So What Does "Mature Themes" Mean Anyway?

Tomorrow's one-shot game, "A Heresy of Angels" was marked long ago as containing "mature themes", a term which I've never quite tied down.

Now, it's perhaps worth noting at the outset what mature themes (as far as I am concerned) are not. All too often, particularly on TV (notably "Torchwood"), but also in RPGs books, mature themes seems to mean nothing more than boobs & blood. Oh, and the ability to say "fuck". (This is particularly amusing when applied to WotC's (3e) "Book of Vile Darkness" and "Book of Exalted Deeds", where they stated "mature themes", meant "boobs & blood", but then chickened out in the artwork to include not much of either. And indeed, when The Valar Project actually did try to publish "The Book of Erotic Fantasy" under the d20 license, they proceeded to change the license to try to block them!)

Anyway, I have absolutely nothing against boobs, blood, or expletives appearing in film, TV, books, or any other medium. But I would hardly consider "Piranha 3D" as particularly 'mature'!

So, then, what does "mature themes" mean? Well, I have a few thoughts...

Character Nuance: A lot of RPG characters are essentially one-dimensional. This is especially noticable in something like D&D, where motivation seems to be little more than "kill things and take their stuff" - which is pretty hollow, especially when you realise that most of that stuff is desirable purely because it enables you to kill things better. To that end, "Vampire: the Masquerade"'s concept that "a beast I am lest a beast I become" is quite interesting, since characters must constantly toe the line or lose themselves. "Black Crusade", in campaign play at least, has a similar conceit at work, which is quite fun. But even in one-shot play, characters each have a 'Pride', 'Disgrace', and 'Motivation', which should provide a little more depth.

Likewise, I think (I hope) that the NPCs are a bit less one-dimensional. There are no (well, few) clear "good guys" and "bad guys", various options for alliances are available, and even those characters who are insane do at least have some sort of motivation. (Note to self, though: must remember to bring that out in the game!)

The Gloves Are Off: This one may well not come up, but there will be absolutely no fudging of rolls to keep characters alive, and no fudging of rolls to keep characters playable. In many games, a permanent injury to a character could make that character no longer fun to play. Indeed, even just the loss of key equipment can cause some players to write off a character. There's a temptation, therefore, not to use creatures like Rust Monsters or energy drain attacks, or to fudge rolls to ignore critical results causing the loss of a limb.

Not here. Not this time.

A Fractious Party: Again, this depends on the characters that are selected for the campaign. However, some of the characters have back-stories that will make them less likely to seek certain solutions, others have competing goals. And, of course, the characters are all (nominally at least) followers of Chaos, and so inherently untrustworthy. So, where most of my one-shots assume a mostly united party with, at worst, mild disagreements, it's entirely possible that this lot will find themselves in outright war. And, frankly, that might be more fun than the prepared adventure anyway!

Shades of Gray: This one is actually probably most fun with a party of Paladins, who do want to stick to "the right thing" (but each of whom have character flaws, each of whom has a subtly different notion of 'right', and so on). Then, you just throw a moral dilemma at them, and watch them grapple with it. (It doesn't work with 'regular' RPG characters, because very few of them ever adopt rigid codes of behaviour voluntarily. Mostly, any such code consists of the morality of expedience - the moment it becomes convenient, Batman picks up that gun.)

With a party comprised of Chaos Space Marines and Heretics, things are rather different - the characters are already essentially Evil (or at least, on the side of the Daemons), so unlikely to fret too much about mindless carnage.

So this one will necessarily have to not be about the PCs. Instead, I'll have to have the NPCs grapple with questions of doing the right thing, of making the tough sacrifice. Oh, there is one area where the PCs have a potentially tough decision to make, but I'll not go into that... spoilers!

(But for the most part, this last one will be off the table. I have another "Mature Themes" game provisionally scheduled for next year, so I'll probably play with this particular theme a lot more then.)

And I think that's about it. I'll try to report back next week on how the game went...

Further Thoughts on Black Crusade

Since my previous post, I've made some very significant progress with "Black Crusade". It turned out that a lot of the issues I was seeing were down to creating five Space Marine characters in sequence. These characters do indeed have a huge array of fixed powers and gear, and so end up quite homogenous. However, as soon as I moved on to the human characters, things became a great deal more flexible. So that's good.

In the end, I decided to stick with the 'official' character sheets, mostly because I don't currently have time to do a revised version. However, if I am ever going to run the game again, especially for more than a one-shot, a better character sheet will be a must. In the meantime, I have done a 'cheat sheet' for each character, detailing all the relevant terms from the character sheet.

The rest of the prep for the game is reasonably well in hand. However, I'm a little disconcerted at the scarcity of opponents in the book. I suspect part of this is that the game may be intended for use in concert with the other games in the universe, but I don't think this should be assumed. Certainly, I'm inclined to think that Fantasy Flight really need to put out a "Monster Manual" for this game pretty urgently.

(They've also made the key error of providing the antagonists with a long list of skills, talents, and traits, without explaining what these are. As WotC discovered about a decade ago, this saves a little space at the cost of a huge amount of utility. Everything the GM needs to use a given monster really should be included directly in the stat-block - even if that means cutting down on the number of individual monsters. Tsk tsk.)

The upshot of all of this is that I'm reasonably confident that the game will be ready for Saturday, and I'm reasonably happy that it will go well (at my end, anyway). However, I think I'm extremely unlikely ever to run this game again - the atmosphere is great, but the weaknesses inherent in the game engine, coupled with the lack of any clear idea what the PCs should actually do, leave me with little incentive to go back.

A shame. I was really looking forward to this game back before I actually saw it.

Frustrated by "Black Crusade"

Oddly, I was sure I had posted something about this game on my other blog, but looking through the archive, I can't seem to find it...

Back when "Black Crusade" was first announced, I was delighted. Despite never having been a huge fan of "Warhammer 40,000", and having largely skipped the first three RPGs in the line, I found there was something about the concept of this book that really grabbed my attention. The notion of a game where the PCs were followers (willing or otherwise) of the Ruinous Powers, carefully trying to balance their Infamy and Corruption as they did mighty deeds... it was just intriguing. (And besides, it's not really as simple as playing the "bad guys" - the WH40k universe doesn't have any good guys at all. The closest equivalent, the Imperium, is a flat-out tyranny.)

Unfortunately, although the book was extremely well presented, I was left with an overwhelming sense of disappointment. The big question I was left with was, "Now what?" - I couldn't see any clear way to structure a campaign that wouldn't just collapse almost immediately, and I felt (and still feel) that one-shots run the real risk of falling into the same trap as Sabbat chronicles in "Vampire" - the players don't care, so they just run amok. (That's about to be tested...) Plus, it didn't help that the game, despite being built on a fairly rules-light engine, is incredibly detailed and heavy in key places, which mean that it isn't ideal for one-shot use.

Still, I persevere. While reading the book, I had come up with a concept for what I figured should be a fairly strong one-shot game, which would be a good test of the system in practice (as opposed to mere theory). And, with the passage of almost a year since I finished reading the book, it is now coming to time to run the game.

My first step in preparing for a one-shot game, once I've got the basic premise worked out, is to generate the PCs that will be used. There are three reasons for this:

1. The PCs are the one and only thing that I can't fudge. If I run out of time to generate villain stats, encounter layouts, and the like, I can either wing it or run the game out of the book. I generally prefer not to do this, but I can if necessary. But if I don't have characters to give out, that's game over.
2. When developing a one-shot, I like to have the design of the PCs to be influenced by the concept of the adventure, but not the specifics, while I prefer to have the specifics of the adventure influenced by the specifics of the PCs - that way, I can check that at least one PC can actually jump before inserting a jumping challenge, and when creating the characters I don't have to make sure to remember to give one of them the ability to jump.
3. Creating PCs is generally a really good way to revise the system, which can only help when developing the adventure.

But creating the PCs for the "Black Crusade" one-shot is proving to be something of an ordeal. Partly, this is certainly down to just not being able to block off some time to do the job. Partly, it's because I want to create two characters per player (to give a choice between Space Marine and Heretic characters). Partly it's because the character sheet for the game is just crap.

But to a very large extent, it's down to the system itself. Specifically:

• Characters can be members of two 'races' - Space Marines or Heretics (humans). That shouldn't be a problem, until you look at all the 'stuff' that gets tied to race. Space Marines start play with about a dozen fixed skills, a half-dozen fixed traits, and some fixed equipment. Humans start with considerably less, although they gain additional development points later in the process. The upshot of this is that the choice of race is the single most important decision in character building. It also means that all Space Marine characters are incredibly homogenous - there is almost no scope for customising such characters.
• The game is awash with specialised terms, with are referenced by name but not description. So, your character may well have the "Medicae" skill. Good for you. Any idea what that actually does, specifically? What about "Bulging Biceps"? That was probably the single greatest weakness of "Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay" in its second edition, and it's worse here. It's a real pain when trying to evaluate character development choices, especially when everything has different costs, and three-quarters of the options aren't available anyway as they have prerequisites that need met. Grr.
• Characters just start off with too much stuff. The aforementioned Space Marines have about a dozen skills to worry about and half a dozen traits. That's a good eighteen things that the player will need to get a handle on before starting play - they'll either need described on the character sheet, or we'll need to spend a lot of time passing around the book. And, worse, most of that stuff will just never come up in play.
• Characters also start off just too damn powerful. Apparently, a starting "Black Crusade" character is roughly the equivalent of a 7,000XP character in the compatible "Dark Heresy" game, which is the equivalent of some 70 advancements from the baseline. There's not really anywhere to go from there. But that's not what really bothers me - characters also start with pretty much the best gear available in the setting. Now, I don't have any particular problem with powerful characters. That's not the issue. But, powerful or not, don't start them at the top of the power-level in the game - that just leaves you nowhere to go!

So, what am I going to do?

My current plan is to steal an idea from the "Broken Chains" one-shot adventure that Fantasy Flight produced to introduce the game, and boil the characters down to essentials. Rather than a two-page useless monstrosity of a character sheet, I'm planning to whip up a single-page digest featuring just the key elements - the attributes, a subset of the skills (omitting the pointless dross from the full version), the key traits (with descriptions), and the like. I'm also going to get rid of much of the fixed package for the Space Marines, in favour of giving a bit more character differentiation. And I'm going to ease off on the equipment package - bluntly, I want there to be an actual chance that characters could run out of ammo in the course of the game.

My hope is that that will allow me to get the characters together a bit more quickly, will omit much of the pointless dross I've been trying to deal with, and will give something that's actually playable. Of course, if we should ever come to play this game in 'campaign mode', then I'll revert to using the standard package of stuff. But even that will be fine, because with more time to play the game, it's more likely that things will actually come into play.

So that's why the dice hate me...

Here's a fascinating article for you, about the distribution of results on d20s from different manufacturers. Turns out that those d20s really are not as accurate as they pretend...

It's nice when that happens...

Good game last night. Plenty of combat, plenty of exploration. Not too much by way of interaction, but that's coming. Besides, we had an interaction-heavy session a couple of games ago, so that's fine.

But probably my favourite moment of the session was one of those tiny throwaway moments...

The party had defeated a monstrous aquatic ooze, and searched its lair for treasure. Not much was left, except for a light wooden shield that was obviously magical (since everything else had been destroyed by the ooze's acid touch). Unfortunately, the party Artificer botched his roll to identify the item.

At this point, Brindy decided to try his luck with Knowlegde (history). Which shouldn't really work, but he proceeded to roll very well. And he did put all those ranks into that skill...

And so, the shield became something the character had actually seen before - in fact, she recognised it as being standard issue for the Aundair Light Magical Cavalry, one of that nation's specialised units in the Last War.

This caused a little confusion around the table for a moment or two: the party were investigating an ancient Giant tower that had lain undisturbed for millennia - it vastly predated the Last War, Aundair, or even the use of cavalry as a concept.

At which point, Justin pointed out that one of the party's goals in the campaign was to find out what happened to "that other expedition" that came this way. And this shield, therefore, was clear evidence - they came this way!

It's always nice when that happens - it verifies that the campaign actually makes some sort of sense, that there's a bit more to the story than "just a bunch of stuff that happens" (or, worse, "we fought this, and then that, and then the next thing..."). And, of course, it demonstrates that the players are paying attention and are actually invested in the game.

(Not that I doubted any of that. Still, it's nice to see the evidence work itself out.)

DM's Trick - Instant Dungeon

Okay, this one comes from the Fighting Fantasist's blog. It's not a technique I recommend for general use (as it gives too many rooms with only one or two entrances, where I think the default should be three or more), but when pressed for time, it's pretty useful.

You'll need:

• 4d6
• 4d8
• One sheet of paper
• One pencil
• The lid of the Red Box (technically, any box will do, but that's the best one, for obvious reasons!)

And the method:

1. Place the sheet of paper in the box lid.
2. Place the dice on the sheet.
3. Rattle it around a bit. No, a bit more than that.
4. Draw a circle around each die. These are your rooms, complete with relative placement.
5. Now, draw entrances to your rooms. How many? Well, read the d6s as d3s, and your d8s as d4s, to get between 1 and 4 entrances for each room.
6. Now do your best to connect up the rooms in some sensible manner.
7. That's the basic layout of the dungeon. Now go pretty it up, adding some secret doors were appropriate, or otherwise sorting it out.

As I said, I don't recommend it for general use, nor for populating dungeons larger than about 8 rooms or so, but it's useful in a pinch.