old and nasty ones, he's considered a god to be worshiped. Unfortunately, Dar has mostly forgotten those.

Having become a Lich almost purely by accident so long he doesn't even remember where he put his heart in a jar, Dar putters around in his garden out back of an obsidian black castle entirely staffed by skeletons and particularly dried mummy-zombies. Its probably a good thing Dar has mostly given up on the "conquer the world" thing to look after his begonias, though. He can still cut a fine swath. When he remembers where he put his wands and ioun stones.

---

( Skeleton Crew, Ray Had a Good Design  )</u>

Background

Without certain preparations, animated corpses don't wear well. The flesh often tears off messily in motion, especially if the body is rather old. Many necromancers prefer to flense the corpses down to the skeleton with beetle-filled cauldrons (sometimes bleaching the bones in the sun) for greater efficiency - and to avoid flies.

As Eric the .5b points out, Dar has a few interesting uses:

point5b: Does that guy even quite count as a villain? :)

exopilot: He would if someone or something motivated him. :)

point5b: Or he might hire the PCs to take care of the curious creature that's attacking his garden. This amuses them until they twig that he's been unable to solve the problem with his SKELETON ARMY.

exopilot: [laugh] Exactly.

exopilot: And he's not a guy to piss off, since he probably has some kind of artifact that could crack the world right down to Hell. If he, y'know, could find it.

point5b: *laughs aloud again*

point5b: "But wait - the world is where I *keep* my *garden*. Hrm."

exopilot: Imagine him joining the Party in town. "I'm worshiped as a god, y'know." "Shut up, old man, before I pop you one!" "[draws himself up] Excuse me, did you say something, son? [ominous sound of rattling surrounding the inn, screams]"

This is why you keep ideas away from people with psychological issues.

OK, its not enough that I have one start-up Capes game that I haven't actually kicked off, though I'm obsessively creating characters for it. No, I had to have another idea, implement a basic idea, and then go out of my way to create another bloody signature banner for it!

Yes, back on the old Capes Fantasy kick, with a large dollop of Dragonlance and more than a little of the old fantasy pastiche flowing. Plus, any ol' excuse to pull images from the repository and tinker with them is very likely a good reason.

It seems like everyone else has a cool banner sig when they post things, so I thought it only just that I fiddle something together that captures some of the elements found in This Present Darkness.

So, guy with gun and military gear, a crucifix, a UFO, and Cthulhu. I think that captures the bulk of the important aspects here ...

Now, if only I had a public web site to put there in the lower corner ... Hmmmm.

I have committed the cardinal sin of geekdom.

I have crossed the streams.

I have mentioned Capes and Primetime Adventures on rec.games.mecha. On Usenet.

Just to set the stage, someone mentioned that Palladium was thinking of resurrecting the Robotech RPG franchise. Someone else replied that Robotech was just a Macek hack-job. This leads to ...

Devillin wrote:
> Ohhhh.... Okay... Then maybe you don't know... Robotech is being
> revived with a new movie, and possibly new series based off of
> that. Go to Robotech.com for details on the Shadow Chronicles.

Oh dear Hades below. Didn't they learn from *Zoids* that the mingling
of traditional cell animation and 3d CGI is throwing good money after
bad? And I say this as someone who /liked/ *Zoids*. The phrase "No good
can come of this" is frighteningly burned into my mind. With a massive
MAC-II monster laser mount.

(Not that there's much in the way of "news" there; there's not even a
synopsis. I'm wagering that it'll have about as much to do with the
*Robotech* we all know and love as, well, any of the three source anime
that went into the blenderized *Robotech* had with each other. Ie. for
those playing along at home, not a lot.)

> Wasn't telling him not to post. Just warning him from posting a
> "Robotech = Macek hack" umpteen bash. It's an argument that has
> been said and doesn't need to be made again. Those of us who care
> about Robotech, Series and Game, get tired of hearing that lame,
> boring,
> stupid bash everytime a discussion comes up about Robotech.

And some folk that care about *Robotech* actually care that Macek was a
hack. Assertion is not fact, regardless of the side it comes in on.

The original post was pretty content-free, but so has rgm been, for the
past few years.

> While a lot of us would love to see Palladium put out a truly unified
> Megaversal Ruleset that is universal across all Palladium books, the
> closest we will get at this point is an Ultimate Edition, like Rifts
> got.

That'll never happen, since that'd require the system to be rebuilt
from the ground up with consistency in mind, and that just won't work.
The source materials are simply too far out of joint to be rectified
and reified in such a manner. For good or ill, really, Palladium is a
2nd Generation RPG design with all the baggage that implies. We can do
better than that now, on multiple levels.

I actually go into some discussion of using *Capes*
(http://www.museoffire.com/Games/) for space-based SF action in my blog
(http://zamiel.livejournal.com/998094.html for the specific post). I
use *Battlestar Galactica* as my example, but you could just as easily
use *Robotech*, *Gundam*, or *Sol Bianca* as your basis. In fact, I
might make that today's write-up, just because I can and really need to
work on more *Capes* content. You could just as easily use *Primetime
Adventures* (http://www.dog-eared-designs.com/games.html) if you wanted
a less Player-conflict-level, more TV-series-like feel with a somewhat
more traditional GM structure.

The difference between these modern designs and the foregoing ones is
the vastly increased focus on the conflict-as-primary-element and a
concommitant reduction in the idea of mechanic-as-simulation. Mecha
literature doesn't treat things in a simulationist fashion. The fact
that giant metal war-machines can walk bipedally testifies to that
particular fact. So why focus the mechanics on the simulation of things
the story doesn't simulate? What is important is the conflict between
characters and how those conflicts are resolved, and that's what the
bulk of new game design is focusing on.

(Incidentally, damn it's amusing to be posting to rgm again. Its been
years. Nothing's changed here save the almost complete drying up of
content.)

As Eric the .5b says, "WARNING: Post Contains Snark."

I'm an old, old time poster to rgm, back in the days before it was Moderated ... or even rec.games.mecha. Never has it been a particular haven for folks with more than the mildest of Narrativist inclinations, to borrow from the Forge-speak Dictionary. And yet, here I am, crossing the streams of geek-centric motivations. When will I ever learn?

And yet ...

Anime, particularly mecha-centered anime, is never, ever about the simulation. The physicality of the mecha, aside from the fact it's big and roughly humanoid, is simply not important. Much like ammo in the stylized gun-fu combat of modern wuxia, the simulated properties of kinesics, square-cube rule, et alia, are elided from the narrative because they are not what the story is about. If they ever are introduced, it's because the issue is of importance because of what it allows to be said about the characters, not because the characters are saying it about the world. The mecha themselves are cyphers, manifestations of character through which the conflicts between people are enacted. And I don't meant the minor conflict of "Does he hit?" but much bigger ones, such as "Does she realize he loves her?" or "Can the enemy onslaught be stopped?"

To date, none of the major mecha-genre games have really tried tackling this kind of thing, partially because they were all written long before the modern move toward more narrative involvement became central, and partly because the authors have always been writing systems which double as war games under the hood. This applies equally to clunky 2nd generation designs like the Robotech RPG and newer, sleeker, 4th generation systems as embodied in the new DP9 Jovian Chronicles and Heavy Gear. In all cases, the focus is strong, almost exclusively, on Simulation -- and in my experience, to the detriment of the Narrative. (Again, I'm using Forge-speak. This is not because I particularly want to, but because it works, for the moment. And, yes, this should be a footnote. I really wish Semagic let me insert footnotes which link to later in the text. Sigh.)

But this needn't be the case.

Let's use Capes for the sake of argument. I could use PTA, but I don't have the PDF on my system and, frankly, that makes it annoying to try and make rules references anymore without the PDF living in a lovely frame right next to my post. But I digress.

Looking at the field of mecha-literature through a Capes lens, it's worth referring back to my post on space adventure in general, since all those tenets are applicable here, but more so. The big difference is the recognition that the focus in mecha Scenes is generally on the Conflicts between people on a personal level. As such, while, like space adventure, mecha are generally created as separate Characters, they often, even always, have Traits which tie back to the characters which frequently pilot them and their relationships.

As an example, lifting from Robotech, Max Sterling has a relationship with and eventually marries Miriya, a Zentradi combat pilot. As such, their Character sheets will very likely have Abilities like "Love For My {Wife|Husband}," but the mecha they pilot (such as the "Max Type" VF-1J) should definitely have Styles like "Protect My {Wife|Husband}" and should themselves have Exemplar Relationships to said mecha. As a result, when Max and Miriya are in Scenes together, whether it be together in person or fighting side-by-side in combat, Conflicts which take their emotional connections as the core will be frequent, and important.

A focus on the emotional environment of the people is what makes mecha anime different from stories which are just about a war without the intermediary of the iconic human represented by the giant robot. While such stories can be told, they're particularly rare in the genre. The closest to it may be VOTOMS, Even then, the war serves as a particularly stark backdrop for the conflicts between Chirico Cuvie and the desires and expectations of others.

It's getting early. I'm sure I'll come back to this topic later.

Eric the .5b was complaining the other day about the lack of costumed superheroes, by and large, in This Present Darkness. Well, I couldn't let a challenge go by untouched.

Starlight Express
The Light of Heaven

Abilities

• 5 Light Beam (P)
• 1 Photonic Armour (P)
• 4 Flight (P)
• 2 Quantum Engineering (P)
• 3 Holy Enlightenment (P)

Styles

• 3 Ubiquitous Self-Destruct Buttons (P)
• 2 Purifying Blast (P)
• 1 Light-Speed Reflexes

Attitudes

• 4 Righteous
• 1 Steadfast
• 2 Insightful
• 3 Generous

Description

5'7, female, Asian features, slight build. She wears a tight-fitting body-suit of what appears to be white lycra studded with silvery-green metal plates and features with a pale cloak. Her hair is short and black, and her eyes glow with a holy white fire.

Background

Starlight Express was recruited by the prelate from a radical Protestant vigilante group which called itself "Heaven's Light," led by Express herself. She claims to have been a particle theorist working for the DoD when she experienced, as she put it, a "Paul on the Road to Damascus moment," and understood at an intuitive level that God intended for her to use her knowledge for the betterment of Humanity. Constructing a protective suit which harnesses photonic energy for attack and defense, she was flattered to be approached by the Council to expand her horizons.

In conflict, Starlight has been known to use the light energy she can create to blast enemies and purge the spiritually corrupt.

Inspiration comes from a perverse blend of Doctor Light from Teen Titans, Sailor Moon, and The Flying Nun. Try not to think about it overmuch. Hero Machine provided a bit of drawing capability, followed up by some serious editing in Illustrator and Photoshop.

I'm such a geek.

OK, you knew it was inevitable.

---

Snakes
Long, Short, Venomous and Writhing!

Abilities

5 Venomous Bite (P)
4 Concealment (P)
1 Scaled Skin (P)
3 Serpentine Speed (P)
2 Fangs! (P)

Styles

2 Sneak Attack!
1 Cold-Blooded Calculation (P)
3 Poisonous Side-Effects (P)

Attitudes

1 Cold-Blooded
4 Sneaky
3 Hungry
2 Agitated

Notes

They're snakes! Long, short, thick and thin! Some of them are poisonous and some of them are not, but why take the chance, right?

---

On a Plane
(NPC Location) On a Motherhumpin' Plane!

Abilities

1 Stews
5 The Tiny Bathroom
3 Overhead Bins
4 Cargo
2 Rows of Seats

Attitudes

1 Sick
2 Tired
3 Terrified

Free Conflict

Event: Someone pulls out an air-sickness bag!

Notes

You can't have Snakes on a Plane without the plane! From the long rows of seats, to the harried steward{s|esses}, to the feelings everyone has when they have been in the air a couple of hours. Inevitably, someone'll pull out an air-sickness bag, and whether its full of yuk, hides a gun, or a snake jumps out is up to the resolver!

---

Snakes on a Plane in Capes is probably only worth one Scene in most folks' games, though if it really gets rolling, that Scene can go a goodly number of Pages. The plane part of things itself will be fairly reasonable if someone brings it on as an NPC; the blocking Traits will make sure that the standard tropes (the tiny bathroom, for instance) won't get too abused, and the Free Conflict just begs for lots and lots of bidding escalation.

Just as in chadu's Truth & Justice version, its probably a great idea to have your characters' Secret Identities or latent forms on the plane for some trumped-up reason, then bust this out. As such, probably not an effective opening Scene, but a damn fine option for when you've got some Story Tokens to burn on bringing in one of your usual characters, the Snakes and On a Plane, all at once! Good Conflicts to break out include:

• Event: A snake slithers across someone's foot!
• Event: A snake drops from above, off-panel!
• Event: A woman screams!
• Event: A snake bites someone!
• Goal: A stewardess stops screaming!
• Event: Someone dies!
• Goal: A snake dies!
• Event: The pilot pulls the plane out of a fatal nose-dive!
• Goal: Someone convinces one of the passengers to pilot the plane!
• Event: A hero takes the pilot's seat!
• Goal: The plane returns to a semblance of calm!

The best part about all of the above Conflicts is that they're all blocking Conflicts; once introduced, until it's resolved, the postulated situation simply doesn't and can't go away. So if you narrate everyone goes into paroxysms of terror and drop Goal: The plane returns to a semblance of calm! it simply can't return to calm until the Conflict's resolved ... and might not return to calm as a result of that Conflict, given it's a Goal and not an Event! (After all, someone might want to stymie attempts to calm things down -- like the snakes!)

It's hard to write about Snakes on a Plane without using entirely too many exclamation-marks.

I'm thinking that this might actually be my Convention Starter Scene of choice. Give everyone two Story Tokens to kick off, and either burn both of mine to bring in both Snakes and On a Plane, or conspiratorially arrange to have someone else bring in Snakes after I set the Scene, bring on one of my usual Characters, and pop off On a Plane ...

Post Scriptum:

This just in.

SNAKES ON A PLANE
The Roleplaying Game
of Personal Discovery
Dire Combat
And Motherf%king Snakes

I do believe I've figured out why I've been so religiously posting things to LJ about Capes and This Present Darkness, and why so many of them are characters and organizations.

I love to create worlds.

Now, this isn't really surprising, I suppose. Aside from the fact I have the most over-developed megalomaniacal god-complex of any socially functional person you know, I do think of myself as a writer. (In fact, lately, I think of myself as more a Writer than a Computer Engineer, which is really quite the transition.) I enjoy the very act of creating a coherent world, piece by piece, birthing it into being, bringing it into awareness and, beyond that, introducing others to the construction and having them feed back into the loop.

In that sense, RPG writing, for all the fact you can't make a living at it, is the perfect environment for the kind of writing I enjoy most. I can endlessly create facets and spin them off into the Void, tying them together with spiderwebs of character and implication, and just wait for others to start treading on them. The forging of entire cultures from a few lines of text and a bit of a flowchart of decisions is just my taste. RPGs are all about creating that shared context in a concise but evocative manner and letting the people at it to enjoy it.

So, in that sense, its not that surprising that I'd keep inundating my blog with TPD bits. Unlike in a more typically structured RPG, Capes isn't built on a GM building a vast edifice for the Players to explore like tourists. I gather the standard setup doesn't really involve a lot of pre-construction at all, depending on folk to build things as they go along with various interlacing. Its my personal obsession with constructing shared spaces (along with Eric the .5b's help, to be fair) that's driving the fairly large amount of material hanging off the TPD wiki right now.

Also, though, in that space, Capes' GM-less play-structure works against my desires. There's not really much of a point in creating this nuanced, faceted space since others can and will and should be adding onto their bits and Scenes and Characters, adding to the Character Library and the shared mythos of the world well beyond and without making reference to my pieces at all.

Part of it is that I'm pretty much the most obsessive world-builder in the group, at this point. I'm also the traditional GM point-man for almost any system you could name, since I'm the obsessive collector and can quote details of systems and settings of games that were released before the bulk of my readers were alive while simultaneously being obsessed with the more modern designs and more experimental approaches. I'm a Collector, in the truest geek-sense, and the folks I'm likely to play with all know it and sometimes seem to defer to it.

The funny thing is that the sense of "playing with your hand showing" that Capes creates just makes me want to write more little obscure characters and even stranger organizations. There's no pressure in having to make it "just right," since everyone else will be equally tasked with making Scenes be cool and interesting. If Marda Nova's throwing a fund-raising gala for the Pact of Warsaw, and someone thinks it would be profitable to have Carlotta Stregazzi in attendance so they can leverage the old material between them, and someone else brings George Bush ... that's all good. It works, insofar as long as folks are dropping interesting Conflicts, they'll be rewarded by the system and by other Players. The more things I write, even stuff no one ever uses, the more I feel like I'm building up the world.

I like building worlds.

Sometime, I really want to play Primetime Adventures, too. Unlike Capes, however, PtA is all about the collaboration from the start, with a GM who exists not so much to create and manage the world, but to pace and create even more conflicts. The means of stating those conflicts is through explicit stake setting, ie. "If you win, Carlotta makes Marda look foolish in front of her backers, whereas if I win, Marda not only looks elegant and stylish, but gains the approval of folks who were previously on the fence about her ... like George Bush," rather than Capes' more ambiguous introduction of the Goal: Carlotta makes Marda look foolish in front of her backers, with the alternatives left unstated. The difference between the games goes to the heart of what's important to my enjoyment in the act of creation, though, since in PtA the GM is pointedly not in charge of creating the world or even wholly Scenes; PtA is much, much more decisively collaborative.

Part of what I'm enjoying about TPD, even with not a full session being played out, is that I have the sense of unfettered creation that I enjoy but without the cloud of terror that the results will be missed. Everyone in the game can read the stuff I'm putting out. Hell, everyone reading my blog can, at this point. I like that.

I'm a world-forging god. And so is everyone else.

For the record, folks, can we try and get together for the first session of significant substance on Sunday evening? Mike, you still need to get a character in. Since all it takes is any three of us to hook up to do the deed -- let me rephrase that -- it should be easy enough for some two of you interested folks to schedule it.

I'm ready to put my dice where mt mouth is.

While we're talking This Present Darkness, let's talk about the only unabashedly heroic organization I've put in so far:

The Council of Apostles

Established in 1002 AD by Pope Sylvester II, the Council of Apostles was conceived and forged as an ecumenical meeting of religious minds. That is, it would be composed of more than just Catholics, any who professed a belief in God, in some form, and was devoted to the good of mankind would be admitted to its ranks. The Apostlic Council's purview would be the threats that the Church discovered in the course of discharging the duty of Christ, both to investigate and, if necessary, eliminate it. The number of seats on the Council was deliberately kept small, the better to keep their activities and knowledge secret. At its head would sit a prelate devoted soley to making sure the activities of the members were directed and managed in accordance with holy responsibility, and that role fell on the shoulders of one family: the Stregazzi.

Technically, the Council of the Apostles only has thirteen seats, twelve reserved for operatives and one for the prelate. If need is dire, the Council can call on other Tribunals within the body of Christ if more resources are necessary (and several have somewhat overlapping areas of concern if not methodology).

Appointments to the Council are for life. If a seat becomes vacant, the prelate is tasked with finding and recruiting a replacement.

We can't have a Council without at least one operative, of course.

Father Andre Di Meo
The Sword of God

Abilities

• 1 Invulnerability (P)
• 5 Regeneration (P)
• 2 Inhuman Stamina (P)
• 3 The Sword Kyria (P)
• 4 Priest (P)

Styles

• 4 Plodding Unstoppability (P)
• 1 Takeing Incredible Abuse (P)
• 3 Bleeding (P)
• 2 Being Sent Flying (P)

Abilities

• 3 Pious
• 1 Centered
• 2 Determined

Drives

• 3 Justice
• 1 Truth
• 1 Love
• 3 Hope
• 1 Duty

Description

5'2, blue eyes, brown hair, an average Italian man in almost every way. He wears his clerical vestments with familiar comfort. Its almost impossible to get a grip on how old he is; his face is unlined but his eyes are deep-set; he could be anywhere from 20 to 45.

Background

Father Andre Di Meo is a relatively new addition to the Council, transferred over from the Tribunal of the Holy Blood (devoted to the investigation of the vampire threat) within the last year. He's tight-lipped about his past, but has said that his amazing ability to survive any injury is wholly an act of God.

Note that Father Di Meo gathers narrative power almost wholly from describing how he's getting his ass beat down, then dusts himself off and keeps coming. I've been wanting to do a character design in Capes like this for a while, almost from the first day I read the text, in fact. There just aren't a lot of game systems in which such a thing is feasible.

And he has Bleeding as a Style. How cool is that?

Are you wondering where I picked up some of the inspiration for the good Father? You clearly never read Xombi.

(Yes, putting Nun of the Above and Catholic Girl on the Council is disgustingly tempting.)

Well, we did the Stregazzi family and their current Don, Carlotta Stregazzi, yesterday. Today, we go into more depth on her late-but-not-gone husband.

John Lanier
Dead Man Walking

Abilities

• 2 Aura of Death (P)
• 1 Perfect Recall (P)
• 4 Drain Lifeforce (P)
• 3 Intangibility (P)

Styles

• 2 Pass Through Walls and Floors (P)
• 3 Paralyze the Living (P)
• 1 Knows Secrets (P)

Attitudes

• 2 Lost
• 5 Devoted
• 1 Unfocused
• 3 Dead
• 4 Damned

Drives

• 4 Obsession (Exemplar: Carlotta Stregazzi, Head of the Stregazzi Crime Syndicate)
• 1 Pride
• 1 Power
• 2 Despair
• 1 Fear

Description

Approximately 5'8, but seldom seen in contact with a supporting surface. Mid-30's European male, thinning hair, monochromatic blue-grey semi-translucent form. Naked. Head has a massive gaping gunshot exit wound at the front-left of the forehead, entry is at the rear right.

Background

At best a minor-lieutennant under the previous Don of the Stregazzi, his luck seemed to be changing when the Don's daughter expressed interest in him. When he fell entirely head over heels for her, she revealed the first steps of her plans to take the seat of power for herself. What could he do? The love of his life wanted to rule the Stregazzi, he'd make sure she ruled the Stregazzi without question.

Carlotta's affair with Marda Nova made Lanier very, very aware of his own mortality and replacability. Even so, his devotion knew no bounds, so that when he approached Carlotta with the plan that would allow her access to the perfect spy and assassin, and allow him to serve her and the family in-perpetuity, she knew immediately it was the only option he had. With the strega binding laid firmly on him, Lanier's final thoughts before his wife blew his brains out across the conference table was how much he would love seeing her forever.

The afterlife hasn't been as rosy as Lanier expected, however. With death came knowledge and with knowledge came the desire for ignorance and rest. Those options are definitely off the table now, however. Lanier knows the secrets of those he watches, and he can never, ever, forget them. It is only the threat of torment by the strega, who can reach across the boundaries between life and death, and obsessed devotion to his Carlotta that keeps him from using those secrets to find someone to release him from his unearthly chains.

Free Conflict

Carlotta Stregazzi

Goal: Lanier earns a sign of affection from Carlotta.

There's something very interesting I've noticed about doing villainous characters (and, frankly, heroic ones as well) in Capes: There's a significant advantage to working the Exemplar Character angle between groups who are notionally opposed or where there's some deep and abiding conflict. Which, I suppose, goes without saying -- after all, that's what its there for for -- but most of the time you don't think about the simply unresolvable conflicts between villain characters, even though in the source material its all over the place. As an example, consider Destro and Cobra Commander. Cobra Commander very easily fits the mold of Destro's Power Exemplar, with the Free Conflict being Goal: Destro usurps power over COBRA. Almost every time they're in the same scene, Destro attempts to take some part of the reins of COBRA, whether it be by simply overruling CC's (admittedly insane) orders or by undercutting him with one of his "trusted" lieutenants (the Baroness being the most oft targeted; wouldn't you go after the smoking hot busty brunette, too?). Conversely, CC would seem to have Destro as his Obsession Exemplar, as often as he seems to be dropping (and losing) Goal: Cobra Commander impresses Destro with his successes.

(Does anyone else think there's some kind of homoerotic sado-masochistic yaoi dynamic going on there? Try not to think overmuch on it.)

Creating more complex villains really leads to more complex heroes, as the latter can then play off the tensions which always surround various villainous characters. After all, how better to distract Destro from Goal: Destro forces the heroes to leave the base than to back CC's control being held in the face of Destro's subversion.

Some people like the Sopranos. Me, I like my crime families to be a bit more ... interesting. So, for your reading enjoyment, here's some in-progress stuff from This Present Darkness:

The Stregazzi family has been an active and profiting, spread from Rome to the western shores of southern Spain even earlier than 1000 AD, when they controlled a valuable import / export business which dealt regularly with the Pope, Sylvester II. Their ability to get access to anything the scholar-pope desired in terms of books or material was not lost on him, and the Pope often was in communication with the head of the family, Marcus Stregazzi. Marcus impressed Sylvester even more with his steely intent and hard-minded idealism. When Sylvester asked Marcus about an ongoing problem that the Holy See was having with things and influences that exceeded the bounds of the normal, the old man gritted his teeth and asked aloud why the Pope did not simply send his men to investigate the disturbances, and if they proved a corruption in the eyes of God, to exert a stark fist upon them. After Sylvester finished his laughter, he asked Marcus who he thought should lead such a "ecumenical" council.

After a bit of thought, Marcus considered and discarded his first-born, Marius. Instead, he suggested his third son, Fortunato, who was already an acolyte of Rome and who, Marcus, thought, be well positioned to influence the innermost positions of Rome after Sylvester died, if he was seen as the Pope's hand-picked successor. He said as much, and Sylvester stroked his chin.

Two years later, Fortunato Stregazzi was not only a fully vested bishop, but placed high up within the Church as the prelate of the Ecumenical Council of the Apostles, a group limited to thirteen members of the most trustworthy sort, each with skills or talents useful to the Pope in investigating supernatural or heretical influences and, if need be, eliminating them quietly. Fortunato himself was gifted with an admirable and organized mind, born to management of a trading empire but turned to serving the Church in commanding its rarest soldiers.

Marius Stregazzi was more his mother's son, and his mind was less managerial but far more calculating. Like millions of Roman wives before her, Maria Stregazzi was the secret power behind the throne, and in the case of Marcus, was made of even harsher stuff, and with fewer qualms about using them. Marius was her boy, and at her knee he learned the most cunning and manipulative of methods, how to rule through force and through sex, and about selling a man exactly what he wants but not what he needs. Marius drank it up like a sponge, and by the time Marcus was planting the seeds of the Council of the Apostles, Marius was learning his way around the Stregazzi transport empire from the bottom up, working days loading cargo onto ships bound from Rome and nights pimping both the finest and basest whores to be found outside the Vatican, including his more-than-willing mother.

It was from this essential division that the family Stregazzi found it's essential split. Two-hundred years later, an inheritor of Marius' line rubbed salt in the never-healed wound by joining the Church as an operative of the Council of the Acolytes, putting one of the fanily's most prized and rarest traits in the hands of a descendent of Fortunato. The Stregazzi were so named because of their tendency to birth witches, or "strega," into both genders. Once, at most twice, a generation would be born a child with a caul, who would have second-sight and the power to hex. The loss of one of the family's few strega to the Church was a dire blow to the men and women who had devoted their lives to expanding the empire into drugs, sex, and violence for hire.

In this day and age, the two branches of the Stregazzi heritage have a wary distaste for one another, but still share a bond of blood, strengthened slowly and erratically over the years as members would defect from one side to the other. "You against me, us against our cousin, all against the outsiders" is the central axiom of the Stregazzi. While Marius' line and Fortunato's clash on occasion, a threat directly against one can count on the other being more than willing to bring its might to bear -- but only if asked.

---

The Stregazzi Syndicate is the outgrowth of the historical Stregazzi family's business empire with over a thousand years of consolidation in the Mediteranean region. While it originally only was involved in smuggling, tax evasion, and the crime of the docks, the Syndicate came to grow without bound as access to ever better technological means came along. Generally run with an eye toward ruthless efficency more than honourable intent, the Stregazzi found themselves among one of the earliest founding members of the Italian Mafia.

Named because of their genetic propensity for birthing witches (or strega) to both sides of the gender line, the Stregazzi have leveraged their unique ability throughout their history. Almost invariably, the head of the family is a strega. Those which aren't are among the most ruthless and agressive of the lot.

Carlotta Stregazzi, the current holder of the seat at the top of the family table, is one of the latter kind. She is a widow, her husband lost years ago to the machinations of business (in fact, she had him killed because he was simply too incompetent at the tasks she assigned him), and she apparently has taken no lovers since.

Beneath Carlotta is a network of very, very connected members of the syndicate, the important nodes of power held by family members by birth or marriage. The syndicate is remarkably liberal in its sexual inclinations, with women holding powerful positions more often than men, possibly harking back to the influence of Maria Stregazzi on her son Marius.

---

Carlotta Stregatti
Head of the Stregazzi Syndicate

Abilities

• 2 Pistol (P)
• 3 Air of Command (P)
• 1 European Beauty (P)
• 4 Stregazzi Family Domination (P)

Styles

• 3 Vicious Assault (P)
• 2 Attack From Behind (P)
• 5 Takes No Shit (P)
• 1 Calculated Damage
• 4 "A hundred men wait to die on my word."

Attitudes

• 1 Cold
• 3 Agressive
• 2 Passionate

Drives

• 2 Obsession (Exemplar: Marda Nova, head of the Pact of Warsaw)
• 4 Pride
• 1 Power
• 1 Despair
• 1 Fear

Description

5'10, 42 (appears 34), long, brunette hair typically worn loose. Classic European beauty with long, clean lines and high cheekbones. Brown eyes. Usually dresses in Italian tailored pin-stripe suits.

Background

Carlotta Stregazzi was, in every way, a spoiled, Mafia Don's daughter. Her father saw to it she received the finest education in the most prestigious schools in Europe, and Carlotta moved through them as an icebreaker moves through fog, leaving a chain of broken hearts and the occasional broken limb in her wake. As Carlotta lacked the strega ability, she was expected to make an advantageous marriage for the family's sake, and then live out her life comfortably but uneventfully.

That was not to be.

In the wake of Don Stregazzi's death, there was significant jockeying for the top spot in the syndicate. Carlotta married the Don's third-place lieutennant and it was expected that she would use his influence to help him take the seat and solidify her security. When he happily put his support behind her, and she began clawing a bloody swath to the top, heads were turned. In the aftermath, when Carlotta put the gun to her own husband's head in the board room and pulled the trigger, jaws dropped.

Two things occured unknown to the rest of the family in the two years between the Don's death and Carlotta's husband's murder:

• John Lanier, the dead husband in question, was bound by a strega to serve the family even after death, and he was a most active participant in the binding.

• Carlotta met and was seduced by Marda Nova. Afterwards, Nova used her leverage to "borrow" resources from the Stregazzi family, in particular a number of the younger strega. When Carlotta realized she'd been duped by one of the few she considered an equal, she decided that the Pact of Warsaw, and Marda Nova in particular, were her enemies evermore and resolved to take power to see that end brought to pass.

Carlotta commands the syndicate with an iron fist and a far more aggressive anger than any Don in a century.

Free Conflict

Marda Nova

Event: Carlotta is about to injure Marda.

Had a bit of inspiration earlier today that resulted in more characters being added to This Present Darkness. We already had Nazi werewolves, but no setting is complete without Nazi zombies!

Martin Henge
Zombie Commander

Abilities

• 1 Assault Rifle (P)
• 4 Undead Stamina (P)
• 3 Air of Command (P)
• 2 Strength of Ten (P)

Styles

• 4 Only a Head Shot Will Do (P)
• 1 Just Keeps Coming (P)
• 3 Bystanders Feel Compelled
• 2 Organic Material Feeds the Beast (P)

Attitudes

• 4 Happy
• 2 Calm
• 1 Casual
• 3 Relaxed

Drives

• 1 Obsession
• 4 Pride
• 1 Power
• 2 Despair
• 1 Fear

Description

6'1, apparently 16, blonde hair, blue-grey eyes, relatively squarish build, pale-grey skin that's only slightly inhuman. Typically smiling or even laughing. Usually wears a Pact of Warsaw soldier's uniform with the shirt untucked and the shoes unpolished.

Background

The Alies had their Super Soldier program and its secret success. The Nazis had a failed Ubermensch project, and in the shadow of that colossal investment, the Thule Retreat's successful experimentation with fusing alchemy and science under Mengele's supervision gave rise to several successes, though none without some inherent problems. Martin Henge was a fairly normal member of the Hitler Youth when he was invited to be a subject of enhancement at Thule, and the resulting innundation of his flesh with necrotic energy was hailed by those working on creating Undead soldiers with pleasure. Henge himself felt his fears of mortality fading away, discovering his effective immortality. Henge's compulsive fear of his own mortality dried up in a flash as it was simply no longer relevant.

The rest of the experimental subjects reacted less well than Henge to the treatments, becoming mindless automatons, though able to follow orders without hesitation or fear. Henge maintains human-level intelligence and an inherent facility with command, so he was put over command of the other Dead Squads (Totegruppen). Their relative durability and lack of need for significant support makes them perfect garrison troops.

Henge is vulnerable to head shots, but unlike his soldiers, they do not completely destroy him. In fact, he has been burned, exploded, bathed in acid, and other means too gruesome to speak, and always has reformed from the most egregious damage in weeks at the longest. A bullet directly in his head will put him down for hours at best.

---

Totegruppen
Zombie Soldiers

Abilities

• 2 Assault Rifle
• 3 Undead Stamina
• 1 More Than Human Strength

Styles

• 5 Outnumber
• 1 Unstoppable Shamble
• 2 Unthinking
• 3 Following Orders
• 4 Head Shot Vulnerable

Attitudes

• 1 Silent
• 2 Mindless
• 3 Empty
• 4 Vicious

Description

5'7+, built lean and lanky, thinning colourless hair, skin grey and clearly inhuman. Always appears slack-jawed and vacant unless feeding on flesh. Uniform is standard Pact of Warsaw but almost always disheveled and unkempt.

Background

Created in the same experimentation by the Thule Retreat that created Martin Henge, the Totengruppe soldiers are zombies, dead flesh animated by necrotic sorceries channeled by Nazi superscience. Incapable of reason or much volition, they exist to simply obey and protect. Particularly vulnerable to others of strong will, they will follow almost any order given strongly enough unless another prevents it. Cold, heat, even the vacuum of space -- none are matters of concern to the Totegruppen.

Nothing goes down with Nazis like Zombies!

Alright, that's really a bit pretentious.Really, what I mean is that I've been giving some thought to the way that With Great Power acts to push the progression of the story not just through the agency of the GM, but through the mechanical construct of the Story Arc.

The Story Arc, if you haven't been following along with the posts I've been wrangling on about regarding game design, is a means by which the Players of WGP can change the allocation of which cards in play are wild cards for the GM. In effect, the game Arc starts out with a significant bias mechanically in favour of the GM / Villains, and as the Players invest their cards from their hands, begin to swing things to significantly more biased at a mechanical level toward them. Its a clever design, making sure that the big bads have early wins, pumping up character motivation to come back and give them what-for, and modeling the progression of melodramatic supers really quite well.

Unfortunately for the world, two things stand between me and really, really wanting to run WGP:

• The mechanical system is entirely card-based, with it being driven to the point the GM has one deck for each of the Players and his own, and GM hand size is well in the 10+ range for most of the game. My tentacles are simply unsuited to manipulating things of that order.
• I ran into Capes first, and really, really like the GM-less nature of the game.

(Some of you were wondering when Capes would enter this post. You're now feeling gratified.)

This put me on the path of thinking about how to really integrate Story Arcs into Capes. To suggest that was "problematic" understates the case. The GM-less nature of the game means that its pointless to suggest that the Arc's progression changes the actual mechanical power of one Player at the expense of the others, as in WGP. That makes no sense, as everyone plays both roles constantly. Moreover, there is no "story arc" in the abstract sense that can be referred to before it occurs in Capes. Finally, I needed a comparable resource for the Players to actually spend for the progression from one stage of the Arc to the next.

Then it hit me, in combination with some thinking I was doing on the idea of meta-Conflicts. Literary criticism may disagree, but cognitive science says that stories only exist in retrospect. An ongoing series of events does not constitute a story until it's told to someone else in the aftermath. For a story to make sense in the context of a Capes game as a meta-narrative, it would have to be assembled post-hoc from things already established. But what things represent facts established in the narrative with any continuity in Capes?

Inspirations, exactly!

Why not Story Tokens? For one, they're too valuable to be tied up outside the context of Scenes, but beyond that they have no history implicit in them. To bring an Inspiration in as a boost to a die, you have to tie the Conflict that granted it into the current situation. Perfect! Add to the pile that Capes is a competitive game at many levels and I was inspired to put together a prototype construct.

The Story Arc in Capes
An Optional System

A Story Arc represents the progression of a given thread or plot from its first manifestation in the experience of the Players and Characters to its resolution. In some senses, a Story Arc acts as a large meta-Conflict, which limits the content of Scenes rather than the actions of a Character during Scenes.

A Story Arc (hereafter referred to as an Arc) comes into play when a Player commits sufficient Inspiration to move the Arc from the Introduction to Exploration stage. An Arc ends when the Resolution stage comes to a close.

Each Story Arc consists of four stages:

1. Introduction
   
   All Arcs start in a nebulous unformed state. The first Scenes in a session or game aren't associated with any particular Arc at all, until Inspirations are committed to create the Arc and go beyond the Introduction. In the Introduction stage, the Arc's overall conflicts are brought out and the Characters get involved to various degrees.
   
   Any Inspirations committed to the move from the Inspiration stage to Exploration are considered to be tied to the issues that the Arc is about. Whoever has committed the most points in Inspirations to shift from Introduction to Exploration gets to narrate the first Exploration Scene.
2. Exploration
   
   In the Exploration stage, the Arc is brought out to the table. Here, the Arc begins to take on shape, the Characters begin discovering information about the core issues of the Arc, and Players begin committing Inspirations to move the Arc along to the next stage.
   
   No significant twists can be introduced in Scenes within this Arc until it moves to the next stage. Again, the person who's committed the most points in Inspirations to advance the stage gets to narrate the first Complication Scene.
3. Complication
   
   Here, the Arc begins to accumulate significant challenge. The first Scene, which is narrated by the Player who committed the most Inspiration points to shift to this stage, generally involves a significant swerve being delivered to the Characters, either in an unexpected twist or greater complications being brought to bear. Once the first complication Scene is introduced, others can by the other Players.
   
   No resolution of the issues which build the Arc can be resolved until this stage transitions to the next by sufficient commitment of Inspirations. As before, the Player who committed the most Inspiration points to the shift gets to narrate the first Scene of the Resolution stage.
4. Resolution
   
   Here is where everything comes to a head. The first Scene in this stage should be bringing things to a conclusion, whether it be in an explosion of violence or confrontation between lovers. Sometimes this will require more than one Scene to deal with all the issues at play, and after the first is narrated by the Player who committed the most points in Inspiration to shift to the Resolution stage, the gates are wide open.
   
   Of particular note is that the total pool of Inspirations which went into the Arc is available to anyone involved in a Scene of this stage, whether they originally committed it or not. As long as there are any Inspirations left attached to the Arc, it is not Resolved. Once all the Inspirations are used, all the issues are considered tied up and the Arc comes to an end.

Key to know is that the Inspirations attached to an Arc at any given stage should guide the creation of the Scenes in the next stage. Any Inspirations committed to an Arc are issues which need to be dealt with in the course of the Arc, the highest rated being the focus of the next stage and the others being of lesser importance. Inspirations committed to an Arc are considered no longer usable by the committing Player until the Resolution stage.

Each stage has a minimum value in Inspirations that need to be committed in order to shift to a new stage. This value can vary based on whether the Arc is an A-Plot or B-Plot (see the Capes text for more detail on those). It is suggested that the number of simultaneous Arcs be limited to only one A-Plot at a time and up to half the number of Players in B-Plots.

Potential advancement values:

A-Plot:

• Inspiration -> Exploration: 4
• Exploration -> Complication: 8
• Complication -> Resolution: 16

B-Plot:

• Inspiration -> Exploration: 1
• Exploration -> Complication: 2
• Complication -> Resolution: 4

Its not necessary that, once introduced, Scenes should be explicitly mentioned as being tied to an extant Arc. If a Scene is important to an Arc, Inspirations which are gathered from that Scene's Conflicts will be committed to that Arc.

Optional Thoughts

• The A-Plot and B-Plot advancement costs are rough approximations. It might be worthwhile to set the cost for moving from one stage to the next equal for all stages if you don't want a build-up of issues as the Arc gathers speed. In fact, you might want Arcs which start spread out and then focus down, in which case it would be sensible to put the largest cost in going from Introduction to Exploration. Optionally, the Player who initiates Exploration can make that choice.
• Nothing limits you to just two kinds of Arcs, either. Introducing Issue Arcs which cost somewhere in-between or Multi-Issue Arcs which are more expensive to shift is certainly possible.
• As a very optional and experimental rule, you can say that Inspirations committed to an Arc can be used by anyone in a Scene related to that Arc's issues (committed Inspirations) at any stage. This will reduce the number of Inspirations usable by the group in the Resolution but mechanically tie in the issues which created the Arc along the way.

Short Example

Alice, Bob, and Carrie are playing with Story Arcs.

After the first couple Scenes, Carrie initiates the A-Plot, committing Peter kisses Gwen: 4. Since Carrie's up to create the next Scene, she gets to start off the Exploration. She knows that the A-Plot is about Peter's relationship with Gwen, so kicks off a Scene where Peter proposes to Gwen.

Alice commits Goblin threatens schoolchildren: 1 to a B-Plot, but Bob commits Harry Osborn defends himself from his father's anger: 3, and controls that B-Plot. Alice can't go to Exploration on that Arc, so creates a Scene with Gwen's father arguing with Gwen about her proposal from Peter (going with Exploration on the A-Plot).

Bob can go to Exploration on the B-Plot, and knows its somehow about the Goblin's threats to the kids and Harry's successful defense of himself. He Scenes Harry confronting his father about the latter's actions as the Green Goblin, then turns around and commits Norman Osborn strikes his son: 2 and retains control of the Arc. It's ready to go on to Complication.

Carrie commits Gwen deflects Peter's questions about Harry: 5 to the B-Plot and hijacks it from Bob. Now Gwen's relationship with Harry is somehow tied in. Instead of going straight to Complication there, she makes a Scene for the A-Plot, with Peter asking Gwen's parents for their blessing. Bob plays Gwen's father and puts Mr Stacy doesn't like Peter: 6 into the B-Plot. He now controls it again.

Alice puts Gwen's mother bursts into tears: 4 and Peter is embarrassed: 4 into the B-Plot, making it even more complicated and taking it over. She complicates things by having the schoolkids that the Goblin threatened being a class that both Mr Stacy and Peter spend time with (the former as a cop representing the department, the latter as a part-time science teacher), and has both present when the Goblin makes a cruel return to terrify the children out of their wits to get back at his son for the affront.

Bob puts Goblin is thrown out the window: 4 into the B-Plot and goes straight into Resolution. Spidey and Goblin face each other on the highway overpass, with a schoolbus full of children teetering on the brink and at risk. Spidey is rocked, as Goblin taunts him publicly and he remembers Mrs Stacy's tears and his humiliating embarrassment, and the Goblin turns his anger at Harry into ever more brutal acts. Driven by the need to prove himself worthy to himself and, despite their ignorance of his identity, the Stacys, Spidey finally drives the Goblin off and saves the bus.

But what about Peter and Gwen? Do they marry, or does more nefarious evil intervene? (Of course it does!)

More inspiration turned to serve This Present Darkness:

Sniper Overwatch
"God, we need some support here." "Roger."

Abilities
• 5 Steel-Jacketed Bullet
• 1 High Perch
• 2 Telescopic Sight
• 3 Riflery
• 4 Concealment

Styles
• 2 Headshot
• 3 One Shot, One Kill
• 1 Glint Off the Scope

Free Conflict
• Event: Sniper line of sight is broken.

Notes
Sometimes everyone needs a bit of backup. Whether its a group of carefully positioned military snipers with state of the art hardware and carefully trained spotters, or just a guy up in a clocktower with a deer rifle, the concealed sniper is less of a who and more of a what. Sometimes they're on the side of the angels, like when a SWAT team needs a guy behind a window holding hostages put down fast, sometimes he's rolling with the Devil, like when the good guys are pinned down behind whatever scraps of cover they can find and know that jumping out means taking a bullet.

Of course, the sniper in your back pocket's only good so long as he keeps line of sight. Sometimes the target moves out of the way behind something big and heavy, sometimes the sniper's flushed. Whenever that happens, you're out of luck. For now.

Inspiration for this came from reading entirely too much Sin City tonight, and thinking about one of the movies I really felt the most directly engaged in of any, Sniper. Why did such a lousy 3rd tier movie engage you so, you ask? Because it knew what it was, and what it was, it went after with a cold blood-thirstiness, just as a sniper is supposed to.

Of course, you know the sniper most portrayed on TV; its not the crazy in a bell-tower with a thirty-ought-six. Its the police sniper, tucked away up on top of a distant multi-story building, muttering impatiently into his radio, "I don't have the shot ... Hold it ... One second ..." And then *bang*, there's a detonation and a zip and someone goes down with a neat little hole between their eyes.

I love that.

By and large, the heroes aren't snipers, though. Its just a little antiseptic. A little too hands-off. No, the heroes enter into an environment created by the sniper, for or against them, a situation that's defined by the parameters of the absence of the actor in the environment. In movies, they may jokingly refer to their sniper overwatch by the code-name "God," but that's not so far off thematically. The sniper is omnipresent, until he's not present at all. He's all seeing until he's blinded. He hurls lightning bolts from high atop the holy mountain. The heroes exist beneath and below the sniper, whether he's on their side or gunning for them.

So, Sniper Overwatch written up for Capes. I can't wait to use it.

I think I've been watching too much mainstream prime-time television, because I just added this to the This Present Darkness wiki.

Sexual Tension
Scene Charging NPC

Abilities

• 2 Smouldering Looks
• 3 Brief Touches
• 4 Averted Gazes
• 1 Awkward Pauses
• 5 Muttered Phrases

Styles

• 3 Almost, But Not Quite
• 1 Avoidance
• 2 Frustration

Free Conflict

Goal: The affected characters overtly express their interest (kiss, ask the other out, etc).

Notes

Moonlighting, Brokeback Mountain, even Batman have been suggested as havens for sexual tension between two or more characters. It just wouldn't do to not have the ability to introduce it to a Scene as an active participant!

There's probably something wrong with me, that I thought this was a good idea for addition, but ... well, the potential for useful addition to Scenes was just too much to resist.

Alright, we've outlined a system of Dramatist nature and structure for an online, multi-user, parallel-structure game. It has some very, very different structural underpinnings than the more traditional systems. What does it buy us, and what does it cost us?

Pros:

• It cuts out two of the primary causes of Player complexity:
  
• The issue of power balance across characters is wholly removed.
• Everyone gets a chance to access the big roles as well as the small roles.

The latter probably deserves further discussion. There is a marked tendency in MU* environs to strongly stratify by time the player has been a member of the community. In some cases, this is a good thing, but insofar as it leads to people who take their in-game position as granted, it becomes an issue just as in any organization, where they work hard at gaining power just to maintain power. The game is no longer about playing well with others, it literally becomes about the players more than the characters.

You can see this often in World of Darkness MU*, where a small core cadre of players play the real "movers and shakers" in the game-world, and if you're not one of them, your stories won't get any attention, and in fact, you'll find yourself being blocked and shut out. (What, me bitter?) Its not an unusual dysfunctional pattern for play to fall into in many games where mechanical focus is on characters who've parlayed "experience points" of whatever type into in-game control.


• The real level of Administration work is seriously diminished.
  
  Instead of spending so much of their time trying to balance the availability of interesting content for characters of all levels, the Admin can look after the relatively minor complexity task of making sure characters who are submitted for review are appropriate and mechanically sound, and documenting the flow of events (an issue which I'll deal more with under Cons, below).
  
  MMORPGs are fighting this very uphill battle, in the form of trying to create multi-tiered content for their players, high and low, in multiple factions. Even with millions of dollars to throw at the problem in big buckets, they frankly do a lousy job of it. Forget the ramifications of trying to view the events of, say, World of Warcraft in a simple, sensible fashion, the entire context of game-play changes significantly between even the upper-mid range of power to the high end top tier. And managing that content takes thousands of Game Administrators, few of whom are empowered to affect the context of the game significantly. Throw an attempt at consistency into the mix and you might as well forget it. There's no way an independent creator can compete at that level, but they don't have to.
  
• Player-driven Scenes are not unusual, and they're not hard to do well.
  
  The fact that every Player has the ability to create a Scene and play it out with others, with very minimal (if any) involvement from the Admin is almost a Holy Grail of design. The introduction of Player-run Plots in most Simulationist systems demands that the Admin keep a tight rein on things, because the mechanics don't provide any tools for managing game-breaking. In fact, they encourage it, in most cases, by encouraging self-protective behaviours; there are no advantages to engaging in risk.
  
  The key to this? The Comics Code, or whatever one calls it in the context of their overall setting.
  
  The Code provides a safety-net for Players to engage in game-threatening Scenes without actually breaking the world. Would it be problematic if the major powers of the world were overthrown? Make it a Code prohibition to actually change the political or social order without Admin review. What's the advantage? Players can raise great armies, work hard at assassinating important figures, or create world-shattering sorceries, secure in the knowledge that not only will they not only not break the world, but they'll be rewarded for risking and failing.
  
  I can't emphasize that last enough. Simulationist designs do exactly what they say they do: they simulate. Simulations do not model with the intent of getting specific results out the other end, they create a structured process which is expected to turn out a revelatory and sometimes surprising result. While this is just what you want when you are trying to decide what the global climate will be in a hundred years (scientific wishful-thinking aside), its pointedly not what you want when you're trying to wrestle tens or hundreds of people into a shared world. If everyone (or just most people) are playing it safe, in the sense of maximizing their minimal risks, the results are very predictable, because that predictability is what people want. People want to win, and if the only way to win is to trump every challenge, people will optimize to that. If one can "win" (in the sense of gathering resources successfully) while providing a narrative "loss" (in the sense of being on the side of a Conflict that's not controlling it when it resolves), then the tension between different ways to win will drive the system as a whole.

Its not all roses and candy, however.

Cons:

• The Admin need to be responsible, at least in part, for making sure events in the game-world are communicated.
  
  This is hard work, and its pretty important in this kind of Dramatist setup, because without knowing the history, its hard to get engaged with the flow. If someone's run a siege on the High Priestess' tower, there needs to be a record of the events, even in summary historical form. Perhaps more as a contrast to traditional configurations, if a character is killed, there needs to be a note on the Character sheet of when, how, and why. Being killed in a Dramatist setup is not really a guaranteed way to being taken out of the game; if its interesting that a Character make a return from the dead, if it looks like it'd be profitable to engage people like so, it becomes inevitable that the Character'll be back somehow, but the context of the death event is important.
  
  (You can pretty much remove this as a significant issue by putting "Significant Characters can never be killed" in the Code, and define "significant" as "Any character with at least one Power," but its not strictly necessary.)
  
  Some of this can be alleviated by engaging the community of players through the mediation of, say, a wiki or other shared space where they can feel a part of weaving the ongoing history of the game space. When the community is doing most of this work, there's much less stress in being an Admin.
  
• The flexibility of Character switching and Scene setting is so outside the experience of most gamers that they may not be initially ready to deal.
  
  This is actually a lot more of an issue than one might think, because gamers seem to be an inherently conservative lot when it comes to trying new things, especially mechanically. D&D is still one of the big sellers in the hobby for a reason. The idea that you don't really have a fixed character, that the character you're playing in this Scene might very well be played by someone else once you leave the Scene is very difficult for some folks to get behind. They've been conditioned by Simulation to fear that someone else won't play as efficiently, as effectively, or as "correctly" as they would, and they'll lose their character. It sometimes takes a while to get them into the understanding that nothing is ever lost in a Dramatist system, so long as its interesting to the other players. This was actually a problem on the Ars Magica MUSH Tela Magica back in the day, when we allowed Troupe-style character ownership; one Magus, one Companion, and any number of Grogs that went into the common Covenant pool. People were always initially hesitant to both put Grogs in the pool and to play any but the ones they put in, but once they gave it some time, they found that there was an immense freedom in it.
  
  Dramatist systems require a significant mental shift to really start internalizing. A Dramatist MU* would be working doubly-uphill, since pretty much every MU* on Earth has been strongly Simulationist in structure. The primary audience is going to be dealing with immense hurdles as barriers to entry, and that has to be expected up front. In that sense, its a very good thing the overall Admin load is so low.
  
  The "privileged character" setup is a middle-position to help ease people into the Dramatist mindset on characters. The permanent Scenes in the core are intended to do the same for groups spinning off their own Scenes. Creating such things and making them interesting (a good starting Character pool, a setting that hooks other locations and events for Scenes) is the first step in getting traditional Simulationist gamers into a Dramatist mode.
  
• With such a focus on narrative, story, and drama, the hardcore "realists" are going to always be on your ass.
  
  This sounds like, at first, a restatement of the above, but it goes well beyond that. Your first complaints are going to be about the absence of a character advancement system. Your second is going to be about the fact someone can turn around and simply narrate out of effect the Conflict they just wrestled over for six pages. The third will be about someone else playing "their" character and doing it poorly. And so on.
  
  Basically, there is a certain component of humanity who will not read your premises, won't read your mechanics, and won't bother thinking about why things are as they are. This is true of every design, of course, but with a Dramatist core, the folks who pride themselves on "winning" will be going absolutely nuts trying to figure out how to "win."

Let me apologize for my descent into the madness of specificity, last night. Like most programmers, sometimes its hard for me to let go of implementation and to just work on design and interface. From a user, and even administrator point of view, it just doesn't matter what the underlying object/technical implementation looks like. Its moot. Only in the roughest sense is it remotely relevant, so I'll try and avoid going too much into programmer-speak and just finish talking design.

So, we've defined the verbs that the Players will use to interact with Scenes, and Pages, and Characters, at least basically. Now we need to talk about Conflicts and how they interact with Players and Characters.

Conflicts can be introduced to the Scene by a Character spending their one Action on a given Page, or by spending a Story Token. Since the Page should know whether the Character has expended its one Action yet, we can just assume that evoking the introduction verb will deduct Tokens appropriately (+conflict Name). There also needs to be a mechanism for taking a Conflict back out of the Scene before its been touched by activity, so that others can contest the introduction of the thing if its an Event or a Goal that drives an objecting Character. Those rules are best supported by social interaction, so all we need is to have a verb to pull it back off (+conflict -Name).

Once introduced to the Scene, a Character can operate on a Conflict in a limited number of ways. The problem is that Conflicts are side-specific, and can have more than one side (with splitting of dice and sides). The most convenient interface is probably to just number the sides, so that when a verb needs to interact with a specific die on a specific side, it can be addressed in the format Side Value. We don't need to distinguish between, say, three 3's on one side of a conflict, any of them will do.

As the result of an Action ...

• A Character can activate one of their traits and target a die associated with a Conflict, rolling it either up or down. Doing so Allies the Character with that side for rolling up or the opposite side for rolling down. (+activate Trait Conflict Side Value, or +activate Trait Conflict Side -Value should work for up or down.)
  
  This is complicated by the fact the result can be accepted or rejected, so requires a second round of verbs to complete (+accept / +reject).
  
  Its further complicated by the fact that activating a trait that is a Power (as opposed to a Skill) generates a point of Debt that has to be assigned to a Drive if the Character has them and not just an undifferentiated debt pool. Best means to do this is probably to just let them drop unassigned Debt into place with +assign Drive.
• After a Character +accepts a die, the other Characters around the Scene, starting with the Character that accepted, can react, activating one of their suitable traits and re-rolling the die. Again, this is probably something best handled by social means in terms of turn order, but the verb structure is straightforward (+react Trait, followed by +accept / +reject to move to the next.
• Either before or after his Action, a Character can stake Debt from their Undifferentiated Debt Pool (UDP, in a rate fit of comedy, from now on) or a Drive (+stake Conflict Side Drive Number, +stake Conflict Side Number). They can split dice on an Allied side, two or more ways as long as sufficient Debt is staked (always evenly) (+split Conflict Side Value Ways).
  
  The Player can also use an Inspiration gained from a previous Conflict. (+inspire Inspiration Conflict Side Value. This will probably require the Inspirations a Player has to be numbered for individual reference.

This pretty much defines the back-and-forth process of the Conflict. There are only two things that needs to be defined now.

Firstly, Conflicts can be Claimed at the beginning of a Page, and Claiming any after the first requires a Story Token. All Claims are reset at the beginning of a Page before Claims are done, so a Claim only extends for one Page. (+claim Conflict Side)

Secondly, once Claimed, if the Claimed side is in control at the end of a Page, the Conflict resolves, and we need verbs for that.

• If the non-controlling side(s) have Debt staked, they get back double the staked debt. It goes back to the Drive or UDP it came from, so no interaction required.
• If the controlling side has Debt staked, the non-controlling side(s) get that as Story Tokens. If the Conflict creator is Allied with a non-controlling side, they get the first Token. The rest are dispensed by the controlling Player (+token {Player|Character}) as they see fit.
• The controlling Player then matches up dice between sides, as defined in Capes. +match Conflict Side Value Side Value is about as simple as that interface can get. This results in folks getting Inspirations. Dice that can't be matched just get converted to Inspirations and distributed automatically.

Once resolved, the controlling Player gets to narrate the Conflict's resolution.

There is one more significant thing a Character can do during a Page that's not directly connected to a Conflict but is an Action, and that's to attempt to roll up an Inspiration the Player already has. +activate Trait Inspiration followed by +accept / +reject will work just fine for that. Pointedly, an Accept here can allow others to react, just like accepting a die on a Conflict.

A Scene should be considered finished if a Page starts and there are no Conflicts in the Scene. (Obviously, this doesn't apply to the first Page of a Scene.)

We'll walk through a couple Pages of a Scene between Alice, Bob, and Carrie:

( Extended Example )

In Part III, I'll go into some of the overall advantages of this kind of Dramatist approach compared to the Simulationist.

After being involved in a lengthy, ongoing thread on roleplayers that involved some rather egregious examples of bad MU* Admin decisions in the construction of TPs (TinyPlots, in the argot of the age; from now on referred to herein as Plots), it occurred to me that I don't think I've ever seen a system'd MU* core that was based on any principles other than the strict Simulationist, which provides certain problems for me as a game designer, and moreover as a guy who's developed multiple systems for MU* play.

I'm not sure which is worse at the moment, that I've never tried to create a Narrativist system for a MU*, or that I find myself using Edwards' Threefold-Model to talk about it. (In consideration of my love of simpler terms, I think I'll use the more reasonable term Dramatist, not the least reason being its easier to type repeatedly.)

So, yes, Dramatist MU*ing. I'm sure Gen Lang will want to jump in here, somewhere, given our long history of online game design discussion.

I'll take as my model (predictably) Capes, as its possibly the most convenient architecture I've encountered for creating consistently Dramatist results with the lowest cognitive overhead. Others might suggest Universalis as a preferred basis, but since I can't get a copy of the game in my hands for love or money, I'll be forced to acknowledge its potential perfection without actually referring to it.

The essentoal element of Capes play is not, as in more traditional fare, the Character, but the Scene. In a MU*, the general idea is that a virtual location (a "room") really defines a specific place and time. But is this necessarily absolute? I've certainly constructed virtual spaces on a MU*, such that the description of the location and its connection to others were dynamic, definable by the inhabitants and existing only so long as there are inhabitants. Something of this order would seem perfect for a Dramatist MU*, with a few core, constant Scenes serving as a meeting ground for folks to interact and then spin off other Scenes by mutual decision.

Exempli gratia: For the sake of making sense,. we'll proceed to design and structure a MU* in an abstract sense. Doing so lets us explore our ideas in a common context.

We'll take as our premise that the MU* is devoted to Modern Urban Fantasy. After all, the World of Darkness MU* are still hugely popular, and I've never shied from ripping off what works.

We need a few core Scenes, so we'll build The Halcyon Days, a bar and grill for the vampires with twin silvered katanas and the fey with big troll-hammers to hang out in. Plus it makes a convenient center. While we're at it, we'll create the deadland version of the Halcyon as another Scene (for ghosts to be non-perceived by the inhabitants of the real-world Scene). That'll do for now.

Once we've set up the core Scenes, we can create the mechanisms for spawning, displaying, and joining new scenes (probably with commands like +scene Name, +showscenes, and +join Scene), so that folks can get involved with making such.

Unlike table-top Capes, we have the potential for folks to join Scenes in progress already. I think the simplest solution to that is to add the new Players to the end of the list of folks engaged in the Scene, and then, at the start of their first engaged Page, allow them to perform the same series of tasks they would at the beginning of the first Page of a Scene. They'll be cycled to the end of Action declaration, as a result of being added to the end, so that should keep things notionally mechanically balanced.

This brings up an important point, Players are just amorphous potential until they are joined with a Character at the beginning of the first Page of a Scene they're involved with. This works well with our Dramatist intent, since we can use technical means to keep the presence and communication of said Players invisible to those with a Character bound to them. That is to say, we can limit the textual perception of those engaged in a Scene to the presence and output of the others playing in the Scene.

How do Characters get assigned? The best method is likely the idea that every Player can create a privileged Character, one which can only be attached to his Player object. They can also create any number of Characters, but all of them have to undergo Administration review for consistency before they go into the common pool. Its probably a good idea to allow people to create Characters for a Scene that don't get added to the common pool unless requested and which have no objective presence after a Scene ends (the Character object vapes when the Player leaves the Scene). This is the kind of thing that can be yanked as an ability if there are complaints about a Player, but best to start with an initial level of trust.

Eg: Alice, Bob, and Carrie want to run a Scene in the deadland outside town. Alice +scene Deadland Outside Town and both Bob and Carrie +join Deadland Outside Town, so they're all in the same room. Alice thinks about it and then does a quick @desc of the room to the Scene.

Alice and Bob both pull their privileged Characters from the pool (+chara Whatever) while Carrie wants to create a ghost for them to engage with, but nothing particularly permanent, just a throw-away for the Scene (+newchara Ghost). That puts Carrie in the new character creation mode, where she puts together the ghost and its Character is attached to her Player until she leaves the Scene.

Once the Scene is over, Carrie decides the ghost is interesting enough to be added to the common pool, so requests an Admin look at the Character with +review Ghost.

Defining Characters in Capes is easy, and that works well for us when trying to do so online. Once in the mode, there are only a handful of commands you need:

• +name Name
• +ability Ability=Rank
• +ability -Ability
• +style Style=Rank
• +style -Style
• +attitude Attitude=Rank
• +attitude -Attitude
• +description Longish description of the character
• +background Longish background of the character
• +submit

Hitting +submit should validate the character design, then go ahead and create the Character object and attach it to the Player, setting the Player object's description temporarily to that of the Character. It should revert once the Player leaves the Scene.

Pages aren't "objects" in the abstract sense so much as they are constructs, but from a technical point of view, they should probably be built as a physical (but invisible) object created when the Scene is spawned. For Scenes which are actually player-created, the Page should add the creator of the Scene to the Player list first, followed by the other +joiners in the order they arrive. The Page also needs to have two additional commands, one command allowing the use of Story Tokens (hereafter Tokens) to add a Character to the Player's position-slot (+chara Name), and one to add Conflicts (costing one Token per Conflict after the first, just like Characters) (+conflict Conflict).

The Page manages the turn-order of Actions of Characters/Players. Each Character gets one Action per Page for free, any after needing to be paid for by Tokens.

That takes care of Scenes and Characters. The last real Dramatist object of importance is the Conflict. Conflicts are where the meat of the command system really resides, and all but a few of the remaining system issues center on how Conflicts are managed.

But I tire, so I'll take that issue up tomorrow.

Yes, its time for more discussion of Capes. Or at least, time to share with my readers some of the work going into This Present Darkness. As much of the ongoing library of goodies is being placed on a private wiki, it would be inappropriate for me to link directly to the site. But that doesn't keep me from posting material to my blog, since I've written most of it so far!

Eric the .5b was good enough to transfer over an organization that he remembered from the SF of his youth.

Homo sapiens argentatus - developing human subspecies first observed in the mid-1980s. Due to a remarkably consistent mutation that occurred in 1 out of every 400 embryonic exposures to Ty-Pan-Oromine, a painkiller discontinued in the late 1970s, perhaps a few thousand people born in the United States during the 1970s share two unusual traits. First, the irises of their eyes are a distinctive silvery-gray, regardless of any other coloration. Second, they all possess psychic abilities - telepathy, telekinesis, and extra-sensory perception.

Upon initial discovery of such individuals, the federal government quietly gathered and segregated members of H.s.a. in special primary (and later, secondary) boarding schools. The primary stated goal was to prevent members of this new, peculiar minority, apparently prone to social isolation, from becoming alienated enough to become a threat to society at large. This seems to have largely succeeded, with the first generation of H.s.a in their early thirties and with very few instances of criminal or violent behavior.

Public knowledge of H.s.a. as a phenomenon is limited. Most H.s.a's are a bit wary of fully interacting with normal society, much less publicizing their differences. The majority live in either of two small towns constructed by the government in the early 1990s. The actual scientific study of the population has been largely classified, though oblique references to this development have turned up in unclassified material that's been largely overlooked. However, upon the births of the first second-generation H.s.a.'s, some voices within the little scientific mini-community have argued for making the public more aware of the next - or at least, a next - step in human evolution.

Well, there was no way I could let that go without elaborating on the implications, now could I?

Jacobin Washington
Psychic Enforcement Officer

Abilities

• 3 Telepathy (P)
• 4 Telekinesis (P)
• 2 Precognition (P)
• 5 Federal Authority (P)
• 1 Silver Eyes (P)

Styles

• 2 Calling In Reinforcements
• 1 Aura of Creepiness (P)
• 4 Psychic Tactician (P)
• 3 Just a Soldier

Attitudes

• 3 Calm
• 2 Intent
• 1 Distant

Background

In his late 20's, Jacobin was raised, like the other members of Homo Sapiens Argentatus, in a government-controlled and isolated town. Like the others, he has always had socialization problems, not only because of his innate disconnection from Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but because the community of people who don't discover means to separate their minds from one another and all sport telepathy rapidly becomes intolerable.

Partly because he's always felt beholden to the government and partly because he was looking for an out, any out, from the insular community he was raised in, Jacobin signed up for the Men in Black program as soon as he completed a degree in criminal science. Leveraging his particular talents and hiding his tell-tale eyes behind the trademark mirrorshades, Jacobin acts as the subtle fingers at the end of the long arm of the law. Personally, Jacobin is content with his constrained responsibilities.

Having had a taste of creating whole organizations, however, I just couldn't stop. Thank Hades for Wikipedia, however, since it provided me with the historical backgrounded I needed.

( The Pact of Warsaw, its Leader, its Soldiers, and a Special Guest )

There's just something gratifying about doing chargen when the inspirations are so brutally intriguing. I just can't seem to stop coming up with ideas. At least in Capes, my creativity goes into the common character and idea pool, and anyone in the game can use the results to their own ends.

Or, as Webster's would have it, "exalt."

With Exalted 2.0 coming out soon, and with Zach Bush being one of the writers for the project, it's rather demanded of me that, in this rash of conversion-madness, I do a little something along those lines. This isn't really the imposition that it might otherwise be, because Exalted is actually one of my favourite fantasy settings of all time. The setting for the game was never my problem with Exalted. The intricate political setup, the multiple axes of personal and political power, the intrigue, the Abyssals, the Autocthonians, I was pretty in from the ground floor -- and the fact I knew the developers and writers even before first edition was released has nothing to do with it.

Well, very little.

In fact, the project I write for White Wolf, Iteration X: Conventionbook Revised, wasn't actually developed in a vacuum (though the horrid suffering inflicted by the cover art may make me wish it had been suffocated in one). One of the reasons I agreed to take up the contract in the first place, aside from the inchoate need to actually rewrite the Technocracy as a whole into something not overtly insulting to scientists and the last several thousand years of social and technological advance, was the desire to do something cool with Autocthon, the alternate dimension/other planet of artificial life-forms and possessed of a potentially malign and ancient intelligence. Luckily for me, Exalted was under development at the same time and I had the privilege to pre-figure some of the revelations of Autocthon as primordial forge-god in my text. That was some good stuff, right there.

Historically, my problems with Exalted have been entirely due to its lamentable saddling with the White Wolf Storyteller system, a mechanical framework which is almost entirely at odds with the sleek and high-speed combat that the manga/anime-inspired art and direction implied. And don't even get me started complaining about the unwieldy and nightmarish complexity of Charm trees, which effectively neutered the power that the various archetypes had for me, even then, in the days before I was aware of the flexibility one can gain by going well outside the usual RPG framework of design. Up until now, the best mechanical conversion I've ever seen has been from Exalted to Wushu. That work actually manages to capture the feel of the over-the-top action implied by the Exalted history and setting, while still having hooks into that setting and story.

(If you're not familiar with Wushu, I strongly suggest you look into it and buy every single PDF available for it. Not because you have to, but because rewarding freeform design with such style is the just act of every righteous soul. Besides, before Capes, Wushu was the obsession I was rambling about at great length. It elaborated on the idea that broad, simply defined Traits were far more expressive than a hundred little skills that was so wonderfully introduced in Jon Tweet's Over the Edge years before, adding a mechanical sensibility that promotes greater detail to get more chance of success and furthering the school of gaming that is predicated on the axiom: "Whatever you say is what happens." I still need to finish writing The Wushu Guide to Giant Robots, but I digress.)

The new edition of Exalted promises to try and address some of the original issues with the mechanical system, but it appears that a lot of my concerns aren't really addressed by the new text. Nor, I suppose, should they be since the bulk of the targeted demographic for the system is disenchanted Dungeons and Dragons players who are looking for a game with more depth and consistency, not necessarily any more simplicity.

Rumor has it that the new Storyteller's Handbook has an Interactive History section, reminiscent of my last lengthy, rambling blog post, so at least I'm well on my way to being an insider with more prescient skill than most of the Weekly World News' reporters, which is a good feeling.

Discussing a conversion of Exalted to Capes has one, significant, difficulty: Much of the mechanical power of the setting and the characters comes from the semi-rigid structure which the characters are defined by. Dragon-Blooded Terrestrial Exalts are meaningfully different than Solar Exalts which are mechanically different from Celestial Exalts who have little definitionaly in common with Lunar Exalts. (I have to leave Abyssal Exalts out of the equation because they are mechanically and meaningfully similar to Solar Exalts, and for in-game reasons, too!) Capes makes different distinctions between characters; the level of detail is at an entirely different level of understanding.

So, this means we have to think about character definition differently. This is actually not a bad thing. Its very, very easy to fall into the bipolar means of character expression in Exalted. Solar Exalted of the Dawn Caste have a very defined role in the original philosophical underpinning of the setting, and that comes with a lot of baggage mechanically and psychologically. The vast bulk of Dawn Caste characters are either very close to that design, or 180 degrees from it. Since every Exalt has Caste-equivalents, all of which have defined expected natures, that means the bulk of characters are either aligned with expectation or can be expected to be directly non-conformal.

Similarly, all Exalts of a given type have a handful of traits which are common to all Exalts of that type. The broadest of these are the anima flares that all Exalts evidence, which is coloured by the Caste-equivalent nature of the expressing character. (For those who aren't Exalted geeks, anima flares are big bursts of energy that blaze around the character when they use their Exalted powers. Some are somewhat less obvious than others, but they're iconographic of the character and emblematic of their "different nature," so get brighter the more power the character burns.) All Lunars are shapechangers with a heart-shape (an alternate animal or plant form that they can switch to at will, along with any other creature they drink the heart's blood of; hello Bjornaer). All Dragon-Blooded have an elemental affinity to one of the five elements. And so on.

We don't define things that elaborately in Capes. For one, that would take far more traits than the twelve our system of choice brings to bear. For another, they're not important to every character, even if they are intrinsic, definitional traits. Let me go on a bit further about this, because its important for a true understanding of Capes mechanics.

The core conceit of Capes is not the fact that there are no GMs, nor that players define Scenes, nor that characters are defined by a smallish number of broad traits. The core conceit of Capes is the Conflict, and the reason that Conflicts exist: to gather more resources for a player to further control the story. The more frequently that players introduce Conflicts that the other players find interesting and care about, the more resources, be it Inspirations or Story Tokens, that they will be able bring to bear. It doesn't even matter that the player win the Conflicts that they introduce, its only important that they engage others' interest. (In particular, losing Conflicts is the only way to gain Story Tokens, the most far-reaching resource in the game.) In that light, Characters (in the sense of the defined set of traits laying on the table tabulated) only exist meaningfully by definition in how they engage with Conflicts. Their traits only define the kind of narrations that the player is likely to engage in to drive forward others' involvement with Conflicts.

That is to say, their traits are not defined as expressions of inherent truths about the character, they do not define the scope of a character's power for the purposes of simulation, traits on a Character define how that character -- note the difference -- narratively engages with Conflicts! This is a significant difference and departure not only from Exalted, but the mainstream of game-design altogether. A character can do anything, any given action can be narrated for a character, no matter what is defined on the Character sheet. What they can accomplish is constrained by their named and enumerated traits, and the traits that go into defining the means of accomplishment is a whole different way of thinking.

For example, let's talk about the anima banner. In Exalted, the anima banner has a number of potential powers and effects, depending on what kind of Exalted it is (Fire-aspected Terrestrials are surrounded by blazing fire, the Solar Dawn Caste tend to have pale white and bright gold flares which terrify onlookers, and so on.) For our purposes, none of this matters, unless the player who has created the Character thinks it interesting or engaging to the other players for it to be a means by which the character engages with Conflicts. Otherwise, the anima banner is just another piece of narrative text which exists in the space of description. For some characters, the anima banner will be one of their primary means of expression in the context of Conflicts, and as such will be listed as an Ability . For others, the anima banner may just be one of the ways they tie together a multitude of other powers and really subsume the practice of their Abilities, just being a Style. And still others won't interact in the context of Conflicts with the anima banner at all, save as narrative flourish for the usage of other traits ("Activating Angry. As the fury of the betrayal of the usurper burns in my gut, my forehead flares with the light of my caste mark and my anima banner unfolds like massive golden wings of solar light!").

Equipped with this knowledge, doing character creation for Exalted becomes a different exercise. We're not trying to define what the character is capable of, as the original system does. We are, instead, defining, literally, why we should care about the character.

( Exalt the Examples )

Exalted is not the most direct or neatest conversion to Capes, but a due consideration of the tropes of the setting and the underlying reasoning about why a Character possesses certain traits on the sheet may be the most revealing discussion I've written on the system so far. The setting itself is brilliant and, in places, beautiful. Its certainly worthwhile to consider how to reframe it in terms that actually work with my current style of play.

(As a post scriptum, its worth noting that, unlike the Exalted mechanics, you don't need any special systems to cover mass warfare in Capes. Characters can just as easily represent ten-thousand blood-thirsty barbarians as they can one little old lady. Armies, just like anything else, may simply be narrative entities, without a Character of their own, the Conflicts only being meaningful as the conflict between individuals. For example, the player of the Dawn detailed earlier, in a Scene framed as a clash between armies, say "Activating Swordsmanship. Charging into the teeth of the enemy, my hundred fighters lay about with the skill of mortal men drilled by an agent of the Unconquered Sun, bodies flying back from the force of their blows!" and the Dragon-Blooded could respond, "Reacting with Military Expertise. The Legion meets the thrust of the mere hundred men like a vast set of jaws, closing around them in a classic pincer movement, cutting off every avenue of escape." The armies themselves are purely notional, constructs of story for the purposes of illustration.

Woe betide the Dragon-Blooded if the Dawn's player burns a Story Token and brings in a Character for the forces under his command; he then would have an Action for each Character and a much higher likelihood of winning Conflicts in this Scene. But that's why Story Tokens are useful to have!)

CYCLOPS!!! Holy crap! You are:

Most of the civilized world will call you a pussy. They're right. You play it safe everytime, and have no problem with ordering others to their deaths while you take all the glory. You also get everything you want, because, even though you are a dickhead, you're really fucking smart. Famous Cyclopses include: Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Paul Walker

You know, I think I'd be offended if this guy had anything like a clue, but ... I'm feeling magnanimous.

Really magnanimous.

( Cyclops With Cape )

I'm an old-school RPGer. My collection is frightening in its depth and breadth. I've probably given away more RPGs than most folks have in their libraries.

I actually have two copies of Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth and its' supplement, Aria: Worlds. Back in the ancient days of 1994, Aria was an imaginative, even cutting-edge, game design despite (as Eric the .5b maintains) possessing the worst RPG name in history. In terms of mechanical resolution, Aria wasn't actually all that ground-breaking. The d10-based Stat + Skill design was already popularized by Ars Magica, and already served yeoman duty in other designs as well. No, what set Aria apart was its telescoping focus, by design using the same conceptual framework to frame individual characters, small groups, communities, villages, cities, provinces and kingdoms as single-character mechanical abstractions. This was utterly new and no one really since has taken the underlying idea as far as the original, which suggested starting by creating ancient kingdoms and running conflicts 10,000 years at a turn, then shifting to smaller areas and/or shrinking the time per turn until, by the time you felt like finishing, you had a ready-made backstory rich in conflict and reasoned events that you and your players already had a stake in.

This telescoping mechanism also meant that the greater socio-political issues could be resolved at a higher level and individual accomplishments could then have effect, applying modifiers to conflicts in the greater scheme of things. That is to say, if you were rolling along at five years a turn, exploring the conflict between the Church of Freyland, the Ruling Council of Freyland, and a small group of rebels which called themselves the Silver Sword, it might be the Sword was actively engaged in a war of terrorism against the Council, secretly funded by the Church even while the latter paid lip-service to the Council. This gives immediate rise to the idea of playing out the course of one of these terrorist attacks, and if the characters are capable of derailing (or executing!) it, that could easily apply a modifier to the next 5yr cycle between the three larger groups (each of which has a character sheet of its own).

Aria also suggested building sheets for lineages, from which entire families of heroes might descend. Unsurprisingly, the organizations that a character was related to all had an influence on their character sheet, to the point which it would have been easier to do chargen with a complicated database/spreadsheet solution than mere pieces of paper. The question of whether anyone ever actually played the game as written (as opposed to, say, converting Aria mechanics to Fudge) remains open until this very day. The unexpected density of the main text, which read like a sociologist's wet dream, the complexity of the interaction between levels, and the general mood of the time cooperated to make sure Aria was never a big hit, or even particularly influential.

(That said, Andrew B. Watt was actually intended to write a supplement for Aria, and Bruce Baugh took from it inspiration to, much later, create the community creation mechanics for the D20 edition of Gamma World, so all was not truly lost.)

Aria really represents the core of trying to apply tenets of creating a "simulation" to a suitably epic set of design constraints. Unfortunately, simulation creates an inherent cognitive overhead and the models so created have no real measure of plausibility save arbitrary designation. What effect does introducing magical water-production on a daily cycle to wide-scale agriculture, anyway? Aria would have one crunch numbers and come up with an answer, but it never could overcome the underlying feeling that the answer had no authority save the work that went into figuring it out. Simulation, as a game design ethic, has to have a clear target to model or it loses what coherence it can bring.

But that's not why you've come here today. You're here to read more of my Capes rambling! And I shall not disappoint!

The real problem with Aria was that it tried to simulate, in the belief that such a model would automatically give rise to conflicts which players would then want to explore in greater depth, being vested, in some way, in their creation. As far as that goes, it was right -- but the baggage needed to create and sustain the model ran to over 600 pages. The sheer cognitive load that entails is staggering. While the core idea is good, the mechanism is faulty, like someone trying to build a timepiece out of cooked pasta. Watches are good; linguine makes a lousy spring.

Enter Capes. Capes does not take as its central tenet the need to simulate the way the world works. On the contrary, its model is explicitly formed around the idea that there are actors in the world, and there are things that they care in a narrative sense about which oppose one another, and that the actual physical logic of the means of resolution is effectively uninteresting, in a mechanical sense. Thus, in Capes, a "character" is composed of things which are "interesting" for we, as the audience of the ongoing narrative, to watch occur. This is why a Capes character need not be a person, as we've discussed here before. Locations, devices, and situational environments can all have enough inherent traits they bring to the story that they make interesting actors in play.

This opens things right up for playing out Aria large-scaled background development using Capes as the underlying mechanics. Simply frame the Scene as being "ten-thousand years in the history of the continent, Athos," and bring characters of an appropriate scale onto the table. There might even be individuals of sufficient immortality and personal power to be at play at such terrific scale, such as transfigured religious figures, gods, and the like, but likewise situations certainly fit the bill, such as floods, vast fires, volcanic eruptions, and so on.

Let's sketch out a couple characters which might be apropos to a ten-thousand year Scene:

( Ten-Thousand Year Egg )

Both of the above sheets could be modified slightly to create an inhabitant of one of the cultures, and this actually works to help tie the levels together. Without there being some kind of reflection between levels, some effect, there's little reason to care.

There does need to be some kind of mechanical support for changing the nature of such characters, and its one that I've been tinkering with for more individual-scale events. To wit: allow Conflicts to explicitly modify the characters if resolved. For example:

Conflict
Goal: Imrys deals the Kusangi a decisive defeat on the battlefield. (Kusangi's Warfare would swap with Vast Plains, decreasing their ability in battle.)

The key here is that there is a definite narrative event which is tied to the desired ends. The ensuing resolution would likely involve the Imyri staging daring attacks on dragon-back and calling up ancient sorceries while the Kusangi ride in numbers to the border and the plains themselves make it hard for the Inyri to channel the horsemen into killing fields. The Kusangi might introduce a Conflict simultaneously where their shaman work to unravel the concealment of the hidden city, forcing the Imrys' player to replace the trait entirely. And so on.

These thoughts are still very much in flux and further discussion would be much welcomed.

Hat tip to Nekokage.

The further adventures of God. Y'don't say?

( The Further Adventures of God! )

So, anyone up for working on a new comic setting called The New Gospels? No, wait, I suppose that has already been done by way of John Constantine. Bugger.

Last time, we dealt with the lovely genre of space combat when discussing Capes' capabilities. Tonight, we'll talk about things which are inspired by another fairly popular subgenre that R Talsorian games has done its level-best to make into a stinking pile of dog shite:

Cyberpunk.

Back in the day, RTal produced the original edition of Cyberpunk, using the Interlock mechanical system, and it was good. Rooted firmly in the 80's cyberpunk literature movement, CP was a great game with a lot of resonance for we gamers of the day. We could be edge-running criminals with power and charm, sticking it to The Man and turning technology to the service of Mankind and, more importantly, ourselves. In short, a lot like ourselves, if we'd had balls and the world really was the insane economic nightmare the anti-capitalist types keep telling us it is. CP was grungy, hardcore, and in most cases, like gaming and literature of other genres, wholly wish-fulfillment fantasies. Chicks were busty and under-dressed, geeks ran the world in electronic guise, and life was cheaper than dirt on a shoe.

Cyberpunk, the genre rather than specifically the game, hinged on a few tight issues:

• Technology is moving faster than society can keep up.
• The gap between the haves and the have-nots is vast.
• Criminal enterprise is one of the best ways to accomplish ends.
• Big Corporations(c) own everything worth owning.
• Government is, at best, ineffective and at worst, self-destructive.
• Culture in general is deeply dystopian.

And, perhaps the overriding iconic statement:

Style over substance.

Add to that the stylistic tropes of the genre and you can pretty much say you've got the whole thing:

• Big guns.
• Big swords.
• Tight leather.
• Sunglasses at night.
• Grungy, blocky technology that, nevertheless, is frighteningly advanced.
• Cybernetic implants; technology implanted directly into the body.
• The Net / Cyberspace / Matrix, the virtual magic-space of the computerized technology-world.

Together with the core statement, all the above go into the original Cyberpunk game, cyberpunk literature, and coloured all its inheritors, including the cyberpunk-plus-fantasy Shadowrun which, because it conflated an entire pseudomythology rooted in overt magic with the technofetishistic cyberpunk mythos, was less powerful than it could have been in actual play. (That said, the Jayhawk Series, written in 1991 and published entirely on the Net, was a fantastic piece of fiction based in one group's SR game.)

The presence of the Matrix / Net / Cyberspace / Hip-Term-of-the-Week as a pseudomagical technological mirror-world fits into the same niche as the text Sorcerer & Sword gives for the "Other World" in a traditional high fantasy setting. The Net serves as a mystical conduit between the priests of the setting and their gods, the wonders of technology, as well as a whole universe in which the spiritually empowered can compete better than the physically empowered. In this case, the deckers and hackers who are, effectively, cyphers for many of we-the-readers gain force in the setting equivalent to that of the street samurai and the fixers, the physically and socially advantaged. Deckers act as the go-betweens for the powerful spirits of the other world, as well, the Artificial Intelligences and programs.

In part, this is why I felt that Shadowrun really wasn't the game others were obsessed with it being. Even though I really enjoyed playing it, and the addition of the overtly spiritual aspects (particularly Shaman) added a whole different moral level to the game, at core they were elaborations on aspects of the setting already well present and insufficiently developed in games.

So, that brings us to Capes, which is probably what you've been waiting for, in short, "Why are you going on at such length about a literary movement and RPG setting that folks haven't cared about for a decade or more?" Part of it is the recent release of the most recent version of Cyberpunk, which was a pretty ugly mess of crappy design and even worse art, and part of it is recognizing that the particular mix of archetypes in cyberpunk literature really lend themselves well to the way Capes does things.

Let's talk archetypal characters.

( Archetypes )

Cyberpunk, as a genre and as a game, is ripe for Capes conversion. Hopefully this will have come through in this post and more interest will come flowing down the line.

Everyone needs an example of things to start off with, and it seemed just that I start with myself.

Alexander Voynich
English Teacher / Occultist

Abilities

1 Teaching
4 Mythos Occultism (P)
2 Linguistics
3 Willpower

Styles

1 Social Censure
3 Obnoxious Arrogance
2 Commanding Voice

Attitudes

4 Arrogant
1 Angry
2 Frustrated
5 Obsessive
3 Charming

Drives

3 Justice
3 Truth
1 Love
1 Hope
1 Duty

Background

Born Alexander Williams, with a marked physical disability that left his arms and hands virtually unusable. Driven by an obsessive nature and the overwhelming drive to bring order to his world, he stumbled over HP Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Cycle" writings in his early teens. Intrigued and tantalized, Alex shifted his focus from computer science to more occult explorations. After several years, he finally acquired a copy of the Necronomicon of the Mad Arab and began unraveling its secrets. After nearly a decade of study, he was ready to work the foul tome's greatest rite, the Hasturian Elevation.

Unfortunately, the rite was interrupted by the scions of the Cult of the Elder Worms, a foul accumulation of the worst elements of society. In the fractured sorcery, physical aspects of the Elder Gods infected the form of Alexander, transforming him into a hideous monstrosity and consuming his mind. When he came back to himself, Alex realized he'd destroyed those who attacked him and left his childhood home ruined and burned.

Hearing of the possibility of a ritual that would strip the detritus of the Elder Gods from his astral form, Alex went underground in his search, taking the name of one of the greatest of Mythos texts as his own, the Voynich Manuscript.

( Nachtmaren / Cult of the Elder Worms / The Voynich Transfiguration )

That seems like it should be pretty much a fine example of how much madness one can cram into one character and its Nemesis. And to think, I haven't even created any Exemplars! (Those'll have to wait until I see what other characters are in play.)

So, I'll bet you're all wondering what my Next Big Game to Run(tm) is, right? Right? I mean, I'm sure you know its Capes, at least, given my near-constant goobing about the system for the last ... while ... but what's the premise?

Not that I really have to come up with a premise for a Capes game. Let's be honest, pretty much anyone that plays can take over the game and try to steer it in whatever direction they find interesting, and that, ultimately, is the whole point of the thing at heart. While the catchphrase is "Super powers are fun ... but do you deserve them?" the subtext is that the phrase refers to the players, not the characters. "Do you deserve to get to tell more of the story?" is what it really means. But it always helps to start on something like the same page, and I've become very used to setting the stage for any games, so I will. Ha!

Name:
This Present Darkness

Premise:
The comic books have it right -- at least to some degree. There are people with incredible powers in the world, there is sorcery loose in the world, and there are soul-shattering threats out there in the world. The existence of superheroes isn't exactly a secret, but there are very few who have a completely public persona. Most maintain a "secret identity," even if only of the most rudimentary sort. History has proceeded largely undifferentiated from our world, the pressure of the empowered on either side of most major conflicts being roughly equal.

Mood:
This is not a Silver or Golden Age comic setting, but the more modern and gritty kind, with a bit of Frank Miller-like noir thrown in, just for kicks. Imagine something vaguely like Aberrant, only with a usable system. Characters like the Daredevil, Marv (from Sin City), Batman, and Ghost Rider fit in nicely. Superman, Captain Marvel, or Galactus, not so much. Thanks to Capes' flexible mechanics, keeping powers strictly street-level isn't really required as everyone's equally effective, but think of characters who wouldn't necessarily be known well beyond their own city or region at best.

Setup:
This is where it gets interesting:

• Create a Heroic Persona. This is a powered character whom only you will get to bring into a Scene, unless you give your permission for someone else to do so. In accordance with the mood, "heroic" is a pretty flexible concept; anti-heroes are generally pretty good, but nothing completely villainous.
  
  If your Heroic Persona requires a secret identity, note that it is explicitly not covered by the prohibition against other people playing it. If you'd like, you can privilege your Secret Identity and let anyone play your Heroic Identity. Your call.
  
  Your Heroic Persona must explicitly be an Avatar Character. That is to say, it should be recognizably be based on you, in a universe where comic book powers are real. Up until your powers manifested, your life was exactly like it is / was here.
• Create a Nemesis. Your Nemesis is somehow tied to your origin story, and is a recurring character in your comic. They should be generally villainous. If your Heroic Persona is an anti-hero, your Nemesis should approach the line from the other side.
• Your Nemesis will be your Exemplar Character, and the major unresolved issue between you will get framed in the shared Free Conflict. Other Exemplars should be shared between your Heroic Persona and at least one other player's Heroic Persona.

House Rules:

• Your Heroic Persona or your Secret Identity is privileged, no one but you can play it.
• Your Nemesis is anti-privileged; you can never play your Nemesis.
• Players who are not present at a session do not have their Heroic Persona available in the common pool. Their Nemesis and other Exemplars, however, are fair game.

Comics Code:

• Heroes and Nemesis cannot be killed.
• Innocents cannot be killed as the direct result of Heroes' actions.
• Areas larger than a few city blocks cannot be destroyed. The world is right out.
• For the moment, the world situation cannot be meaningfully changed. (No assassinating the President, nuking Jerusalem, or taking over Chechnya. Fictional nations can be created and affected, notably.)

Its worth noting that there's no reason not to try these things; the Gloating mechanic means you get rewarded for doing just that and being thwarted. Comics Code content can be changed between sessions.

I'll try and post my Avatar and Nemesis sometime this week, I hope.

Poor Tony Lower-Basch. Having been tormented by the most active poster on the Capes forum being a psychotic drooling geek, he unmasks himself as a fanboy and discovers my secret agenda, getting to write the next edition of Capes!

Or, er, some such madness. More accurately, I asked some questions about the uses and applicability of multiple Characters, each representing some aspect of a narrative character, and he had a geeky fanboy moment with me, which is all kinds of flattering, I'd like to note. None of you have revealed yourselves as Evil Squid Fanbois/goils. And why is that?

Having discovered the secrets of multi-aspect characters, however, it occurred that I really needed to do some write-ups of more traditional characters in the comic medium, and introduce what I think may turn into the next Big Game I Run(tm).

Multi-aspect Characters are an interesting idea at the core of it all. The obvious applications are for those characters who have a secret identity, Peter Parker / The Amazing Spider-Man being the best known example of the medium.

( Friendly Neighborhood ... )

Given the above write-up, its interesting to note that two characters could very well play each aspect of Peter Parker / Spider-Man in the same scene, narrating actions and thoughts for the same narrative body. Since, conceptually, Peter and Spidey have ostensibly different goals -- at least in the sense of Peter often wanting to have a "normal life" and the Spider-Man persona, necessary as it is, interfering with it -- the idea of them having different players and being in mechanical opposition over Conflicts makes perfect sense. The Conflicts would play out largely as internal dialogue between the conflicting parts of Peter's emotional self. From a meta-game perspective, the presence of both aspects of the character appearing in the same Scene is an indicator from the beginning that the conflict between Peters' needs will be manifesting in-game.

Tony's cited example from the Forge thread I linked to first in this post approaches the other clear use of aspected characters that I had, the presence of "modal minds." Tony's Doc Achilles and her multiple personality shadings is an excellent example, as is the idea of a secret agent who is both a deadly combatant and seductive socialite. In both cases, the different aspects of a character capture one mode of thought that the character can express, and whose baggage can come from either side. In fact, there's no reason that an entire Scene couldn't be wholly populated by players playing aspects of a single character, their narration bringing in conflicts from the outside while the resolution of those conflict elements represents the tug-of-war between the aspects on the fabric of the story.

An extended example likely belongs here, but I'm awfully tired to be writing up one of those. It'll wait until later (and this might become one of those arcane bits of marginalia that linger until after my death with people wondering what I meant).

Regardless, this is a particularly unique facility of Capes and one I've seen be even addressed in many other game designs, though I'm told Universalis has a similar non-GM'd structure and focus on story as the mechanical inspiration. The ability to decouple the aspects of a character from the control of a central player goes one step beyond the decoupling of Characters from specific players; as a result of this second-stage decoupling, more complex stories arise naturally from the interplay of players and mechanics, without being forced by the imposition of some external structure such as one finds in With Great Power while still emerging in a way that provides a coherent story.

A design with the ability to emergently encourage traditional story-structure without forcing it is a pretty incredible thing.

And that brings us around to the idea I had for a game ... but that'll be the next post.

Well, since I've been on such a Capes kick lately in the mornings, it would be remiss of me not to do so again while I'm waiting for my 750mg of muscle relaxant to kick in, so today we'll be looking at those mysterious entities called Non-Player Characters in Capes.

What are Non-Player Characters? I'm so glad you asked, Sherman! NPCs in Capes are not GM run characters, which would be complicated if they were, since there are no GMs in the game at all. Instead, they are active story participants which aren't embodied entities. Locations are one kind of NPC, like the Abandoned Amusement Park which has Abilities like Conceal and Attitudes like Lost. Phenomena are another type of NPC; like Martial Law, or Virus. Virus is an interesting Phenomena, in that, like other NPCs, it gives up a column of traits (Abilities, Styles, or Attitudes, in this case, Styles) in exchange for an associated Free Conflict that can be brought into play at the beginning of a Page by the player. Virus' Free Conflict is "Goal: Contain the Infection" which is intriguing, in that the infection, by definition, can't be contained until the Goal is resolved once it hits the table, and the containment, technically, only has to hold until the beginning of the next Scene. Situations are the last kind of NPC, and they tend to be the most nebulous, because they don't have much of an embodiment at all. Social Function is a great example of a Situation, with Abilities like Mingle and Dance, Styles like Alcohol and Three's a Crowd, and Attitudes like Loud and Annoying.

Also of note is that if the NPC has a Free Conflict associated, when the Conflict is resolved, the NPC leaves the table entirely. That doesn't mean it stops being important to the narrative, but it can't be used to influence Conflicts for the rest of the Scene. That is to say, once the Virus has Contain the Infection resolved against it, its player can no longer Lie Dormant in someone to try and gain more Inspirations or Story Tokens. NPCs would seem to make great things to take as your character if you're the scene-setter, and occasionally difficult to work in if you're not.

Technically Things are the first type of NPC, but frankly I don't think they're that non-person. The Millinium Falcon is as much a "character" as Han Solo, and the Enterprise is certainly moreso than any redshirt we see on Trek. As such, I'm departing from book-canon by not lumping my previous ships and such in here, but feel free to if you're a stickler.

So, yes ... all the NPCs mentioned before are in the book. But I don't write this stuff up to not get to write my own, so ... on to the NPCs!

( Places, Situations, and Phenomena, Oh Boy! )

NPCs in Capes are interesting for many reasons, but from a pure game-tactics point of view, they're excellent ways to start collecting Story Tokens from the other players by introducing a story-centric counter-force that they will care about. If someone sets the scene with some space combat and you drop in an asteroid field, they'll start seriously wanting their ships not to be getting rocked by rocks. Further, NPCs make excellent second- or third-characters that you bring in with a Story Token, letting you work up a collection of Inspirations by playing off yourself. This is good tactical sense, letting you gain resources with relatively little danger, especially once you note no NPC has "Powers," or traits they can spend Debt with.

A particularly evil scenario comes to mind wherein the scene-setter opens with a traditional urban street, and drops Zombie Plague, the second in turn plays a Zombie Horde as a multiple "person"-character, and the third goes for Joe Average, representing the poor benighted normals in the city. A brutal, if amusing, scene suitable for opening the play for the evening. Might make a fun Convention setup, too.

So, yesterday's mild gaming epiphany was the realization one can do Sorcerer in Capes.

That's just too easy.

How about space combat?

"Space combat?" you say. "You mean, with fighters and capital ships and blasting lasers and the like?"

Absolutely. And even taking into account the differing scales of various types and styles of ships. How? The key is understanding that ships, even -- maybe especially -- those who are piloted by story-centric characters are characters in their own right. In fact, there are definite differences in similar ship-types piloted by different characters. The fact is self evident; if there weren't, we couldn't tell them apart. Yet, we do, so ... QED.

How does this apply to ships of different scales in Capes? Well, in the same way that it applies to characters of different scales. It doesn't matter that Batman and Superman are of wholly different scales of physical ability, in a story where they're pitted against one another, they each have a roughly equal chance of coming out on top (depending on whose author is penning the ish this week). If Batman wins, its because he's used his agility, planning, and cleverly concealed bit of kryptonite at the right time, despite the titanic fists and inhuman strength of the Man of Steel. Likewise, if Supes brings it home, its because Bats pulled out the stops and the Man of Steel had to pull out all the stops, even though he was only up against a piddling mortal.

Consider, if you will, Battlestar Galactica.

( BSG Battle Fleet Hidden Within )

The interesting thing here is that it becomes very easy to see exactly how the various events you see in the TV series could come to be. The Comics Code just needs to include "Core characters cannot be killed, but their ships can be destroyed."

Scene: Deep-space asteroid field. There's a mining vessel that needs to be protected as it does its thing. Opening scene, so folks need some Story Tokens to burn later.

Alice picks a Generic Viper to be on patrol in the field. Bob picks a customized Raider to trade Debt for Inspirations. Connie picks another Generic Viper to be Alice's wingman.

Alice: Drops "Goal: Vipers discover Cylon patrol."

Bob: Goes off of Erratic to try and get a die on the Goal.

Connie: Calls the Raider "Scar" and drops "Event: Viper One gets blown to shit."

Next page. Alice claims Discover. Connie claims Viper One. Bob claims the other side of Discover from Alice.

Bob: Rolls something on the opposite side of Alice on the Goal. He rolls well, and describes it as his pilot screwing up. Alice Reacts, and they have a bit of a back-and-forth as they vie for control of the conflict. Bob eventually holds it.

Connie: Scar pops shots at One and the die come up decent, but she pushes, stakes two Debt and splits. A bit more back and forth with Bob, but his options are limited as are Alice's. Connie's holding One in her sights.

Alice: Bangs at the Discover conflict a bit more, and Bob responds. More back-and-forth, but Alice can't sustain it.

End of page, Viper One takes it in the bobo from Scar, Alice gets two Story Tokens and Connie gets at least one decent Inspiration. Bob gets a single Inspiration from the Discover ... and turns out they discover the Raider the hard way.

And there's your opening scene.

The scary thing is exactly how much this makes sense, in the sense of story construction. Playing the mechanics to maximize your profit creates plots which make sense in traditional story structure.

The other scary thing is, even if all three players took Generic Vipers, they could introduce Conflicts where they were shot down by or shot down entirely notional Raiders ... and that too would be appropriate for an opening scene.

Its all rather cool.

I just had the oddest idea, and wanted to get it down before it escaped my mind (because writing it down mechanically pounds it into my brain).

Run Sorcerer using Capes.

The first House Rule is "All core characters are straightforward normals, with Skills, not Powers, save for one, which is their Lore."

All core characters have Demons which are Exemplars of one of their negative Drives. The Free Conflict associated with the Exemplar should hook into the Demon's Need somehow.

The third House Rule would be the kicked: No matter what character you play in a given scene, you cannot play that character's Demon in the same scene.

I think that really gets to one of the most interesting potential dynamics in the hybrid Capes/Sorcerer crossover, not in defining who you can play (as in most RPGs), but in defining who you can't. That would easily keep the sense of wary concern between the Sorcerer and the Demon very real, while still letting characters be traded around the table every scene.

Hmm, let me try some chargen.

( Test Capes/Sorcerer Character )

[thoughtful look]