Latest Mad Scramble for Shadows of Atlantis

  

I'm about to start Chapter 7, the penultimate scenario for Shadows of Atlantis. Preparing the chapters has become a bit of a chore, only made easier by the fact that I have access to the first edition version of the book that has the useful history extras and lots of extra maps that have been pretty essential for me as a GM. I think they've helped the players visualise this as well. So prep involves opening both sets of documents in Affinity Publisher and extracting images and text as needed to create handouts on Roll 20, the VTT I fell back to after the debacle of Role losing AV. 

Yes, I know that Role has AV back but I wasn't migrating all the material back across after four completed chapters.

I started reading the chapter for tomorrow's game and realised I'd not flow sheeted it (as it was optional so I missed it on the initial run through); that was no bother until I realised that some of the opening act didn' hang together, especially if you used the same team that you'd had in play from the start. Now, the characters in our campaign have been in play since early August 1939, and I was going to pick up the story early 1940 at Section M's headquarters. However, I realised that the loose-goosey way that the campaign (and Achtung! Cthulhu overall is written) means that there will be gaping holes if I just went ahead as things are.

I figured I'd check out the original version to see if I could fix this, which was when I discovered that the scenario was set in Peru originally and had just been translated across to a new country. It explains why there was even less information than previously expected. Oh, and there was a good chance that you could actually be playing the Nachtewolf (German Occultist) operators if you ran it as written. So no real hope there.

The fallback position was that I needed to get some alternative characters in play, which meant taking the ones for the NPCs already available, creating new sheets and getting some nice pictures. As I was rushed, I raided Artflow.ai again and just added the character descriptions into the engine. The results look really nice.

Ms Serena Falconer - Aviatrix & Socialite

Frank Ambrose, Antiquarian

Sgt Bertrand Ross, former French Foreign Legionnaire

Elizabeth Soames, Field Explorer

I'd never touch AI for anything professional, but this was so easy to use for producing character portraits for the game that we're playing. That was fortunate, because I didn't have the time to scan the net for old images that would fit.

Anyway, all the handouts are done and uploaded, the characters built, and we press on. Shadows of Atlantis may be badly organised and hard to use, but the adventure is fun!

I do think that there's a significant chance that the party could be killed on this mission, but then again, this is not the character set we've all been invested in for the last year or so.

25 Nov 2025

Lists, Lists and more Lists - Part 2

An equipment table with unique items highlighted

Following on from the previous post, I quite often skim equipment lists very quickly. The picture here shows why. It shows a table of firearms for Fading Suns (but this isn't about that game, this is just an exemplar I had to hand, plenty of others do this). Within the table, I have highlighted the items where the game mechanic related statistics vary. 

Across ninety-one data points (13x7) there are six numbers which are ever so slightly different. four of those relate ammo capacity and only one of those is a really significant change.

Yes, there are differences in the provenance (faction) of the weapons, and their names, and some slight variations in costs, but they really don't make much difference. There's a lot of effort here for very little benefit. I do wonder it it would have been better done with a base weapon and some tags for extra features that adjust cost, and some modifiers for price and quality based on faction.

I do know that there can be some pleasure in looking at weapons when the statistics make meaningful differences, but here they don't really. When they're all so close mechanically there's very little point in have a table to differentiate, especially if there's no flavour text that may call out the difference.

Then again, I'm not really a gun bunny any more, my days of getting excited over getting hold of a M41A Pulse Rifle in game have long gone. Except in the Alien RPG...

Hat tip to Dr Mitch for triggering these thoughts in his response to the original post on Facebook.

10 November 2024

Lists, Lists and more Lists

Lists, lists and more lists

I've just finished reading the second of the Fading Suns 4 core rule books, the Character Book. It's the largest volume and it was a bit of a slog. Although the book is well written, albeit occasionally a little long-winded, it nearly killed my interest once it hit the lists.

The game uses traits as a broad descriptor and there are pages and pages of descriptions. I nearly game up as it bored me. It's the kind of thing that you won't see in play and I'm sure that players will have loads of fun working through and making choices about their character, but reading the book from a GM perspective it just disengaged me. I had the same issue with Old Gods of Appalachia (and I know I will with Numenéra once I dig into that). I've lost the passion I once had for reading spell lists, monster descriptions and all the various forms of list that certain flavours of roleplaying game.

It's strange, as I used to pour over these in detail, but now they bore me and I end up wishing for a hypertext linked character generation tool where you can just click through. At least the Cypher games abstract this all away for the GM when creating characters. I need to read the next book to see how Fading Suns deals with this.

I know that it all falls away when it's on the character sheet but it just doesn't excite me anymore. Is it a sign of age or perhaps a change of taste? How do you feel about this kind of approach?

8 November 2024

 

Books in October 2024

 

The October cover collage

October brought eight books and 2,147 pages. One non-fiction, one roleplaying and the rest fiction. Apparently I'm down 27% on books and 30% on pages on September! I'm on 85 books in total for the year so far.

The non-fiction was 'Pathogenesis', by Jonathan Reynolds. A fascinating listen on Audible, it covers the impact of infections disease on human society, a very different lens to the usual 'great men and empires' take. 

The roleplaying game was 'Root' by Magpie Games. A superbly written and beautifully illustrated Powered by the Apocalypse game of the boardgame of the same name. Characters take the role of a band of vagabonds in a war-torn wood. Putting the anthropogenic animals to one side, it's probably the closest take to a decent Robin Hood roleplaying game that I've seen. 

I read to Aliette de Bodard novellas, 'In the Shadow of the Ship' and 'Navigational Entanglements' and enjoyed them hugely. Her books remain an automatic purchase and go to the top of the reading pile! James SA Corey's 'Livesuit' is set in their new SF universe, but there wasn't an initial obvious link to the first book. I'm sure that will develop as the series progresses. An enjoyable novella.

'The Wife Swap' by Jack Heath was an impulse by on a Kindle offer, and it was a diverting murder mystery. Different to my usual fair and consumed quite quickly.

'Moscow X' by David McCloskey was pretty brutal; once again, this wasn't James Bond style spy fiction but espionage seen through the lens of realism. I look forward to the next book. This was just pipped to the post as my favourite read of the month by 'The Curse of Pietro Houdini' by Derek B Miller. Set in Monte Cassino around the time that the Allies assault the Abbey in World War Two, it tells the story of a young refugee from Rome who falls in with Pietro Houdini, a man sent by the Vatican to help protect the art at the Abbey. It felt very different and I enjoyed it immensely.

1 November 2024