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!

Republic credits are no good out here…

 Board Games, Roleplaying Games  No Responses »
Feb 082014
 

“…I need something more real.” One of my favorite scenes from Star Wars Episode I is the first meeting with Watto at his shop. Bartering for a used hyperdrive component, the heroes run into an age old problem: currency exchange.

Most often in my RPG games, money has been either the generic Gold, Silver, Copper coinage; or for the sci-fi theme, Credits, all tracked on a sheet of paper. Nothing actually changed hands. There were no “Watto moments” where an issue with payment lead to an adventure or series of encounters. I’ve always wanted to get some tangible, tactile money exchange into my game. Something the players could hold onto, something as Watto would say, is “real”. However, such currency available to gamers in the past was either too expensive or of such low quality to be a vehicle for in-game jokes.

As in many things in today’s gaming world: Enter Kickstarter.

Recently, we have seen some quality hobby gaming coin sets come up on Kickstarter. Myself being a long time a-wishin-and-hopin for such reasonably priced options have jumped at the opportunity and backed two such projects. The fruits of the first have recently arrived.

Future coins is designed to supply in-game currency for Minion Games 4x title Hegemonic. However, they can very much be used for any purpose. My primary use for these will be in my sci-fi RPG’s, specifically Traveller and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire.

I was very pleased with the quality of the credit coins. The coloring, shading, and trim, is very well done. My only nitpick is the color for the highest denomination coin, 100,000, which looks black. The other denominations more than make up for this however, the shading between the raised text and the primary coin color give them a good depth and actually enhances the feeling of being a solid coin. There are both straight colors and metallics. For those of you who lust Ferengi-like after cold-pressed latinum, the 1,000 coin will more than satisfy.

If you are interested in picking up some of these for yourself and missed the Kickstarter campaign, not to worry, Minion has you covered and you can get your hands on some right here.

The other collection of coins I have jumped into is Conquistador Games Best Damn Metal Gaming Coins. This collection offers quite a bit of diversity in choice of era including Roman (my favorite), Spanish, Celtic and others, as well as fantasy and pirate themes. This particular kickstarter has not yet shipped, so if you are interested in picking some up it is possible that Conquistador or their partners in this project, Game Salute, will be selling additional coin sets later this year.

Range Finding

 Roleplaying Games  No Responses »
Dec 282013
 

I’ve been playing a fair bit of the Star Wars Edge of the Empire (EotE) RPG lately. No serious campaign this time, but an easy going romp with pre-generated characters and new players, a far cry from the experienced players I ran with in my previous Saga edition campaign. This has been filled with light hearted gamorrean stomping and stormtrooper blasting.

I haven’t played enough EotE yet to feel confident in contrasting it at length against Star Wars Saga Edition, but I do have a feel for the overall flow of the game and can make some broad observations.

If I had one big “thing” to draw a contrast between Saga and EotE it would be the distinction between the mechanics of distance and range. Saga, if one remembers, was influenced by the development of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons (4E) which was being developed at Wizards of the Coast while Saga was being finalized. In some sense Saga was an early preview of 4E, and therefore very miniature combat oriented. Using one inch grid maps was common and with both published and D20 OGL material very available. In my Saga campaign I used the fine starship maps from Future Armada, for example, where you could detail out the encounters with Line of Sight, range, and all that you would expect from a miniature-centric combat system.

With EotE that comfort of precision is unceremoniously stripped away. Range in this system is loosely defined as short, medium, long etc. and is left to the GM during game play to confirm. Rather than being a measured process based on a granular tracing of squares or distance, movement between ranges is achieved by the mere expenditure of an action by the player character. For example, to move between medium and short range would be one movement action.

This, I must say, takes a bit of getting used to. After so many years of comfort with simply allowing range and movement rules to keep a melee controlled, being awash in uncertainty can be frightening. But from a different perspective, it can also be quite liberating. There is no counting squares, no measuring movement; A quick decision on expending an action to change range is all that is needed. If you think back on all of the sessions over how many years you GM’ed in how many systems, how often did encounters begin at range “short”. Probably most. So why all the need for expansive range and movement rules with all of the time they consume? Why indeed.

I am still getting acclimated to this concept, I have a bit more convincing that needs to be done. And I must admit on more than one occasion the thought of retrofitting a Saga-like range system into EotE has crossed my mind. As of now I’ve managed to hold this compulsion at bay; I really want to see how this system works in different flavors of encounters and the multiplicity of combinations that can only come about during extended game play. For now I am pushing forward with the rules as-is and keeping my straight-edges and rangefinders in the drawer.