Matter transmitters bug me.  In short, I find them incredible in the most basic meaning of that word:  I don’t believe them.

  If by some chance you’ve avoided all science fiction, let me explain the matter transmission concept.  A material object, possibly even a living object, is deconstructed particle by particle, and a complete record of the position, motion, and energy of each particle is recorded and transmitted to another location where an exact copy of the original is constructed particle by particle, having the same energy levels and motions and relative positions.  It’s the teleporter of Star Trek, the transmat encountered on Doctor Who.  Larry Niven envisioned such matter transmission booths replacing telephones.  And there’s something about it all that I just don’t believe.

  It actually is not the science.  It is pseudo-science, certainly; someone is going to have to find a way around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle if it’s going to work.  But there’s a logic to it that suggests to me it will one day be accomplished.  I don’t know that I will live long enough to have my molecules disintegrated and reintegrated, but I would be surprised if no one ever manages it.

  What bothers me is the way in which this technology doesn’t matter in the worlds in which it is prevalent.  To have done this is to have accomplished much more, but generally those aspects are not considered or even worse are discounted for insensible reasons.  So bear with me while I take another look at transmat technology.

  In order to build a matter transmitter, you have to be able to disintegrate a target.  This may seem obvious; yet in how many settings do they include matter transmitters and don’t include a simple disintegrating weapon?  If I can find and disintegrate a dozen men on the surface of a planet far beneath me, why doesn’t it work as a weapon?  Since I don’t have to worry about reproducing the object disintegrated, I should be able to destroy buildings, structures, perhaps entire cities.

  But that’s just the beginning of my interest in disintegration.  After all, I’m quite aware that if you disassemble a molecule, you convert it to an enormous amount of energy.  The problems inherent in containing and controlling such levels of energy are another question; but why can’t this technology be used to generate power?  Given the amount of energy in a mass the size of a human body, the energy required to initiate the disintegration reaction must be a tiny fraction.  When the dilithium crystals are failing, why don’t we just throw furniture into the transporters and convert it to reserve power?

  And the weapon use of such power is staggering.  A moment ago I was talking about a disintegrator; but if you start to take apart the molecules of an object, you initiate nuclear decay on a massive scale.  Every building, every person, every rock is a potential nuclear bomb whose massive energy can be explosively released with a bit of prodding from our disintegration technology.  As it says in Multiverser, “a device which disintegrates without containment is a remote nuclear fission reaction stimulator.”

  And that leads me to think about the containment.  If I’ve built a transmat, I’ve found a way to contain the energy of complete nuclear collapse.  I don’t know what those force fields will be like, but somehow I think they’ll be able to deflect or absorb unimaginable amounts of power.  We are casually assuming the presence of a shield that could have easily contained the impact of Hiroshima.  We are tossing those shields around as an everyday tool, without any consideration of their real power.

  It’s probably not impossible to design a matter transmitter which reintegrates directly from the disintegration pattern; but it makes more sense to include a memory circuit.  And most of the matter transmitters in most fiction at least imply the existence of such memory banks.  That means that whenever you transfer an object from one point to another you also make a data copy of it; and as long as you have that data copy, all you need to do is add energy to it and you can make another–and another, and another, as many as you need.  You can make a hundred dinners, a thousand starships, a million soldiers.  But this is a largely untapped resource, and the excuses used are complete nonsense.  Not enough energy?  Easily rectified:  throw a few rocks into the disintegrator.  Pattern loss?  This is as foolish as those badly-written spy shows where they are passing around the “only copy” of a computer program.  If making a copy of a program deleted the original, it would make sense–but anyone who understands even a little about computer memory knows that even deleted data is still there until something replaces it.  Keeping the file in memory is easier than losing it.  But is the available memory too small?  The memory circuit really only makes sense if it’s large enough for the entire file.

  But writers go to great lengths to make it impossible to copy things, especially people.  We are told that complex DNA molecules are imperfectly replicated such that life forms can’t be copied.  But we know that life forms can be copied, because that’s what happens when we teleport them.  Really, we’ve completely destroyed one body and built another identical to it.  Besides, those “tiny molecular changes” are inconsistent with most of the other replication applications we can conceive.  How many water molecules have to accidentally be mis-linked as hydrogen peroxide before the liquid is not merely bitter but deadly?  How many mistakes can you make in the atomic structure of a metal object before the levels of radioactive decay are measurable?  No, molecular copying has to be perfect for it to be useful at all; it doesn’t have to work substantially better to copy life forms than anything else.

  Not only can we copy things, we can modify them.  The applications of this have never been adequately explored.  In fact, the medical applications alone are mind boggling.  Did you break a bone?  We disintegrate you, make an adjustment to the program, and reintegrate you with the bone corrected and fully strengthened.  You can do the same thing with a ruptured spleen, or a hernia, or a defective heart valve.  With a filtering program, you can completely remove every trace of a targeted virus or a chemical poison.  If there’s chemical imbalance, whether insulin or hormones or neurotransmitters, you can adjust to correct levels.  Body temperature can be corrected.  With our growing knowledge of the human genome, we would be able not merely to instantly undo the effects of such genetic disorders as sickle-cell anemia or Chrone’s Disease but to reconfigure the genome itself to remove the cause.  And when it comes to cosmetic surgery, well, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”  You want to be taller?  We’ll re-craft your long bones and vertebrae.  Overweight?  We’ll filter out a hundred pounds of fat on one shot.  We can add muscle mass in all the right places, turning a ninety-eight pound weakling to The Incredible Hulk in minutes.  Forget hair dye; we can change the color of your eyes, the pigments in your skin, the length of your fingernails.  Your facial structure can be completely rebuilt.  If we want we can provide you with entirely alien features, or make you look like someone else.  Giving you short blond hair in the morning and long dark hair by dinner is no problem at all.

  Let’s consider cooking.  Insert the roast of your choice and enter the program.  We can increase the temperature such that it is fully cooked in seconds.  At the same time, we can screen out gristle and bone while dispersing the ideal amount of fat and moisture for the most tender servings.  And spices can be added not merely to the surface but throughout the meat.  It’s as easy to chill as to heat.  Water can be turned to ice, cream and sugar to ice cream–we can even make Baked Alaska, with the hot cake and meringue surrounding the frozen center.  Spoiled food is no longer a problem, as we can screen toxins from our meat and dairy product far more easily than we could from our bodies and serve them fresh and delicious.

  Your wardrobe is as flexible as your imagination.  Oh, there will still be designers; but instead of selling clothes they’ll sell computer files.  And getting dressed won’t take long.  Stumble out of bed in the morning into your transmat and execute the preprogrammed routine.  A few seconds later you arrive at work dressed in a new suit cleaned and pressed, with your hair combed and your teeth clean.  If you like you can even program a shot of caffeine already in your blood, or go one step better and clear those endorphins from your brain.  After work, you enter another program into the transmat and go directly from work to the club; you arrive in a completely different outfit with your makeup redone and even a new hairstyle.

  But we don’t have to stop there.  Do you like being thirty-five?  No reason for you to get any older–we’ll just save the pattern of your thirty-five-year-old body and restore you to that physical form with each trip.  Or if you’d prefer being younger, we can probably do that too–maybe not the body you had then, but something very like it.

  And of course everything that isn’t true of cloning is true of transmat copies:  they have your personality, your memories, even your fingerprints, and they’re your age.  Today there are people who are highly skilled to the point of indispensable; tomorrow we’ll be able to copy these people so that they can be in several places at once, and if something should happen to one he’s not entirely irreplaceable.

  And we could go beyond that:  we could design our own people.  Once we know the basics of the human genome, we can modify it to suit our preferences; and unlike with genetic splicing, we don’t have to wait to see the results of our changes:  we can birth the new person fully grown.  And we don’t have to be limited to people.  We could design and build a faster race horse, a smarter ape.  We could design bodies completely different from anything we’ve seen.  And if we like we can give them human levels of intelligence.

  That, of course, leads to a much deeper question.  Why is it that we don’t let our science fiction stories make copies of people?  At least, whenever we do it’s usually an accident, and usually with serious complications.  For television, it may be in part because of the technical problems of having multiple roles played by the same actor.  But there are also moral and theological challenges raised.

  As already said, everything that isn’t true about clones is true about transmat duplicates.  At the moment of their creation, they match the pattern exactly.  They will diverge from each other thereafter, as each acquires distinct experiences and memories, but depending on how established their characters are at the time the pattern is made they will always be similar.  Which is the original?  In truth, neither–both are copies, the original having been destroyed in the creation of the pattern.  Neither has any more claim to being that person than the other; each has the same continuity of consciousness up to the moment the original was disintegrated.  And you might argue that it is illegal, immoral, or unethical to make copies of people–but is that going to prevent it from happening, or force it underground?

  But there’s a deeper problem, a theological problem which you have to answer before you can use a matter transmitter:  is man merely the sum of his material parts?  Is there nothing more, nothing intangible, what might be called spiritual?  If there is, then when the body is disintegrated it would presumably leave a disembodied spirit; and when it is again reintegrated, some spirit would have to occupy it.  It’s easy to hypothesize some sort of spiritual dimension such that the spirit of the man can travel any distance instantly and so be immediately reunited with the body; but it’s just as easy to imagine that some other disembodied spirit would fight him for that body–one of the dead, perhaps, or something worse.  Also, if a man has one spirit, and you duplicate him, what spirit occupies the other body?

  The presence of matter transmission technology in a game world has so many other implications it should be carefully considered before inclusion.  If you’ve got it, you have the basis for uncounted changes to the world from its weapons of warfare to its basic social structure.  You also have some very challenging story ideas from which to build adventures that can be as intellectually compelling as they are exciting.

  Technology always changes the world in unanticipated ways.  When you consider the effects it has in your world, make sure you don’t stop with the obvious.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience.

Some years ago I was the dungeon master for a new group of novice AD&D players. After a hiatus, I found myself back in the dungeon design business, and this time for a bunch of teenagers who did not know me. I wanted to do something good, fun, interesting. But I also wanted to apply the lessons of previous games to the new one. One of those was that dungeons had to make sense: there had to be a reason why this underground structure had been built. And that meant that I needed to create history, a story which explained what had happened in the past.

The story I invented was fairly simple. Eons before (when dealing with elves who live for millennia, ancient history must be defined in eons) an elf had a crazy notion of establishing trade with the underdark, possibly even negotiating peace between the surface elves and their estranged drow brethren. It was he who designed the original dungeon and financed its construction. The tension between his dream and his fear that he might be unleashing a great evil on the world made him a bit crazy. The original designs included some levels which were safe havens, places for travelers to rest and even be entertained, interspersed with levels which were deadly, laced with traps or fierce beasts, intended to kill anyone not privy to the safe path.

The builder died, and was buried in the depths of his creation; that which he built fell into disrepair, and was discovered and occupied by others. The newcomers made changes, making this their homes. Some areas lost all trace of their original purpose and design, while others were untouched.

Among those discovering the abandoned rooms and tunnels was a traveling troupe of entertainers. They saw in the upper levels the opportunity to build a home, a place to practice their crafts. A secret door provided a wonderful entrance to the area they picked–the second level of the dungeon–and behind it they began making changes. One of their number, a young wizard, began to construct something here that would be the wonder of the age. Yet as his companions died, the troupe and their work would fade into oblivion, leaving their magical showplace buried and forgotten.

And so it was that the character party stumbled into something none of them could possibly understand, something so strange and frightening it would leave them bewildered and terrified; yet so awesome they kept returning, trying to fathom its mysteries. For the thing that had been built eons before into which my characters now blundered was something unknown to their age.

It was an amusement park.

It wasn’t difficult to design. I had to throw a lot of continual light spells around, and extrapolate some spell research into locomotion. There were some things I couldn’t include–I wished there were a way to do a Ferris wheel, but the underground setting limited the vertical dimension of my designs. Still, I managed to create a very real collection of attractions.

Some of these were very straightforward. There was a stone zoo, in which petrified specimens of a number of fantastic creatures had been caged for display. Two stages were illumined with light spells in reflective containers; one of these was for plays, and had prop and costume supplies behind it, while the other was the sideshow where the magician kept his tricks and gear. A betting wheel would spin automatically when a bet was placed, and if the d6 matched the player’s number it paid five to one. A small cafe included a floor where some ancient musical instruments still sat. And there was a quiet boat ride through a dark tunnel, the boats magically teleporting back to their starting point once the passengers had disembarked. I even included vending machines which could create food and drink when activated by a coin. But there was so much more.

The merry-go-round had carved figures of horses, but also of fantastic beasts; and they were enspelled such that once riders mounted all would move in a circle with the same gait they would have if alive. The cavalier in the party loved this, using it to train herself on gryphons and dragons and pegasi. The funhouse had mechanical shifting stairs and floors and slides, vents of air blasts from below, distorted mirrors, and an entrance to the vast maze on the next level. The strong-man bell was extensively magic-mouthed such that on a die roll (adjusted for strength) it would hurl insults or compliments at the characters. And the shooting gallery provided five bolts to fire from the tethered light crossbows (sites suitably misaligned), again charging a coin to play and rewarding victory with a few coins returned.

My favorite trap–that is, ride–was the tilt-a-whirl. The characters entered a room; it was perfectly round, with two doors, one to the north and one to the south. The room had a thirty foot ceiling. There was a sort of statue, more like an obelisk, in the center–shapely and not unpleasant, but with no feature that would distinguish the front. The floor was metal, and this smooth metal continued up the first ten feet of wall. A few minutes after characters stopped entering the room, all doors would close and then vanish, and the metal floor and wall would suddenly shift, slowly turning. As it turned, it increased in velocity, and characters were forced to the outside wall; but as everything was told from their perspective, they were told that as they were moving, some magic drew them against that wall. Then, as they were pinned helplessly against this wall, they saw the obelisk slowly drop into the floor; at the same time, the ceiling descended toward them, inexorably threatening to crush them. This took only a couple minutes, and the ceiling stopped descending when it reached the top of the metal part of the wall. But then the truly terrifying happened: the metal floor beneath them dropped twenty feet, down to the obelisk below. They were now suspended by the magic which pressed them against the wall as it spun. Then, slowly, the metal wall began to drop toward the floor below, and once it was there it slowed to a stop. One door–randomly selected–opened to permit the dizzy characters to stumble back to the halls, uncertain of whether they were north or south, or whether they had descended to a lower level of the dungeon. Of course, they had not–they had been lifted twenty feet and then lowered back to their original depth. But their perception of the situation left them quite bewildered.

But their favorite was probably the roller coaster. This began as a bench at the end of a hall. If anyone sat on the bench or stood in front of it, suddenly a low wall would appear creating a sort of cart around it, and it shot straight up thirty feet, and then moved forward–at the same time leaving behind an identical looking bench at the end of the hall. I mapped out a course that carried them three hundred feet per round (a minute); along the way there was one straight stretch where a group of piercers would attempt to drop into the cart, and another where large spiders sprang at them. But the true terror was in hurtling through alternately light and dark tunnels, sometimes bound straight for a wall only to have the cart turn at the last instant. Of course, once two of the party members had been swept away by this trap–I mean, ride–others had to follow in the hope of rescuing them. The carts would depart at one minute intervals. And in the midst of the ride was a section where one cart would leap over another. I think one of the players may actually have screamed. I know that at least one of the characters leapt from the cart onto the track to escape.

I’ve run thousands of hours of fantasy games; yet this is the adventure people best remember. They all agree it was an insane idea, a concept which never should have worked, never should have been tried. Yet it was among the most fun and most memorable adventures they ever had. Almost fifteen years later they still speak of it.

I never imagined when I thought of it that it would really work. It was just an idea for an adventure, something to fill space in a dungeon map. Two levels down I had a luxury hotel; two levels below that was a dragon lair; below that was a race war. This was just part of the show. What made it so wonderful was that it was so totally out of place, and all the players realized that whatever they thought it was, to their characters it was completely inexplicable and clearly very dangerous, even demented.

A substantial part of creative thinking involves taking two things that have not been put together before and asking whether they can be combined. This adventure placed a modern amusement park in a medieval fantasy dungeon. I often find my ideas by looking at what to me are perfectly ordinary things and asking how they would be perceived by someone with an entirely different understanding of reality. I find a way to make it work in that reality, and then attempt to describe it to the players through the filters of the characters’ mindsets and presuppositions. The result is always strange to the point of alien, to the level of magical. By taking the ordinary and shifting it until it is out of place, you can create something quite original.

Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience.

Enter a world where humanity struggles against the forces of Hell and its minions.

Obsidian: the Age of Judgment is a roleplaying game set in the far future, where cybernetics and magic coexist. And humanity needs every advantage they can get, because Hell is quickly taking over Earth–Daemons roam the land, ranging from rat-size to mountainous! And in the last City built by man, they also roam the underground levels.

But there is hope–the Darchomen (a group of Mystics given power by a force called the Divinity) have set up the Law–an organization whose goal is to stop the forces of Hell and the Kultists who bring them into our world.

Now, if only they could get organized–and I mean the guys who created this RPG, not the players!

This game is a great concept–there can never be too many apocalyptic games, in my opinion–the system is interesting (at least to me, thus the POV title), and the references to two certain movies I happen to like are icings on the cakes.

Now, if only it were organized! I can’t explain it–it just seems like it could be better organized, so let’s just move on to the wish list.

Things I would like to see–an index, better cybernetic creation rules (and rules for installing), better editing (which could fall under ‘organization’), and website support for this diamond in the rough.

(BTW, is it my imagination, or are the motivations vaguely reminiscent of VAMPIRE? Just a coincidence, right?)

Enough whining about the flaws–let’s talk about the positive aspects.

This game has good potential, and I look forward to some supplements to see if the designers work on the flaws found in the core book. With all these threats to mankind, we had better see some kick-ass material! The “Wall of Obsidian” is what really gets to me, and I definitely can’t wait to see Wasteland to see if there’s more on that structure.

So, you guys at Apohis Consortium LISTEN UP–learn from your mistakes, and use the good stuff you already got to make OBSIDIAN a success.

After all, VAMPIRE had to have three editions, and they still don’t have it all together yet.

One of the most unexpected recent entries to the well-worn category of
classic fantasy games is Gemini, a very dark fantasy game from Stockholm,
Sweden. It’s a fascinating study–on one hand, it’s a D+D retread game
without much to comment upon, but at the same time it subverts your
expectations again and again with some very interesting variations on
classic themes.

First, do not purchase the book unless your are willing to cut the authors
some slack for haveing to translate into their non-native tongue. Given the
state of most RPG editing, where extremely bad editing slips through from
people who are ostensibly natives, I don’t find this difficult. If you’re
sensitive to it you may wish to reconsider your purchase, or read some of
the book first to be certain it’s your thing.

The book itself is gorgeous. If you are one of those people who buys RPGs
for the art and art alone (and I can hear you breathing, so I know you’re
out there) then this is something you should pick up. The book is filled
with tortured, Scandinavian looking souls in glossy full-color plates and
ornately filigreed edgework for each page, proving that the Swedes have a
handle on darkness that the White Wolf kids would give their eyeteeth for.
Thematically, the book has Dark Ages written all over it, and the consistent
tone was a delight–even with the loopy grammatical constructions, it’s an
easier read than a lot of stuff written by native English speakers on the
market. Whether this is a sad statement on the RPG industry or not I leave
as an exercise for the reader.

The world of Gemini fits the book’s form– the Dark, Dark Ages, like the
We-all-suffer-and-God-has-abandoned-his-Faithful Darkness that makes a great
gothic novel. You have a monotheistic church that hold the only hope of
salvation, evil Inquisitors, a seeping corruption and (one of my favorites)
magic being definitely tied to the deviltry and darkness camp. In fact, in
Gemini all magic slowly warps and darkens you until you are a festering
pustule on the face of humanity. The metaplot ties directly into this, with
a rather elaborate story about the Great Seal being broken and the dark one
rising up to conquer the world. The refreshing change is that in Gemini,
due to the formal and ornate writing, the evil really does seem
overpowering–far more than the second rate evils in WitchCraft or many TSR
supplements.

A lot of this is due to the system constraints placed on piety. Gemini
closely maps your ‘goodness’, and as you fall from grace you become prey to
more and more of the filth of the world…even contact with the unnatural
will erode you. It’s a pleasant whiff of Cthulhu mixed with the kind of
controls that should have been In Nomine–you can be any way you like, but
being good is hard and being evil is ultimately a very bad idea.

The rest of the game’s system is by far its weakest quality. Although the
magic system is a notch more engaging, the resolution systems are ununified
and clunky…just figuring out how to conduct a combat round was an
extremely onerous exercise, made more difficult by how simplistic the
results were. Aside from a roughly sketched out skill system, this game’s
system is mired in late 70’s D+D mechanics–most GMs will want to tear out
the guts of this wholesale and convert to something more fluid, or at least
consistent.

The best element of the game is its take on demihumans. Dwarves are
dwarves, but they gain strength and blessings through the augmentation of
their body by piercing–the images in the book of Dwarves with horrendous
body piercings attacking the enemy are provocative, and the tales of the
dwarven race’s downfall and the horrifying Curse that many of its members
suffer from really differentiated them from other game depictions.

Likewise with the elves, who in Gemini are an artifact race created by
now-extinct masters. All elves are male, except for the Queen–who is the
giver of all life, and the bearer of every elf born. Different temperaments
and subraces of elves are generated depending on which consort the Queen
took to bed to create you. Furthermore, the elves have varying levels of
sentience depending on how much ‘caelum’ they are given by the Queen–so
elven society very much resembles an ant society, with a queen, workers,
drones and warriors. Very interesting stuff.

The Verdict

Gemini is an interesting exercise, and if you have any interest in running a
dark fantasy game with a very Catholic feel to it you should certainly get
ahold of a copy. Overall I think it’s more useful as a piecemeal
sourcebook–the poor system and choppily translated writing is compensated
by the great race and Church descriptions. Very dark and very Swedish.

Power doesn’t come cheap. If it did, we’d all be living in mansions, spending
our weekends sucking down margaritas on some isolated tropical beach. That
isn’t the way the world works, and that isn’t how games should work. Now every
game has different definitions of power. In fantasy games, magic is usually a
good route to power. Hardware and techno-gizmos are often the surest way to
power in an SF game. In this article, I’m going to draw on Orson Scott Card’s
Hart’s Hope and Stephen Donaldson’s Gap Saga for examples of how to
extract the price of power from your characters.

Blood Magic

Hart’s Hope, one of Orson Scott Card’s earliest works, tells the tale
of a young man named Orem who must overthrow the cruel Queen Beauty and
restore the just and rightful king to power. I won’t go into too much detail
about the plot, since I’m not a big fan of Card, but he does describe the
basics of a ghastly, if compelling, magic system.

In the world of Hart’s Hope, magic is divided into two parts: magic for
men and magic for women. Women’s magic gets only passing description in
Hart’s Hope. It is men’s magic that I am going to focus on. In order to
cast a spell, you must draw blood from a living creature. So, for a simple
spell, you can give yourself a small cut and gain the magical power needed for
the spell. A more powerful spell may require the blood of a wild animal. The
most potent magical power comes from the blood of loved ones. A wizard willing
to kill his wife or his child stands to acquire massive amounts of power. Of
course, only a truly heartless or diabolical fiend would do something like
that. Which means that only the heartless or diabolical will have access to
the most powerful magics.

I’m not going to try to boil this idea down into a game mechanic. That would
dodge the basic point of this article: too many games water power down into
some neat little game mechanism. A new spell or increased skill simply means
that the character can now beat up bigger and badder beasties.

BOOOORING!

Imagine if your players had to sacrifice something, a stat, a magic item,
their nifty new starcruiser, in order to nab that little piece of personal
power. It is often said that people will value something that they have to
work for. RPGs have that angle covered rather well. Most experience systems
require a character to clobber x number of baddies before he can get a new
skill. Well, what if we turn that system on its head? Give your characters the
power they want, and then hit them with the price of that power. If they want
to pull a cool stunt, its going to cost them. To get back to Hart’s
Hope, how attractive would magic be in your game if your players knew that
they’d have to injure themselves or hurt the ones they love to use it? Such a
situation breeds a respect for power and a clear understanding that if the
characters want to hoist out their big guns, its going to cost them. This can
generate a lot of sticky moral situations and tension between the thirst for
power and the reluctance to pay its price. Instant compelling role-play fodder
right there, folks!

There are a few things to keep in mind when creating a magic system like this.
First, you have to make the price worth the reward. In an AD&D game, it is a
little ridiculous to expect a mage to kill his first born child just to cast a
magic missile! Simple spells in Hart’s Hope require that the mage only
draw a small amount of his own blood. The key is to keep the cost of magic on
a mage’s mind, no matter how simple the spell. But don’t over do it.

A related guideline is to keep your magic system usable. If truly powerful
magics require a mage to jump into a volcano or something, you won’t find many
mages using such magic often, if ever. Magic should demand a stiff price, but
it should be something that a heartless or at least a dedicated character can pay.

The price of magic should also have reverberations throughout your campaign.
NPCs should know what a mage has to do to gain power and react to spellcasters
appropriately. If you decide that mages have to sacrifice puppies and kittens
to cast spells, you can bet that most NPCs won’t be too keen on mages in
general. Such social isolation and stigma can lead to some great role-playing
opportunities. The ideal magic system should give your game a unique flavor
and added depth. It shouldn’t be just a laundry list of stuff needed to cast spells.

Finally, be sure to follow through on whatever sacrifices a character makes.
You should ensure that a character’s decisions do not take place in a vacuum.
If the player is role-playing this out, he may need some not so subtle reminders.

Cybernetics and Freewill

So far, I’ve talked about extracting a material cost from your characters. In
most games, it will be enough to require characters to sacrifice trusted items
and their personal health. If your group is up to role playing challenge,
there is a very cool concept that you can steal from Stephen Donaldson’s Gap saga.

In his five volume series, Donaldson tells a sprawling (and a bit long winded;
I skimmed the last book and a half) tale of an interstellar struggle for
power. I could write a few months’ worth of columns just on this series alone,
but instead I’ll focus on one very cool character: Angus Thermopyle.

Angus was a space pirate, one of the most brutal and heartless men in all of
space. I say “was” because at one point in the saga, Angus is captured by the
authorities and turned into a cyborg, complete with laser beams in his
fingers, a sophisticated suite of ECM tools, and increased strength and
agility. Basically, he gets all the cool stuff out of Shadowrun.

But that’s not all. Since Angus is just a bit on the murderous side, the
government implants a computer in his head, a computer that controls his
actions. Angus isn’t reduced to a simple automaton. He still has most of his
freewill. The computer kicks on in certain situations and forces him to obey
the commands of selected individuals. It also controls his violent compulsions
and sometimes gives him access to new data or skills (a la the Matrix).

I think that this is one of the niftiest ideas you can add to a science
fiction game. Mind control like this is a natural outgrowth of cybernetic
implants. If we can modify the body, why not modify the mind?

There are a lot of pitfalls to this idea. One of the most common mantras in
any RPG that includes a seduction or fast-talk skill is that NPCs can’t use
skills like that to make PCs do things. PC freewill is inviolate. Often, I’d
agree with that. A game isn’t much fun if the GM is always telling you what
your character is doing. But with the right players and the right plan, you
can make this work in a game.

My first suggestion is that you check with your players before trying
something like this out. Most gamers, I imagine, wouldn’t be too keen on
hearing halfway through a campaign that those implants that took at character
creation have turned them into corporate lapdogs.

On the other hand, it is a good idea to keep the limits of the implants’
control secret. Part of the fun of this idea is that it gives a game a hint of
the unexpected. It can also worry your players to no end. You want to give
your players a basic idea of what’s up, but save a full explanation for an
appropriately climactic scene.

Don’t over do it. It is a little easy to shackle everyone with mind control
devices, but it makes it a little less unique and may be problematic if not
everyone is keen on losing some of their character’s free will. A character
coping with something like this should be the exception, not the norm.

Finally, keep the level of control over a character reasonable. Any mind
control implants a character has should be there for a reason. This can be a
great tool for advancing your plot and provides a lot of cool role-playing
opportunities. Don’t just use it as a method to browbeat or abuse characters senselessly.

The genres of Fantasy and Super Heroes are mixed in the world of Providence, an RPG that has the catchphrase “Learn to be a hero again.”

The world known as Providence is a jungle realm spread across the interior of a sphere but geological instabilities have cracked the jungle floor, flooding the land with an ever-increasing amount of water. The world is a prison, and that is how it’s supposed to be. The inhabitants of Providence are descendants of a mass penal colony, sent to Providence due to a failed crusade. Now, the people struggle to find the gates that will lead them back home and discover how to use them.

The cities of Providence are unique in that they are built upward rather than outward, due to the fact that most characters in Providence have wings or glider membranes and, thus, the ability to fly. Which brings us to the caste system: Pure, Blessed, Gifted, Fortuned, Redeemed, and Fallen.

Pure are those who have full wings. They and the caste below them are the only members of society who are taught how to use magic (see below). Blessed are those who don’t posses full wings - theirs are smaller and don’t work as proficiently. As a result, they don’t fly to well. Members of this caste are occasionally taught magic, and are usually advisors, generals, etc. Gifted are those born with Shard abilities (see below), which is one of the few ways to move up in the caste rankings. This caste is the only one delineated by ability instead of appearance. Fortuned do not posses wings. Instead, they have a membrane that connects their arms to their torso, allowing them to glide. Redeemed have wings or glider membranes that no longer work due to an injury, atrophy, or birth defect. These people are used to work the menial functions in life (soldiers, field hands, etc). Finally, the Fallen are those who do not have wings, and are regarded as outcasts.

The population of Providence is also divided into two categories: the Seraph (those who possess feathered wings) and the Iblii (those who have leathery wings). After that, they are also separated into family classes called Troupials that are based on appearance and general function. Examples of Troupials are Bat, Dove, Gargoyle, and Dragon, with many more to choose from.

The basics of a Providence Character are the four aspects: Characteristics, Skills, Traits, and Magic (powers and spells).

There are ten Primary Characteristics that represent the physical, mental, social, and magical attributes of a character, like Coordination, Intelligence, and Strength. They range from -3 to +3, with the average human having a 0. There are also from two to three secondary characteristics, such as Agility, Memory, and Might.

Some characters may have magical abilities (called Wird). A character who has natural, Wird-enhanced abilities is called a Shard. A person who can cast spells is a Spell Caster. Shards are inherently more powerful than spell casters, but spell casters are more flexible in their field of expertise.

The Providence RPG uses the Creative System, which makes use of the d10. The number of d10s you use depends on the level of Skill a character has and their relevant Characteristic. The total may be more or less than two dice. However, only two dice are rolled; having more or less than two dice gives a modifier to the roll. For each additional d10 you have you get a +2. Fewer than two dice gives a -2 for each d10 less than two.

Example: If you have Characteristic Strength 3 and have to make a Strength roll, you would have three dice total. Roll two dice and modify your roll by +2. If you only had Strength 1, you would roll two dice and modify your roll by -2.

Alongside the basic system is a more advanced optional set of rules that can attain a greater degree of realism. Unfortunately, this optional set also brings with it a lot of math.

The Good: The system is easy to learn - with the advanced optional rules requiring some time to get used to (for example: The Modified Target Number is when the number of dice the opponent has is doubled and added to the target number [usually seven]). Plenty of examples pepper the creation and system sections of the book. The layout is very good - the pages look like old parchment and the text has no typos that this reviewer noticed. The binding is also quite professional.

The Bad: The art ranged from good to awful. The game uses a lot of number crunching which can bog down play for both novices and experienced players. And having information separated into two books (the second being the Providence World Book) has its advantages and disadvantages - one is left with the feeling there’s something missing in the Main Rule Book. Finally, do we really need 26 total characteristics?

The Verdict

This game is a decent blend of fantasy and super-heroics - worth looking at. Try it, and see if you can learn to be a hero again.

Dungeon design is a tricky art for those who want to take it beyond the
standard encounter key and graph paper used by most gamers. The dungeon
crawl has gotten quite a reputation as the playground for hack n’ slash
gaming devoid of any character oriented gaming opportunities. In this
article, I am going to use Ursula LeGuin’s The Tombs of Atuan as an
example of a dungeon setting that transcends the typical dungeon crawl. I’m
also going to talk about using what I call “temp characters” to add a little
variety to your game.

Dungeons for Role Players

The Tombs of Atuan is the second book in LeGuin’s Earthsea series.
The Earthsea books follow a young man named Ged as he rises from wizard’s
apprentice to archmage. In The Tombs of Atuan, Ged journeys to a
distant land to recover an ancient artifact. The artifact is held within the
treasure chambers of the Tombs of Atuan, a series of caverns beneath an
ancient temple dedicated to the worship of deities known as the Nameless
Ones.

Now, if I had offered to run an RPG based on that description, you’d
probably have visions of the typical dungeon crawl running through your
head. Heroes find dungeon, battle monsters, dodge traps, defeat the boss
monster (to steal a video game term) and carry off the treasure. If a writer
of any lesser talent than LeGuin had tackled the subject, then perhaps
that’s how The Tombs of Atuan would have played out. But in LeGuin’s
capable hands, the scenario follows a much different path.

First off, the Tombs of Atuan are not stuffed to the gills with monsters and
guardians. Instead, the treasures of the tomb are hidden in a labyrinth rife
with traps and accessible through only one door, which can be locked from
the outside. Thus, any intrepid explorers must not only worry about getting
lost in the maze, but should they alert anyone to their presence, the temple
guardians need only lock and barricade a single door to trap them within.

So far, we’ve basically traded a combat oriented adventure for a problem
solving oriented one. That’s not that big of a leap. Replace orc with pit
trap in any dungeon and you can do that, too. But here’s where things get a
little interesting: Suppose that in order to get through the labyrinth, the
characters need the help of an antagonist. In The Tombs of Atuan, the
story does not focus on Ged but on Tenar, the High Priestess of the temple
of the Nameless Ones. Instead of Ged’s adventures, the story concentrates on
Tenar and her slowly dawning realization that she wants to know of life
beyond the walls of her temple. She comes to discover that the she no longer
wishes to serve the Nameless Ones. Ged’s greatest challenge lies not in
besting the tricks and traps of the labyrinth but in convincing Tenar that
there’s something more to life than the Tombs, and that with his help she
can escape and begin life anew.

Dungeons should serve as a setting for your plot, not as a substitute for
one. The typical graph paper and encounter key dungeon is scripted and
linear by nature, making for a rather boring scripted and linear plot. Plots
need to be flexible in order to succeed. They need to take unexpected turns
to hold your players’ interest. Too often, dungeons are anything but
surprising. Room one is the guardroom, room two is the storage room, room
three is the common room, room four is the leader’s room, and so on. Design
a dungeon just like you’d design a forest or a town. If your PC’s entered a
tavern at noon, would they find the same scene and people as when they
entered at midnight? Hopefully, the answer is no. (If it is yes, you either
have a very bizarre campaign or need to learn the basics of world creation.)
Create a community or an ecosystem of some sort and draw up a logical and
coherent history for it. Then, using your dungeon map, figure out how your
orc tribe or what not would make use of their space. Don’t simply assign orc
X to room Y, but draw up a plan of defense. Assign each room a use, not
occupants. Give the inhabitants personalities and motivations just like
you’d do with a town mayor or the local master thief.

If your players prefer role playing over combat, they’re not going to be too
keen on the idea of frontally assaulting your dungeon. But now that you’ve
created a system instead of an encounter key, you’ve hopefully generated
some plot hooks, either accidentally or intentionally. Your players no
longer have to approach the dungeon as conquerors but as ambassadors,
explorers, or thieves. And when they get there, they’ll have three
dimensional characters to deal with.

The key to creating an interesting dungeon is to ditch your preconceptions
of dungeons. Dungeons don’t have to be linear and they don’t have to exist
in a bubble, exerting little influence over your world beyond their walls.
In the early days of RPGs, this was the case. But don’t let that stop you
from using dungeons in your game today. With a little creativity and
planning, a dungeon can provide a lot of role playing opportunities.

Send in the Temps!

Another unique feature of The Tombs of Atuan is that most of the
story isn’t about the series’ main character. Ged might be the main
character in the series as a whole, but in The Tombs of Atuan, he
plays an important but secondary role to Tenar. There’s a lot of potential
here to use a similar set-up in an RPG. Most everyone has played a Great
Escape-type scenario, where the characters are somehow imprisoned and
have to come up with a plan of escape. Well, what if we turn that situation
on its head? Instead of the characters coming up with a cunning plan, what
if someone else came to rescue them? That might not sound like much fun, and
if the GM just uses NPCs to do it, it isn’t. But whoever said that the line
between PC and NPC had to be so clearly defined?

Let’s say that the characters are trapped by their enemies. Instead of
leading them through an escape plot, why not hand them temporary characters,
maybe spies who have infiltrated the enemy camp and must now free the PCs.
This offers an interesting change of pace, perhaps allowing your players a
chance to play characters much more powerful than ones they are used to
handling or to try out different classes or skills. Many novels shift scenes
and change their focus from one character to another. Why not try that in an
RPG?

There’s a few hurdles that you’ll need to clear for this idea to work, and
it isn’t appropriate to every circumstance. The temporary characters’
actions must have a direct influence on the main characters. If you hand out
characters that have nothing to do with your players’ regular ones,
your game will lose a lot of its meaning. The players may not feel all that
happy about losing their characters, if only temporarily, unless they have a
clear sense that what they do with their new characters will have an obvious
impact on the lives of their regular ones.

Keep your players in mind when designing characters. If you know that your
players prefer brawny barbarians, don’t stick them with bookworms and spell
slingers unless you either get their OK first or don’t plan on using the
characters for more than one session. Part of the fun of using this idea is
springing it on your players unexpectedly. But this could easily turn
disastrous if you make characters that no one wants to play. Keep in mind
your players’ styles and personalities when creating their temp characters.

Be flexible. Give your players some room to modify the characters you make
for them. You can’t give them exactly what they want, so give yourself some
breathing room to cater to their needs. The worst thing a GM can do is
dictate to his players what they’re going to play and how they’re going to
play it. Nothing turns players away faster.

Once a PC, always a PC. If your players show any interest in their temp
characters, keep avenues open for them to reappear on a semi-regular basis.
Hopefully, if everything goes well, they’ll become attached to their temps
and take some interest in their lives beyond the game in which they used
them. Of course, any self-respecting GM will use that to get the PCs into
all sorts of trouble. Maybe the temps have been kidnapped by a villain, or
perhaps they’ve departed on some expedition and haven’t been heard from in
weeks. If you’ve done a good job with your temps, you’ve just created a
whole new set of plot hooks.

Finally, don’t take control of your players’ regular characters any more
than you have to. It might be funny to make Rob’s smooth talking space
pirate stammer and fall flat on his face, but Rob sure as heck isn’t going
to like it. Leave the regular PCs off stage for the duration of the temps’
stay. If you find that the scenario you designed with temps in mind requires
a lot of contact between the temps and the regular PCs, you should probably
reconsider the use of temps.

Temporary characters can provide a nice change of pace and put a little
spice into a campaign. They can also help prolong a campaign’s life span by
increasing the variety of challenges available to your players. Everyone is
used to playing a single character, which gives you even more of a reason to
break that tradition. Just as it is with life in general, variety is the
spice of RPGs.

Shadowrun holds the distinction of the first successful “toss two genres in
a blender and stand back” game. After a succesful nine year run, FASA has
produced a third edition of this popular RPG.

The Setting

The backbone of any successful game is its setting. Shadowrun takes the
cliches from two completely different genres, fantasy and cyberpunk, and
combines them in a way that is both familiar and wildy new. To summarize:
for reasons unknown, elves, dwarves, and orks have returned to the world and
magic is once again possible. Corporations rule the world as national
governments are largely ineffectual. Peoples who did not forget their mystic
roots, such as Native Americans, have harnassed the power of magic and
forged it into political and economic muscle. The trappings of a typical
cyberpunk dystopia are all there: ridiculously wealthy coporate elites dwell
in isolated enclaves while the vast mass of the poor eke out a miserable
existance in post-industrial ruins. In short, the world is a grim, gritty
place.

The Characters

Players take on the role of shadowrunners, mercenaries employed by
corporations for covert illicit activities, such as sabotage, assassination,
and theft. Character creation uses a simple set of priorities. Players begin
with five priorities and assign one each in race, magic, skills, attributes,
and resources. The race priority determines whether the character is a
human, elf, dwarf, ork, or troll. Magic controls what kind of spells, if
any, a character has access to. A higher priority in skills, attributes, or
resources gives the character more skills, higher attributes, or more cash
for equipment, respectively.

Shadowrun allows for a very wide variety of character types. For example,
players who want a spell slinging character can choose to become a mage,
traditional pointy hat and wand types; a shaman, holistic spell workers who
choose an animal as a totem; aspected magicians, specialists in a particular
type of magic; or adepts, warriors who use magic to enhance their physical
abilities. The character creation rules allow for a lot of flexibilty
without much complexity.

The Mechanics

Shadowrun uses dice pools for task resolution. To do anything, players roll
a number of six sided dice (usually equal to a skill level) and count up
the number of dice that come up equal to or higher than a GM-selected target
number. The basic mechanics are simple and apply to everything, from writing
a computer program to whacking someone with a samurai sword. What’s puzzling
is that, with such a simple basic rule in place, FASA went on to pile
loads of specific sub-rules on top of it. The game system tries to cover
ever conceivable action or event with specific rules. Maybe I’m a bit used
to making stuff up on the fly, but most of the rules I’d never use, since
they are too specific and non-intuitive. That being said, the basic
mechanic is solid enough, and simple enough, that I don’t see any need to
play Shadowrun with a different set of rules. Just keep in mind that, if
you’re like me, there’s going to be a lot of rules that you’ll have no use
for.

Playing the Game

There’s not quite a full set of tools in this book for the novice Shadowrun
GM. Shadowrun includes a nice overview of typical shadowrunner activites,
from breaking and entering to industrial sabotage. This is fertile ground
for adventure seeds and gives a beginning GM a clear picture of what
Shadowrun adventures entail. That being said, the sample background included
in the book is short on really useful data. While Shadowrun is set mainly on
the streets of the urban sprawl, the write-up on Seattle as a sample setting
is curiously high level, taking a very general overview on the city and the
area around it. I would have much preferred a sample city neighborhood with
gangsters, street samurai, and thugs rather than a general overview of the
city as a whole. Aggravating the problem is a complete lack of stats for
adversaries. There’s no sample NPCs or monsters (besides dragons) for the GM
to use, a serious failing, especially for beginning GMs. There are sample
characters in the character creation chapter that a GM could adapt for his
own uses, but there should be at least a basic overview of the typical
security grunt or Mafia goon.

The Verdict

Overall, the Shadowrun game packs a very fun setting, a simple basic
mechanic (even if at times the rules are bloated), and flexible character
generation rules into a quality package. I recommend this game but caution
you to expect to fork over money for a few supplements if you do not have
the time or inclination to create a lot of your game from whole cloth.

The first brainchild of Over the Edge’s Jonathan “I make the cool
games” Tweet and Vampire: The Masquerade’s Mark “I got a stupid dot in
my name” Rein*Hagen was Ars Magica, a brilliant role playing game of
Mythic Europe that they unveiled in 1987. It revolutionized game
playing with troupe-style playing, sensible character types, the use
of real medieval history as a setting and what is still the most
richly detailed and well-designed magic system in an RPG today.

Twelve years later the game is still miraculously alive. A lot of
this is due to a dedicated and intelligent fan-base: if Ars Magica has
a flaw, its people’s mistaken belief that you need to know Latin to
play. Well, that’s just not true -but it is one of the few games that
attracts historians, philosophers and non-hacknslashers out of the
woodwork in droves.

Ars Magica has seen four different publishers - Lion Rampant,
White Wolf, Wizards of the Coast and now Atlas Games, who ironically
used to be most of Lion Rampant. Now that the battle-weary game has
come home after a couple of near-cancellations, occasional lows and
White Wolf’s obsession with making the game a precursor to their World
of Darkness, new fans can discover Mythic Europe for themselves. It
has been worth the wait.

“The Dragon and The Bear” describes the Novgorod Tribunal, which is
13th century Poland and Russia. Unlike most RPGs, Ars Magica
researchers know their subjects - Simeon Shoul has done a fantastic job
of covering the area, complete with beautiful maps, a complete lineage
for the royalty of Poland and Russia and a comprehensive index.

For those who think ‘real’ history is lame, they have another thing
coming: the Mongols. Yes, the basis for so many faceless photocopied
barbarians in so many bad RPG worlds are here in stunning, vivid
bloody glory, and it is the eminent arrival of these ghastly hordes
which gives this supplement its real punch. Past tribunal books have
posited plots and historical events, but never with such breadth and
depth. No matter where your saga takes place, the Mongols will
affect them, and now all the details are in one place.

Also featured are full rules for Volkhv characters, including the
entirely new system of magic used by pagan characters that resurrects
the old shaman rules from the 3rd edition and makes them shine. I was
especially fascinated by the treatment of faerie in the game, which
receives an exhaustive treatment - the differing natures of Slavic
faeries are discussed, as are Arcadia and the Pagan Gods that live
there.

The Verdict

Atlas Games has really scored with their first tribunal book. They
have expertly woven Slavic myth and reality together into an excellent
sourcebook that will delight any Ars Magica player. “The Dragon and
The Bear” is a true cut above the standard locale books in the RPG
industry, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in medieval Eastern
Europe. If you have never tried Ars Magica before, now is a perfect
time - Atlas has a wide range of great materials ready for you to use,
and you simply won’t find a better medieval roleplaying game.

When I first heard about Fading Suns, I had no idea whether this was to be a fantasy game - “Isn’t that a D&D world?” asked one of my playtest group - or a science fiction game. All I knew was the name, and the name lends itself to either genre. Now that I’ve got the book, and have played around with it for a while, I can honestly say that it’s both.

Fading Suns takes place three thousand years in the future, after humans have expanded their sphere of influence to a few dozen “known worlds” and quite a few “lost worlds,” planets which were cut off - intentionally or otherwise - when the Church began to crack down on technology. Now, though, technology and the technological Guilds are making a comeback, and the Lost Worlds are slowly starting to rejoin the fold - and the stars have begun to die. There’s a lot of philosophical debate about this, but it’s not necessarily what the games are going to be about.

There are four major factions in the world of Fading Suns: the noble houses - five major and innumerable minor, the Church - several branches, the Guilds, and the aliens - who can also belong to the Church or one of the Guilds and whose worlds are often governed by the nobles. The universe is similar to that of Star Wars, kind of; one of my players likened it to the Mos Eisley Cantina. The introductory story gives the impression of a dustball out on the edges of the known worlds, sort of run-down but great for scum, villainry, and the poor schmuck of a noble who’s there to try and keep an eye on things.

Character creation is fairly simple; attributes are divided into three sections, and skills into two. Body Characteristics include, well, physical stats; Mind Characteristics deal with mental tasks, and include the character’s technical aptitude; and Spirit Characteristics are opposed: they deal with the character’s psyche and personality, and are paired; no pair may ever exceed a total of ten points. Imbalance in a pair means that the character leans one way or the other in that particular area. (Yes, it’s confusing; I can’t think of a better way to put it, though, without plagiarizing.)

There are, as I said earlier, two types of skills: Natural Skills and Learned Skills. Natural skills are those which everybody has in the Fading Suns universe - they include fighting, dodging, and observing. Learned skills are “tricks of the trade,” as it were, and can be pretty much anything not already covered.

Next come Benefits and Curses, and Benefices and Afflictions. The former generally deal with the character as a person - psychological quirks, physical stature, that sort of thing - while the latter involves things that the person has - church vestments, travel passes, money, et cetera.

Die-rolling in Fading Suns is extremely interesting; the player rolls 1d20, aiming to roll under the target number - usually a Characteristic plus a Skill - but, if he manages to roll under that target number, the closer he gets to it, the better he does, and the more victory points or extra effect dice he gets on the roll. On a target number of 13, therefore, rolling 12 would be better than rolling 11 - and a 13 would be a critical success, doubling the number of victory points or effect dice. 19 always fails, though, and 20 always critically fails, visiting disaster upon the character. A 1, on the other hand, always succeeds, no matter what the target number.

The neat thing is, though, that’s all you ever roll. Only the target number changes - so you need exactly one die for the entire group. Even damage requires only that you roll the same die several times. (I find it unfortunate, however - and this is something I dislike about a great many games - that you can critically succeed on a combat roll and do absolutely no damage, even before the other person dodges and counts armor/parrying in.)

My verdict? I love the world. I like the system. My players are bugging me to run it again, though, so I ought to be off…