Rendezvous at Rouen

 Roleplaying Games  No Responses »
Nov 092024
 

My 2d20 project for Modiphius’ World Builders community program has been released to DriveThruRPG. While not my first publication with Modiphius, it is my first through their World Builders community program. Rendezvous at Rouen for the Achtung! Cthulhu game line is a Section M mission set in France right after the surrender to Germany in June, 1940. It’s a sequel to the Quickstart adventure A Quick Trip to France.

My original goal was to release it on September 30th in time for Roll20’s “The Next Adventure” program. An unexpected event got in the way of that schedule: Hurricane Helene. The storm ravaged western North Carolina where I happened to be. Thankfully, (and by the grace of God), I came through it unscathed, but my heart goes out to those lives that were lost and the families impacted by the devastation of the storm. I had been through hurricanes before, but never in the mountains. I now have first hand understanding of flash floods and mudslides, along with a healthy respect for the convergence of moving water and terrain. 

With more time to complete the project I decided to add some details, do a little more research into the city of Rouen and its history and put more effort into the maps. These extras I think were worth it pushing the final page count to 32 from my original target of 15 pages. 

For those of you who are thinking about writing your own World Builders content, I thought it useful to give you an idea of the effort it took to produce this mission. I used tools that parallel Modiphius’ process and added extra time in for activities like layout and proofreading. Most of the art in the game is provided by Modiphius as part of the World Builders program. Art is one of the sticking points for tabletop RPG design. Unless you are a gifted artist, commissioning artwork is prohibitively expensive and no AI is permitted in the program. Thankfully, Modiphius gives its World Builders community access to an art pack for use in development. I took advantage of this everywhere I could in the manuscript with only a couple custom pieces I created that portray the relics of Saint Vitalis that the player characters acquire during the game.

With that, here is the rough breakdown of time spent in the various major areas and the tools used to accomplish the tasks.

Project start: 9/18/2024

Principal writing: 9/18 to 10/20, 32 writing days.
Tool: Scrivener
Word Count: 11,101 (Final Draft)

Map design: 10/21 to 10/27
Tool: Inkarnate
Maps Created: Rouen city, Rouen Cathedral, Grotto of Anguish, Hidden Cavern

Layout, editing and formatting: 10/28 to 11/4
Tools: Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, utilizes the World Builders template

Upload to DTRPG: 11/5
Tools: DTRPG submission tool and editor

That’s about 48 days total time to go from an outline to the finished product. To give you a sense of where it started, here’s the original outline idea: 

Rescue from Rouen

Scene 1
Sneaking into center city
Contact with underground

Scene 2
Entering the cathedral
Finding the crypt

Scene 3
Opening the door to the catacombs
Chase through the catacombs

Scene 4
Rendezvous with the boat
Escape the monster of the Seine

Note that the original working title was “Rescue from Rouen”. While the creation process was taking place, “Rescue” changed to “Rendezvous”; better with the French theme; then “from” changed naturally to “at”. Looking back on this first outline, I was impressed that not much changed from the scene flow other than one minor detail: there is no door to the catacombs. 

For how much is packed into this short four scene mission, that wasn’t a bad total project time. I was happy with the effort and it was fun to do. Given that this adventure is meant to complement and conclude the original Quickstart adventure, I wanted to keep the price modest and accessible for players. You really get your monies worth on this from a time and page count perspective, but I’d rather have this in the hands of players who are excited about Achtung! Cthulhu and want to explore a bit more before diving all the way in. 

This was a fun adventure to craft. The research in and of itself was a pleasure. I know more about Rouen and its cathedral than I ever did. I hope this is an enjoyable mission for both the gamemaster and players!

2d20 World Builders

 Roleplaying Games  No Responses »
Mar 112023
 

To date my contributions here have been primarily about board gaming. While board gaming remains a very important part of what I will continue to cover here on the site, a new addition to the portfolio is on the horizon. As a long time player of roleplaying games, there has been a draw to the newest incarnations of that old hobby.

In recent years I have taken a keen interest in the evolutionary path of narrative mechanic driven RPGs. Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars system was one that I’d classify as a first “mass market” (for as mass a market as RPGs are) narrative driven games. In that game the dice themselves were the narrative modifier to the flow of the game with a light form of meta-currency. Another of these narrative systems games is the 2d20 System developed and published by Modiphius entertainment. In this game, the narrative mechanics are driven by meta-currency as well as the dice results. An interesting combination.

This year, Modiphius launched the 2d20 World Builders program. This program gives the 2d20 community the ability to produce content for the 2d20 rules system under the programs guidelines and structure. Creators are free to develop their own game using the 2d20 rules as well as one licensed property, their Achtung! Cthulhu setting. With the World Builders program, distribution of created content is through DriveThruRPG. Given the value of the system and the property, a very good opportunity for designers and creators.

I have begun work on an adventure for Achtung! Cthulhu with the intention of publication through the program. While I won’t go into too much detail right now, on what topic I will be covering in the “Secret War” of the setting, rest assured that my love of history, interest in World War 2, and love of storytelling will all combine into what I hope to be an interesting and engaging adventure. More to come!

The Force in RPGs

 Design, Roleplaying Games  No Responses »
Dec 312015
 

This is the first post of a three part series

The Force.

It’s one of the most recognizable yet mysterious aspects of Star Wars. In RPG circles it is equivalent to the “magic system” of a campaign, but as I will explore in this post, The Force should be treated as much more than tacked on “super powers”. Without being true to the spirit of Star Wars, any RPG representation of The Force can at a minimum feel contrived, and at worse, complicate and muddle the design. The art of roleplaying embodies the spirit of Star Wars. Storytelling and the kindred struggle of a group of close friends are central concepts in the saga, and roleplaying is my favorite way to simulate these concepts on a gaming table. The light and dark side, good and evil, and the balance of the Force, are concepts Star Wars fans are familiar with. They intertwine with the story arcs throughout the saga and provide Star Wars with part of its unique feel. Getting this same element right in an RPG makes it feel like Star Wars rather than a refactoring of a generic adventuring RPG.

In this series of posts, I am going to cover the playability and design of Force mechanics in Star Wars Roleplaying games over the last 15 years. I am leaving out West Ends classic D6 edition because I have never played it, nor feel confident in making comparisons of it to Wizards of the Coast (WotC) or Fantasy Flight’s designs. I will also not be completely comprehensive in regards to the details of the systems; my approach here is to bring out the differences of the systems and possibly bring some insight into this critical element of a Star Wars RPG.

With the release of 1999’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, an effort by Lucasfilm to consolidate some of the previous Star Wars license holders was initiated. The dormant RPG license previously held by West End Games was transferred to Lucasfilm’s primary toy partner, Hasbro. Hasbro had acquired Wizards of the Coast late that year and the gang from Renton was an obvious team to take on a new RPG line. Given their experience with Dungeons and Dragons and their D20 System they had ready experience and material to draw from.

Star Wars D20 was launched in November of 2000 to a lot of pent up demand in the gaming community. It was built on the solid D20 system, not without its flaws, the system had evolved over its various iterations and was effective and flexible. With the release of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones in 2002, a revised edition was published.

In Star Wars D20, the Force is represented by Force Points. As could be expected, all living beings possess Force Points which can be used for adding bonus dice to checks. Droids, being an example of a non-living being, do not possess Force Points. Non-Sensitive Force users were limited to five points, they could never become more powerful in the Force. Force-sensitives however, could gain Force Points well beyond five. The Force came into its own when Force-sensitive and Jedi Player Characters (PC) expended points to gain bonus dice to boost the effectiveness of their Force Powers.

It makes intuitive sense that the stronger in the Force a PC is, the more powerful they are using force-based skilled and powers: the apprentice can lift a rock, while the master lifts a star-fighter. To highlight the difference between the light side and the dark side of the Force, a force-sensitive PC declares which side of the force they call on when performing a check; they state whether they are calling upon the light side or the dark side of the force. This changes the curve on the bonus dice granted depending on character level and whether they were a force-sensitive or not. (Non-force-sensitives did not “realize” they were using the force when expending Force Points).

This curve awards more bonus dice with the use of the dark side of the force at lower character levels. By level ten the light side catches up and by level thirteen provides more bonus dice than the dark side. While not explicitly stated, the designers wanted to simulate the ease and draw of being “seduced” by the power of the dark side with this mechanism.

The penalty for drawing on the dark side is the gaining of a Dark Side Point. There are other ways to gain Dark Side Points besides calling on the dark side as determined by the GM, but by accumulating enough Dark Side Points the PC could slip away from the light with a penalty now present for using any light side force powers. When a PCs Dark Side Points exceed their wisdom score, the character has “committed completely to the path of darkness.”

Overall, D20 was good a baseline for a Star Wars RPG; but as the focus of this post implies, the development and representation of The Force is where you move from a competent action based system with guns, vehicles and fighting, to imparting a Star Wars feel to the texture of the design. Miss there and the seams where the force powers system is built into the overall design will begin to show.

One of these “seams” in Star Wars D20 is the design to reflect the balance between the light and dark side of the Force: the bonus dice curve, and the dark points accumulation was implemented to represent the pull of dark side power and the negative affects to the PCs if they travel down that path. However, its primary implementation occurs as a response effect when force-sensitives fuel force powers with the dark side of the force. The text notes that GMs should monitor and assign Dark Side Points to non-force-sensitives based on the “evilness” of their actions. But this actually only appears in a sidebar, as if the designers realized the weakness of the mechanics but recognized something had to be done to implement the balance of light and dark across the system, not just for Force-sensitives.

You are probably seeing right now another issue: if effects occur due the use of the dark side, why is there no counterbalance of effects for the use of the light? Intuitively, when you think of balance, a positive-negative polarization comes to mind, a pendulum, even a see-saw. What you are thinking of is the Yin and the Yang.

In D20 we have effects for Yin, but see no representation of the Yang. Just being a PC with zero Dark Side Points doesn’t make Yang. That’s more akin to being at the center.

We will pick up next time looking at how WotC made changes to the Force mechanics in Star Wars Saga edition. In the third part of this series we will do a side-by-side comparison between WotC D20, WotC Saga, and Fantasy Flight’s Force and Destiny. Until then, may the Force remain in balance for all of your campaigns!

 Older Entries