Robin D. Laws's Blog, page 107

Self-Refuting Graffiti Tag

Mutant City Police Blotter: Yakuza Organ Trade

It's not just The Esoterrorists that urges you to reconfigure real-life mysteries by ripping tales from the headlines. With Mutant City Blues undergoing a resurgence of interest lately, I figured I'd start swapping in case ideas for the Heightened Crimes Investigative Unit as well.

Japan's strict limitations on organ donation have created a thriving black market in which the yakuza are often involved, either as recipients or brokers.

In your mutant city, a down-and-outer with quills, blade immunity and webbing mutations disappears, to the anxiety of his family and the indifference of everyone else. If the detectives search where no one else will, they discover that the victim's disappearance coincided with a yakuza boss' incognito visit to town. It turns out that the mobster had him killed to harvest a kidney for his own use. The boss also shares the blade immunity enhancement (along with others adjacent to it on the Quade Diagram) and superstitiously feared believed that he might lose this power, from which he derives much underworld prestige, if he settled for just any kidney.

Pre-Canada Day Link Review: Crafty Corvids, Hooch Crime

Vengeful crows adept at cross-species identification.

Kensington Market bakery bust shows thatt Ontario has a crime called "supplying alcohol in a form that is not liquor."

The Birds

The updated archive is here!

Korad: Polling Ulthon

Use the poll below to approve the most important facts about Ulthon, a populous land of bonelands and wronglands inhabited mostly by the carrion-eating nonhumans known as the Veytikka:

View Poll: Ulthon

RPG Scenario Pro Tip: Triumphing Over Will

Want to immediately punch up your RPG adventure writing? Train yourself to eliminate unnecessary instances of the word "will."

Adventures exist in a weird provisional future, where you have to account for events that may or may not happen in a story that your readers have, in collaboration with their players, yet to bring into being. That's where "will" creeps in: In response to intruders, the octoproid will flee around the corner, turn invisible, and attempt an ambush.
When Johnson hears about the murders, he will phone his reporter friend, Ngen.
A Lore success will allow a character to recite the legend of the Six Dead Kings. The above sentences are all snappier when reconfigured to drop the "will:" In response to intruders, the octoproid flees around the corner, turns invisible, and attempts an ambush.
When Johnson hears about the murders, he phones his reporter friend, Ngen.
A Lore success allows a character to recite the legend of the Six Dead Kings. Sometimes "can" functions as "will" and should likewise be eliminated:

A red success can grant the character access to the secret tunnel.

This reads better as:

A red success grants the character access to the secret tunnel.

Removing these from a manuscript immediately makes you seem like a more seasoned RPG writer. Wills can be tricky and determined, fiendishly worming their way into the work of established writers. I still catch myself occasionally doing this, after all these years.

(NB: This edict against the word will should not be construed as a request to eliminate wordwill, who is a fine fellow undeserving of your assassination attempts.)

Post-Prandial Link Review: Robin's Laws podcasted, Cyclopean Scalia, Achronous Cthulhu

Joe and Nicky of the 2 GMs 1 Mic podcast go in-depth on Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering.

US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cites Polyphemus the cyclops in ruling that violent video games enjoy First Amendment protection.

Four acclaimed Trail of Cthulhu PDFs, each set outside the game's default 1930s period, will appear in the print scenario anthology Out of Time.

Action Begets Setting in Ashen Stars

Earlier I talked about the way every SF game calls for a unique setting, whether the designer likes it or not, because there isn't a complete enough assumptions set to present a default universe.[image error]

Ashen Stars creates its setting to serve the action. This of course is how a creator in a non-interactive story form would create a new SF world—to make the story happen.

The action in Ashen Stars, as in any GUMSHOE game, is the investigation of mysteries. nottheterritory got to this thought before I did: space opera TV shows are typically structured like other procedurals. An ensemble of characters confronts a situation, discovers more information about it, and then acts to bring about a resolution.

In Ashen Stars, then, the PCs solve interstellar mysteries.

From this observation arose the obvious brief for the setting: it had to feel like a procedural TV show that never was.

It also had to sidestep the traditional stumbling blocks we face when translating actual TV space opera properties to gaming.

Like their cop show counterparts, TV space opera problem solvers tend to operate within a command structure. This simplifies storytelling, especially the flow of exposition, and the division of screen time between cast members.

Command structures cause endless problems in an RPG context. Nobody wants to be bossed around. The player who gets to be the high-ranking officer usually lets the authority go to his head. In a game, you want the traditional consensus-based decision making, where each PC gets equal input.

So we needed a world where problem solvers operated as collectives, but which referred to the shows we all know and can tee off of.

Thus was born The Bleed, a remote sector of space formerly patroled by command-oriented problem solvers, but has now been abandoned. Why would this happen? Why, it must be that the once utopian interstellar empire has had to pull back, after a disastrous war. The people of the Bleed now have to hire freelance troubleshooters to solve their problems.

This fed back into the TV conceit. Today's shows, in this age of recycled IPs, are often reboots that darken up previously sunny properties. So Ashen Stars would feel not only like a TV show, but like a grittier reimagining of a classic program. This allows gamers to have their classic tropes, but to readdress them up according to a more jaded contemporary sensibility.

The Birds

The updated archive is here!

Ironroot Deception IV

Gad and Vitta, still prisoners of elven supremacists, penetrate the final secrets of their captors' mysterious excavation, encounter a legendary monster, and complete "The Ironroot Deception." The fourth and final installment of this serialized short story, featuring characters from The Worldwound Gambit, is up now at the Paizo blog.