The High Cost of Magic in Shadowrun

Magic.  One of the things that sets Shadowrun apart from other Cyberpunk settings in a jarring, significant way.  In First Edition, magic is frighteningly powerful- able to drop a charging Troll in a single, well-cast spell.  Things missing from later editions are equally terrifying- like the ability to petrify a living being into a lump of calcified tissue, or simply turn them to goo.

When you're not goo-ing someone or hitting them with mana bolts, you might summon a spirit or elemental to do your bidding.  Ply the Astral spying on a mark, or or throw your Magic Pool into spell defense to save your team's collective hoops.  There's a LOT of mojo that can be thrown around by a Mage or Shaman with a mind to do so.  But what is the cost of doing so?  What must a chummer trade in order to wield such immense power?

A lot, it turns out.  A whole fragging lot.

Using Grimoire with Shadowrun First Edition gives you the option to be a full-on Mage or Shaman, or an Adept.  Adepts are "aspected" magic users, only able to harness magic in specific ways.  We're going to talk about adepts later, for the purposes of this article we're discussing full mages.  There are several types of Adepts, thus covering them separately.  Casters able to command the full repertoire of magical hoodoo fall into two broad categories- Hermetic Mages and Shaman.

The Mage/Shaman dichotomy was one of the wonderful things about Shadowrun in the early days.  In most popular RPGs during this time, there were things like specialty mages (Illusionists etc.) here and there, but I don't recall anything as thematic as Mage/Shaman until years later.  One could argue that AD&D Druids are sort of in this vein, especially since they had their own rules for picking holly etc. or one might argue the old Divine/Arcane split between Clerics and Mages is the same thing, but bear with me, here, I'm working from how all of this hit my 15-year-old gamer sensibilities at the time.  I think maybe it was the heavy influence of Native American tropes that really weren't seen anywhere else, at least not in our game group's experience.

So, full casters of both flavors can do an awful lot, so much, in fact, that in my 30 years of playing Shadowrun I've only rarely run across players who actively use all of those abilities.  I've seen a lot of players and GMs ignore the Astral completely, for many of the same reasons they skip or handwave the Matrix rules.  It can be complicated, and it takes the caster to a realm the rest of the party cannot access, forcing a pizza break for everyone who isn't Awakened.  The basic abilities wielded by these characters are Sorcery, Conjuring and Astral stuff.

Sorcery is the ability to fling spells.  Spells can be cast on the fly, or as rituals.  There are many spells to choose from, from illusion and detection to manipulation to elemental to combat.  Unlike most RPGs, there are no spell slots or spell points, in Shadowrun if you're careful, and your dice love you, you can cast infinite numbers of spells- until you push too far, or your dice luck runs out.  This is the ability far and away most used by PC casters to do dirty deeds.  And it's ridiculously effective- here's why.

In Shadowrun First Edition, the Sorcery skill is important in two basic ways.  First, it determines the number of dice in the character's Magic Pool.  This is a pool of dice that can be used to agument the spell, help offset Drain, or be allocated to defend allies.  The higher the skill, the more of these dice you have to throw around.  Second, the Sorcery skill becomes the target number for the poor slots you're working your mojo on.  The higher the skill, the harder it is to resist the spell regardless of the Force of the spell the mage is casting.

Force, you see, is the umph behind the spell, and sets the number of dice the spell will roll against the target.  In SR2 and later, the Force becomes part of the ability of the target to resist the spell- but in Shadowrun First Edition... the more skilled the caster, the harder it is to resist the spell, regardless of Force.  So, in SR1, pumping up ones Sorcery skill both raises the target number folks need to "save vs." your spells, AND increases the Magic Pool you an use to stick it to 'em, regardless of spell Force.  Sure, there's some give and take here- but overall it makes life extremely difficult for your victims.

Conjuring is the ability to summon spirits to come to your aid.  Mages tend to conjure Elementals, and they tend to be done by ritual, and hang about until they have performed a specified number of tasks.  Shaman can summon nature spirits on the fly, but they also tend to take off at the next Sunrise or Sunset.  Elementals once summoned and bound hang around in the Astral until called, and generally can be called for one service per success on the summoning roll.  So, Shaman can call nature spirits on the spot, Elementals are a mage thing, and require an hours-long ritual. Mages and shaman can also banish or control spirits.

That brings us to Astral stuff.  Perception, the ability to see into the Astral plane and assense things, like auras, magical items, Ritual sorcery underway, etc.  It's a powerful ability that allows for a lot of intelligence gathering and forewarning.  Add to that the ability to Astrally Project- leaving the body and projecting a being of pure magical spirit into Astral space.  Magicians can travel Astrally at thousands of kilometers per hour.  Engage in Astral combat against other magicians, spells themselves, Awakened creatures... And in Astral space, a character's physical attributes, if they can be called that, are based on the magician's mental attributes.  So the weak, sickly wizard can become a powerhouse in Astral space.

So... phenomenal cosmic power.  Sling spells, conjure spirits, travel the realm of spirit and magic itself.  Your spells that injure through pure magic ignore 95% of the armor options out there.  Your spells that attack Willpower can drop trolls in their tracks (maximum Willpower 5) and your Magic Pool can help defend your team while they geek the enemy casters.  What, pray tell, is this cost we said was to be paid earlier?

Shadowrun uses a system of priorities to create characters.  There are five items players prioritize by assigning the numbers 0-4 using each number once.  Those items are Magic, Attributes, Skills, Tech and Race.  The higher the number assigned, the more of that resource is available to create a character.

To be a full magician, not one of those adepts we'll look at in another article, one must put Priority 4 into Magic.  Period.  And that's if the character being created is human.  Metahuman magicians must put 4 in Race, and 3 in Magic to qualify.  This requirement is pretty harsh, because your next choices become extremely difficult to make once these initial numbers have been placed.

Attributes are important to a caster- Willpower is key to resisting Drain, and Charisma is extremely important for conjuring.  Reaction, which determines initiative, is calculated from Intelligence and Quickness.  Cybered up Street Samurai are going to be trying to kill you, and they are going to move very, very fast.  Reaction needs to be as good as you can make it, or they'll geek you before you can toss your first manabolt.  Intelligence also determines Astral Pool dice.  Oh, and Intelligence, Willpower and Charisma are also used to determine how your Astral self performs.  Strength and Body?  Well, those aren't that important until you need Body to resist incoming damage.

Skills are vital- Sorcery, Conjuring and Magical Theory are all a must to be a working magician.  If you're using Grimoire, Enchanting is a thing.  Do you want to be able to wield a mageblade?  You're going to need Armed Combat.  Etiquette comes in useful, as does Negotiation.  Can you ride a bike, or drive a car?  Necessary skills add up very quickly, and you're going to want your magical ones to start as competently as possible.

Tech- we can skimp on that one, right?  No need for tech when you're a mage or Shaman.  Except there is.  Next to each entry in Tech is a slash, followed by a number.  This is the number of Force points your mage begins the game with.  Divide these up between all the spells you want to know, and that's your entry-level spellbook.  Plus, fetishes, spell focus items, and your Medicine Lodge or Hermetic library will be expensive.

So, let's look at creating a Human caster.  Priority 4 is gone right away, and we can toss 0 to Race to get it out of the way.  Now comes an interesting debate.  We can throw 3 into Attributes, giving us 24 points to spend.  This can result in, if you're min-maxing, a 6 in each mental attribute, and a 2 in each physical.  But that would lower Reaction, and mean only two dice to help resist incoming damage.  One could go for even 4s across the board.  That's not too bad.  But to put that 3 into Attributes means it's not going into Skills or Tech.  It would buy us 30 points of Skills.  This means the character could max out (6) Sorcery, Conjuring and Magical Theory and still have 12 points left over for other things.  Not a bad choice.  But a Tech of 3 gives the character 400,000 nuyen to spend AND a whopping 50 Force points.  That's 8 spells at Force 6 plus one more oddball at Force 2.  Quite a portfolio. But only one of these choices can be made.

The 2 must be next, and in Attributes that buys the magician 20 points.  Now things are getting dire.  Human average is 3 in Shadowrun, which means the Attributes could go 3 across the board, with enough points left to bump one up to 5, or two up to 4.  Not terrible, but also not a standout, and as noted above, casters need serious mental mojo to make the best of everything a caster can do in Shadowrun.  So maybe we want to put the 3 in Attributes, and give the 2 to Tech or Skills.  24 points in Skills is pretty decent- you can still max out the three Magic skills and have 6 points left over for incidentals.  But that doesn't leave the character with a lot they can do *but* magic stuff.  Tech would score the mage 20,000 nuyen and 20 Force points.  So, take a look at that drop again.  From 400,000 nuyen to 20,000, and from 50 Force points to 20.  Now things are starting to look a bit harder for the player.  Less than half the spells of the previous level.  Ouch.  And 1/20 the cash to spend.  Maybe we can make it on 20 Force points to begin with, and 20,000 is enough for starting magical equipment and a few months (very) modest living paid up front.  Forget that mageblade, though.

Priority 1 offers 17 Attribute points- ugh.  At this level your new magician has less than average Attributes overall.  And trying to put significant points into any one will slight the other five something terrible.  Skills?  20 points, not as bad, but at this point the Magic skills might have to take a hit to provide a few precious points for other skills.  Tech?  1,000 nuyen and 10 Force points.  Barely enough for some modest starting gear, and a pair of Force 5 spells.

Good thing we don't have to look at Priority 0.  Except we do - what if we wanted to make a Metahuman caster?  That means 4 and 3 are taken, and 0 can't be tossed away on Race.  It also means all those juicy rewards for Priority 3 are locked up in making our character magically active, so we start with the rather less impressive choices of 2 and go down from there.

Priority 0.  Attributes- 15 points.  Three 3s and three 2s?  Or mix some 1s in there and pray for the dice to roll well?  This character is now significantly below average.  Elves get an extra 3 points in the form of +1 to Quicknes and +2 to Charisma, Dwarves get +1 Body, +2 Strength, +1 Willpower and -1 Quickness for a net gain of 3 points.  Orks... well, they get +3 Body, +2 Strength, -1 Charisma and -1 Intelligence which is going to hurt them as casters, and is a net bonus of +3. Trolls.  Trolls get +5 Body, -1 Quickness, +4 Strength, -2 Charisma, -2 Intelligence, -1 Willpower.  Net bonus is +3, but OUCH.  Just to get a 1 in all the Mental attributes a Troll would have to spend 8 points.  More than half of the 15 possible at this level.

Skills at Priority 0 are 17 points, not enough to be great at all three Magical skills.  So maybe short Magical Theory and survive long enough to learn it, you won't be creating any spells this soon anyway, right, chummer?  Tech is 100 nuyen, and 5 Force points.  Ummm... yeah.  That's one good spell, or a couple crappy ones.  And forget buying any significant gear.

So, magically active characters have to give up their top one or two priorities in order to be magically active.  Meanwhile, other types of characters can score a cool million nuyen for cyberware and gear and vehicles.  Or maybe 30 Attribute points, enough to go straight 5s, or 6s in all mental Attributes and 4s in all Physical.  Damn, that would be great for a Mage or shaman.  Or maybe they have 40 points of Skill.

But the cost doesn't end there.

Magical characters can have ZERO cyberware without losing some of their precious magic.  None.  ANY cyber reduces their Essence, even 0.01 points, and Magic falls a full point.  Now, the bright side is you can now pack on cyber until you hit a full point of Essence without further immediate loss, but go a tad over that an BOOM.  Another point of Magic gone.

No problem, I can cast as long as I have one point of Magic left, right?  Well, there's the rub.  Cast a spell with a Force higher than your Magic attribute (which starts at 6 if you have one at all) and the Drain isn't just a tired, fatigued feeling.  The Drain is physical damage.  Blood vessels burst, heart flutters, muscle spasms... death.

OK, so, I skip on Cyber.  I'm OK, right?

Maybe.

Another cost of being a mage or shaman is that medics have a very hard time treating you due to your magical nature.  They have a penalty to heal you, because they can't make use of their most technologically advanced curative measures.  If they do, you see, they can cause you to lose points of Magic.  They can choose to ignore the penalty, but then it's time to check for Magic loss.  So you're on your way to burnout and it's not even your fault.

OK, I can deal with all of that.  I still want to be a mage or shaman. Sign me up.

The cost just keeps going, omae.  You see, if you want to become more powerful, you have to take all that delicious Karma your friends are using to boost their Attributes, learn new skills, and spend on saving their butts, and you have to sink it into magic crap.  Lots and lots of magic crap.

Bonding magical items, for one.  Want to increase the maximum Force of a spell you know?  Great.  You learn it all over again, at full Karma cost.  It doesn't matter that you already knew a lesser Force version.  You're paying full cost for the new one.

Oh, you want to become an Initiate, like in Grimoire, and be part of a Magical society and raise your Magic attribute and learn how to use shiny new Magical skills?  Pay up for Initiation, chummer.  And it ain't cheap.  All those wonderful Karma points you could be spending all over the place... all going to Magic.

Magic has a very, very high cost in Shadowrun, both to become a full spellcaster to begin with, and to maintain your edge and improve your magical repertoire.  Is it worth it?  That's up to you.  See you in the Shadows.

Running in The Shadows

"Listen to the wind blow, down comes the night

Running in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies
Break the silence, damn the dark, damn the light" - Fleetwood Mac, The Chain

 I have a feeling that if I can stick to my resolution to get back to blogging, I'm going to blog a lot about Shadowrun.  Specifically, Shadowrun as I love to play it- which means 20 minutes into the future of 1987.  I've loved the Cyberpunk genre ever since I was exposed to it as a kid by Bladerunner, Max Headroom, Neuromancer and the original Cyberpunk (2013) boxed set released in '87.  To me, Cyberpunk sounds like 80s synthpop and looks like a Syd Mead painting.  To me, the Shadowrun logo will always be as it appears above- much like the D&D ampersand will forevermore be the one used in the 80s, most conspicuously on the AD&D orange spine hardcovers and the BECMI sets.  I realize this is a function of my age, and our tendency to love things the way we were introduced to them.  I fully admit to my grognard ways and being stuck in the 80s.  I will neither deny nor be ashamed of my psyche's nostalgia for a simpler time, before I was saddled with the burdens of adulthood and awareness of the much wider world around me.  So, sufficient to say, my Shadowrun is informed in great part by these predilections.

  Shadowrun and I met in 1989 when, a couple of months after publication, I had occasion to flip through the book in JROTC and pronounce it silly.  I mean, ELVES in Cyberpunk?  What the hell was this crap?  I was a proud owner of the R. Talsorian Cyberpunk boxed set, and it was serious, edgy, style-over-substance PUNK.  Hell, you could even use Roadstriker II to do Bubblegum Crisis style Mecha Cyberpunk.  The VHS of the first couple of episodes of BGC were making their way around, and holy HELL was that cool.  Mecha and Cyberpunk?  Awesome.  Magic and Cyberpunk?  Kinda stupid, right?

  Well, my classmate Eric must have felt the same way.  Sometime later, after Seattle Sourcebook, Grimoire and Street Samurai Catalog came out, he had them all- and wanted to sell them.  I bought the lot from him for $25 in Theater class and proceeded to give them a solid read.  I was wrong.  Very, very wrong.  The mixture of magic and machine was seriously wiz, chummer.  Shadowrun, just like Cyberpunk before it, has its own selection of future street slang, wakarimasu-ka? Oh, yeah, the Japanese language sprinkles both games because Japan was going to take over the economic world back in the 80s.  And the Japanese megacorps?  Bad news, Omae.

  So, I had been bitten by the Cyber Fantasy bug.  And by that, I don't mean the ones in Missing Blood.  Those still scare me.  To this day.  But Shadowrun was where it's at.  Or where it was.  Or is where it will be.  Or something.  I had fallen in love with Shadowrun.

  We swapped our Cyberpunk 2013 campaign to Shadowrun, and away we went.  We immersed ourselves in the shadows of Seattle, and several things endeared me deeply to the books.  The artwork was very, very evocative of the world.  Jeff Laubenstein's art coupled with Bradstreet, Steve Venters' cover for the Street Samurai Catalog, the iconic Elmore cover of the corebook, and all the wonderful interior art by so many other contributors.  The Shadowtalk, too, was a thing of beauty.  In-universe characters making commentary on the sourcebook material giving you their opinions, advice, and sometimes just making fun of each other.

 

   So, in the Street Samurai Catalog, the Shadowtalk had various people commenting on the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the many pieces of equipment in the book.  In the Seattle Sourcebook, posters commented on the veracity of the travel guide and issued warnings and advice to people who were new to the Seattle sprawl.  It really gave an impression that Shadowrun was a living, breathing world.

  Shadowrun also had an undercurrent of empowerment for the Native American peoples, which has perhaps not aged in the best way.  Personally, I choose to see it as respectfully done, perhaps with not as much research and cultural sensitivity as we'd show today.  I really can't weigh in, though, since my Natchitoches blood is 1/8, my grandfather never really spoke about that part of our heritage, and I'm only now starting to research it since I didn't even know our tribe until a few years ago.  But as far as someone who presents and was raised in more or less vanilla culture can say, I think the intention of the authors was to give Native American their due and make their culture something REALLY COOL to play.  And to me, that's inviting players to research more, to read more, and to find out more about the cultures their characters belong to.  I've always thought RPGs were a great way to inspire people to want to know more- I certainly started reading voraciously to support my RPG habits - but the mileage of each reader might vary.  The Native American culture is presented in a shallow manner in the corebook- but it got expanded quite a bit with the Native American Nations books.

  I mention all this because I really liked the inclusion of Native Americans as a real, powerful faction in Shadowrun.  I always felt, even with the watered down lessons we got in public school, that the Native American peoples deserved so much better than what they received throughout history.  This storyline allowed for some payback - heavy handed and culturally insensitive though it may have been, teenage me thought the Ghost Dance would have been an awesome thing to behold, or take part in.  I kinda miss the influence in the newer Shadowrun products.

  Shaman and Mages were cool.  Orks and Trolls and Elves and Dwarves were cool.  You could form a band and have a Sasquatch wailing to your left and a cyberjacked synth player on your right.  You could fight The Man, or just take his dirty jobs and do them dirt cheap.  It was all the chrome and style of Cyberpunk with your favorite D&D tropes tossed in, and it was bitchin'.

  Magic in the Shadowrun world was a definite departure from what I'd been used to.  No spell slots, spell points, etc.  Play smart, and the dice don't betray you, and you can cast spells ALL DAY LONG.  And if you're looking to do damage to your enemies, combat spells ignore armor.  THEY IGNORE ARMOR.  And Mana spells attack Willpower.  That Corporate troll guard in the techno-plate?  He's got a maximum willpower of 4.  Nighty night!  Spell defense?  Your mage or shaman can allocate spell defense dice to the entire party to protect them from attacking magical effects.  Mages could summon elementals, shaman could summon spirits.  The difference between the Hermetic mage and the spiritual shaman put so much flavor into the game world.  Do you have a library or a medicine lodge?  Is magic a science, a force to be harnessed through formulae and study, or is it Nature and spirits and totems responding to those who know how to speak to them?

  On the opposite side of magic, there was The Matrix, and not the damn Keanu films.  The worldwide computer network accessible by computers and, specifically, cyberdecks.  A Decker could jack into their skull and run the Matrix virtually, taking control of equipment connected to the network, unlocking doors, jamming elevators, stealing data... that is, if the Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics (ICE) doesn't fry their deck or their brain first.  Deckers are awesome, but be warned- when the decker starts a Matrix run, the other players might get a bit bored.  It takes a good Shadowrun GM with a handle on how to cut scenes to make sure the decker doesn't bring the game to a screeching halt.  But it can be done.  

  Deckers are cousins to Riggers, who jack into vehicles.  The ultimate getaway drivers.  They become the van, car, armored vector-thrust tank, whatever.  They can also pilot drones of every description.

  And the best part (to me) about all of these different types of character, not forgetting things like Street Samurai, Rockers, etc.?  Players can get deep into the weeds of supporting their preferred schtick.  Grimoire has rules for creating new spells and enchanting items.  Virtual Realities has rules for cyberdeck and program construction.  Rigger Black Book has more vehicles, drones and options than you can shake a stick at.  Shadowbeat covers media, music, sports.  There are so many opportunities for characters to get invested in their gear, spells, lifestyle, allies, contacts, everything.  My girlfriend at the time came to our Shadowrun game dressed as her decker, complete with a keyboard on a guitar strap standing in for her deck. (Hi, Amy!)  BTW- my 31 year old Shadowrun corebook still has her apartment in Seattle marked on the map, along with other players' safehouses and hangouts.

  I love Shadowrun so much, I have created cheat sheets and placemat-sized character sheets for the archetypes so that I can run the game at conventions, and this year will be my fifth year running Shadowrun 1e at North Texas RPG Con in June.  To be fair, we only played first edition for two years, adopting Second Edition when it came out in 1992, and we played with that FOR YEARS.  So, my actual time playing 1e was short, but formative.  North Texas RPG Con bills itself as an "old school" con, so I made sure to go back as far as I could to support that.  In doing so I rekindled my love of 1e, reminded me of all the wonderful games we played in those first years of Shadowrun, and made me fall in love again, warts and all, with the clunky but endearing 1e game system.

  So, I love Shadowrun.  And I hope I'll be doing a lot more writing about it this year.  I hope you'll read along, and find it at least somewhat interesting.

Wilford Brimley Overdrive

 

So... I was right in the middle of 30 days of stuff when I just stopped posting.  I know this probably disappointed both of you who read this blog, and I'm sorry.  Here's what happened.

My lovely wife was suffering from what turned out to be a stomach ulcer.  But it took Medical Science!!! weeks to determine it was an ulcer, and not - as they tested for three times - gall bladder issues.  So after a sonogram, and a CT scan, and something like a "hepascan" her gall bladder kept on being infuriatingly functional.  She ended up seeing our practice's PA, as the doc was out on a particularly bad pain day, and this amazing PA spent 45 minutes with us and determined it was probably an ulcer.  Prescribed a badass antacid, and BOOM.  A scope later confirmed it.  So- she'd been in a lot of pain, missed a lot of work, and on the days she did work crashed almost immediately upon getting home.  I got used to feeding her dinner in the bedroom, juggling the kids homework and reading myself, and cancelling my attempt at a Thursday night campaign.  An boy, was I tired.

As my wife started to recover, I didn't.  I was dizzy a lot.  Falling asleep at my desk.  I kept cleaning my glasses because my vision would be frustratingly blurry.  I was going through two 64-oz iced teas a day at work.  Ravenously hungry all the time.  Regular afternoon headaches.  I kept telling myself I was just tired, fatigued from taking care of Mary and the balancing act that required.  I couldn't rub two brain cells together- it's been AGES since I've written, or done any serious reading, or even leisure reading.  I couldn't concentrate.

So I went to the doc for routine bloodwork to check my T levels and was surprised to find out - you might have guessed it - DIABEETUS.

My blood sugar and A1c were ASTRONOMICALLY bad.  Like, make peace with losing limbs, going blind, heart attack and stroke bad.  And somehow, with me getting bloodwork every six months for years, this snuck up on us.  Ugh.

The best part- this appointment was two days before we set sail on our cruise.  JUST the news you want to hear before you embark on an eight day tour of the Eastern Caribbean.  Oh, the conch fritters I didn't eat.  Oh, the Miami Vices I didn't drink.  But - low carbing, as my doctor told me to, was ridiculously easy on the trip.  Cruise ship steak for the win!

Why am I spilling all this- well, to get it out of my system for one.   Also, to point out that I'm not sure how long this has been going on.  My ability to concentrate degraded a long time ago.  Headaches have been going on for over a year.  Some of the other symptoms, too.  I've been so frustrated that I've been unable to finish any projects, much less any leisure reading.  I had sort of fallen into this existence that was chore to chore with a sort of low-cognition rest state in the middle.  Get up, take the kids to school, go to work, try to accomplish something and usually fail, pick up the kids, cook dinner, do reading and homework, try to go to sleep and usually fail until after midnight... lather, rinse, repeat.

I wasn't writing, blogging, reading, my creativity was nil.  I'd have good days, and I'd have fall asleep wherever I'm sitting days.

I am currently on the mend, though.  Medication, exercise, and diet have done wonders over the last seven weeks.  My head is clearer, my headaches almost nonexistent, I managed to lose a pound over the holidays and a cruise, and I'm aiming to lose a LOT more, and faster, now that I've dialed the diet in.


People tell you if you don't take care of yourself, you can't take care of others.  I ignored what I had no idea were symptoms for ages.  I really thought I was just really fatigued.  I was working in such a discombobulated mental state I didn't realize it was more serious than this.  Back in 2013 I was shocked to get a phone call from my boss that my office mate from 2010-2012 had suddenly passed away.  He had Type 2 diabetes, and wasn't tending to it.  He ate what he wanted to eat, and did what he wanted to do, and didn't take medication, and he died.  So, while diabetes is a manageable disease- it's nothing to screw around with.  And here I'd gone and developed diabetes and had no idea how long I'd had it.  If this hadn't been caught- I shudder to think.

Anyway,  lots of stuff to think about.  But since starting to come out of the effects of the illness, at least mentally, I'm starting to get my creative juices flowing again.  I'm reading again, and writing again. 

I'm a mess.  I suffer from anxiety and depression.  I'm medicated for blood pressure.  Now I'm on one med for diabetes that doesn't bother me, and one that makes me nauseous and dizzy.  Love it when the medicine is as bad as the illness, yeah?  But I'm WRITING again.  Maybe, just maybe, I can finish a project and get it out to the world.

Let's find out together.

RPGaDay Day Five: Space

Space. The Final Frontier.  But I've talked at length about the Star Trek RPG(s) in other posts.  The first Space RPG is often said to be Jim Ward's Metamorphosis Alpha, and Traveller followed not long after.  Perhaps space and sci-fi are the second most popular game genres, but I'd have to do some research to confirm that.  

The first thing that pops into my head when I see the prompt for this post is "Space" at the moment is Traveller.  It's an old favorite of mine.  And I came into it in the best possible way- a gift from an adult gamer to a kid.  When my mom's coworkers found out I was into tabletop, books started coming home with her as the more mature gamers fed my hunger for more games.  Traveller appeared in the small box containing the Little Black Books- and tons of supplements.  Traveller blew me away.  What do you mean there are no classes and levels?  What do you mean your PC starts with real world experience, not some fresh-faced 18-year-old?  And you can DIE before character gen is over? 

I was immediately taken with this game.  I loved the Universal Personality Profile- how Traveller expresses the stats of a character in a six character string, with each stat expressed in hexadecimal.  7 is average, so if I was average in everything but, say, DEX, my UPP would be 7A7777, since the second digit is DEX.  You could sum up a character on an index card. The career system, rolling to see what your PC did for a living, for how long, were they successful?  What skills did they learn?  What monies or retirement benefits did they carry away with them?  You sort of had a mathematically-based life story when you were done.  Or you died.  And started over.

Traveller was mostly hard sci-fi.  Jump Drives allowed for limited FTL, rated by how many parsecs could be traveled in a week.  No FTL commo, everything moved at the speed of ships, meaning a sort of galactic pony express existed.  It was easy to lose onesself out in the black.  Many campaigns followed a group of veteran or retired military or paramilitary (Merchant Marines, Scouts) folks with a ship trying to make it running cargo or passengers.  It felt a LOT like Firefly would later feel.

The ship building system lost so many hours for me in Middle School and High School.  I remember watching Lost in Space on USA Network and trying to build Jupiter 2 as a Traveller vessel.  We played out Book 2 ship battles in my living room floor with measuring tapes and protractors.  It was a freaking blast.

The adventures were a lot of fun, too.  Tracking deadly creatures through a doomed lab ship.  Going to a prison world.  Discovering forgotten secrets of a dead civilization.  And the Imperium itself was mostly implied rather than expressly described in the early books- you had starting points, and fleshed things out in your own head.

 So... there are many Space RPGs. But in the case of this writing prompt, the first thing that came to my mind was Traveller. Check it out HERE.

 

New SWADE Blues

Savage Worlds.  I remember taking the first edition of the game for a spin years ago and loving it.  I've kept up with the line since then, enjoying one-offs here and there of the Fast! Furious! Fun! game in multiple genres.  So if I love the game so much, why title this blog post New SWADE Blues?  Well, one, the Elvis pun.  But two, and more importantly- the blues part comes from not having enough time to run about six campaigns using this game system. 

Savage Worlds is a system I've become increasingly fond of over the years because it fills that multi-genre system niche without being GURPSd or BRP or D20.  It handily runs just about any game, but without some of the things that hold other games back from running quickly or cleanly.  GURPS' 1-second turns, Palladium's three mile long skill list, things like that.  Savage Worlds has a short set of attributes and skills backed up by Edges that act as Feats do in D20-based games.  The system uses ratings beginning at d4 and running to d6, d8, d10, d12, d12+1 and so forth.  A d6 is average ability.  Dice "Ace"- sometimes referred to as "exploding" in other games. This means if the die rolls its maximum value, the die is re-rolled and the total added.  This continues as long as the maximum value continues to be rolled.  So a roll of a d8 might result in a 22 if the die comes up 8, 8 and 6.  Rolling 4 or more better than the target number is a "Raise" and represents great success.  And that's sort of it- the basics of the rules. 

Now, add Edges to do anything you might want to add.  Magic, weapon expertise, social skill, linguistic talent, you name it.  The Edges bolt on to the basic die conventions to create an extremely flexible, yet simple, construct.  There's no Hit Points, but would levels determined by rolling damage vs. Toughness, which is a function of an attribute modified by Edges or armor. 

Throw in Bennies, poker chips (or other counters) that allow a player to do a number of fun things to manipulate the game, and the concept of Wild Cards and Extras, and you're ready to rock.  Wild Cards are the important characters of the game- the players and non-players alike.  Extras are orcs, stormtroopers, cops and other background or run-of-the-mill characters.  Extras drop like flies, while Wild Cards are tough and more likely to excel. 

When I introduced SWADE to the Royal Dragoons at our gaming meeting, I asked what genre the players wanted to play.  I got "Fantasy", "Cyberpunk" and "Sci-Fi."  OK, then.  We jumped in and created characters- lo and behold, there was zero issue constructing characters to fit this Shadowrun-esque melting pot of genre.  Even the caster/cyberdeck jocky was a simple build.  We jumped into the game and had no problems with all the moving parts interacting in the game because the system was simple and consistent.  We had to reference things like spells once or twice (and had the help of the Power Cards included in the SWADE Essentials Box) but the game moved swiftly and without much delay.

I remember a halfling assassing parkour-ing off a fire escape to land on an Orc in a dark, wet alley between tenements while spells and guns flashed and fists and feet flew.  It was great to have the battle run so easily with so many separate elements freely mixed.  And it didn't take a truckload of dice to do it- I'm looking at YOU, Shadowrun 6e.

This test run was ruled an unmitigated success by the players, and I've had several requests to run SWADE again, as a one-off or ongoing campaign.  For a group that swears by its 5e and Star Wars D6, it's a pretty fun thing to find a new system people enjoy.  Bonus if it's a system that handles many disparate genres.  I can't wait to run it again- and I have about 20 ideas for campaigns I'd love to run.

SWADE is supported by several campaign settings, notably Savage RIFTS, the new Robotech Macross game, and Savage Worlds standards like The Last Parsec, East Texas University, Weird Wars and more.  Want Weird West?  Try Deadlands.  Space: 1889 for that steampunk itch.  Mix them, match them, SWADE makes it all possible and all good.

Yup, I've got the New SWADE Blues in that I don't have tons of free time to run about a half dozen SWADE games in the near future.

RPGaDay Day Four: Share

The word of the day for RPGaDay 2019's Day Four is "Share."

I often get asked why I collect multiple copies of a lot of games.  I have eight AD&D First Edition Player's Handbooks.  I have three copies of Robotech II: The Sentinels.  We recently had eight copies of TSR's Marvel Superheroes printed at LuLu, along with some B/X books and some copies of Star Wars REUP. 

Why?  Because sharing is part of the hobby.  Sharing our love of the games and the games themselves.  RPGs are at their best wit a group of players, though solo options do exist.  But more than that, I have a love of sharing the hobby itself.  Bringing new people into the RPG fold, showing them how the games are played and watching them figure it all out for the first time.  Some of my favorite moments in the 33 years a gamer have been teaching someone how to game for the first time.  I've been the first GM for more people than I can count, including some of my best friends, my wife, my kids, the list goes on.  Even total strangers- we go as a group to local events and set up game tables to teach tabletop, and let the participants walk away with Swords & Wizardry Light plus some dice and character cards.  The Royal Dragoon Guards gaming club spends our own money to give these things away for the love of the game.  We want more folks to jump into our hobby.  I know I feel that anyone could enjoy gaming, if they found the right genre of game and the right people to play with.

My multiple copies also become the seeds of further game libraries.  There are a few favorite books I rarely pass up at a used bookstore, even though I already own them.  I score them because it allows me to just hand copies of the core books to a new player and say "Keep them!"  When I found out I had a sister in 2014 at the age of 39, and that she was a teenage gamer, I created a shake-and-bake library of starter books to help her get her own collection started.  Some of my favorites, and games that were important to me in my youth.  Shadowrun and D&D were games whose current versions she already played.  Having extra copies around meant I could share with her the versions upon which I cut my teeth.  The photo below is my sister Carlie's initial seed collection culled from my own library.  This is why I hang onto extra copies of a lot of things- the ability to share.

RPGaDAY2019 Day Three: Engage

This one's easy.  What self-respecting Trek fan can avoid the immediate image of Patrick Stewart in the big chair when that word comes up.  I could talk about how to engage players, or how to engage as a Game Master, but instead I'm going to muse a bit about Trek RPGs.  So assume a standard orbit for a moment and let's talk about playing Star Trek.

Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game (FASA)

"FASA Trek" was my first Trek RPG, and one of the first RPGs I owned.  My Mammaw and Pappaw purchased it for me in 1986. Inside the box was the Cadet's Orientation Sourcebook, the Officer's Manual, and the Game Operations Manual.  I was immediately in love.  In the days before the internet, when all we had was novels and the Franz Josef Star Fleet Technical Manual, FASA Trek was a godsend for fans wanting more.  It used a percentile system, so the math was very straightforward.  The system itself was a little too wargame-like for Star Trek, with a system of maps and squares and Action Points that could have been much simpler, but that didn't bother us.  We had a blast with it.  The adventures written for it were generally amazing.  The sourcebooks were fountains of great background like the John M. Ford material on the Klingons that I still use in my own Trek games over the Biker Vikings from TNG onward.

The starship combat game that was compatible with this RPG was great, as well- to the point of having "consoles" for each player to move cardstock chits around to do their jobs.  Engineers balances power and allocated resources to the helm, weapons, sensors, etc.  The players at those stations then took that power and used it to perform their duties.  It was like the Artemis bridge simulator years before computers made that possible.  I *loved* this version of Star Trek.  It was pretty much all we had aside from novels, fanzines and Star Fleet Battles for my whole childhood.  We had to fill in the blanks, and these books helped us do that.  I love that I've become FB friends with some of the folks who worked on it, especially Blaine Lee Pardoe, who wrote one of my favorite adventure modules (The Strider Incident) *and* the TNG First Year Sourcebook which I mined for all sorts of ideas- like the Bridge Command Specialist.  That concept alone is a fun one to play with, and explains why Geordi, as a Lieutenant (j.g.) is left in command of Enterprise when Picard and Riker are down on Minos, rather than any of the more senior officers.  I only wish the promised Ground Forces Manual would have been published.

Prime Directive (Task Force Games/Amarillo Design Bureau)
 
This came out when I was in high school.  It's based on the Star Fleet Universe, a setting created when Task Force Games sub-licensed Trek from Franz Josef, the publishers of the original Star Fleet Technical Manual.  Think of it as Trek if Trek had been written by Tom Clancy.  It's a much more bellicose and martial take on Trek, and there are some limitations to the license- nothing outside the Original Series and Animated Series, limited use of character names, etc.  So what you have is TOS Trek where the Cold War with the Klingons went hot, and became The General War.  There's even an Axis & Allies from Hell style game called Federation & Empire that allows you to play out this scenario.  Prime Directive exists in this version of Trek, and players are assumed to play members of a Prime Team- sort of Star Fleet SEALS, trained for "novel contact" missions, military missions, diplomatic missions, etc.  The idea is to have a team of highly trained personnel to handle dangerous or unusual situations aboard your ship so you're not constantly beaming down your top five senior officers and Ensign Ricky.  The system was interesting, if not entirely smooth, and I really liked the action-oriented Trek setting. 

Modiphius Star Trek
I'm really an old-school gamer, but I have to express a certain appreciation for the Modiphius 2d20 system and the Star Trek game that uses it.  It's got a lot of new-fangled game mechanics that futz with the dice- so it's not going to go over well with some of the hardcore Old School crowd, but it lends itself to some amazing storytelling.


I've not gotten to put it through nearly the paces it deserves, but it's been a lot of fun so far, and encourages player creativity in the interpretation of rules, spending of Momentum, etc.  I wanna see where this goes.

Starships & Spacemen 2nd Edition
OK, This one is a guilty pleasure.  It's an update by Goblinoid Games of an old title from the 70s that was Star Trek with the serial numbers filed off.  It really feels like Trek D&D.  Classes, levels, saving throws, all that.  You can even brorrow D&D monsters with a tiny bit of tinkering.  It has a whole resource management system for ship travel and combat, and a lot of other cool "almost Trek" elements.  I find it a lot of fun to play on its own merits.  I even printed the character sheets in uniform colors.

Other Trek Games
There are other Star Trek RPGs, to be sure.  GURPS Prime Directive, the Decipher Star Trek RPG, the Last Unicorn Games RPGs, and I'm sure there's one or two I'm forgetting.  But the ones I elaborated on are the ones I have spent the most time playing, and enjoyed for their Trek-goodness.  Why choose only one?  IDIC tells us that infinite diversity in infinite combination is a good thing.  LLAP, folks, grab a Trek RPG and ENGAGE!