Savage Speculations

Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing system is my great love, and while Savage Worlds comes a distant second, it still dominates the pursuing pack. I've had great fun running an Eberron campaign under the rules, and I expect it to continue for a while yet, but even so I'm feeling a little stifled by all the fantasy gaming my group seems to be doing.

We've got a regular Pathfinder game on the go, there's Savage Eberron now and then, and Ben's got this big plan for a collaborative sandbox campaign again set in a fantasy realm. These are all good fun games, and I like fantasy as much as the next bespectacled geek, but sometimes I want my character to be able to lay down a burst of suppressive fire or jump off a building on a motorbike. We did have Rogue Trader for that kind of stuff, but I'm not sure that campaign's going to make a return, and anything cyberpunk is a no-go alas. So I've been thinking about more modern or scifi games I could run, using Savage Worlds as the engine.

Savage Star Wars was my first thought, a scifi-fantasy hybrid to be sure, but with enough droids and spaceships and blaster guns to provide a contrast to all the normal sword-swinging of our weekly games. The problem I always had with Star Wars as a gaming setting was that the plot had already been written and cast a long shadow across attempts to run a game; I know others have succeeded, but it was too much of a strait jacket for me.

This was long before Bioware came out with Knights of the Old Republic and in doing so introduced a proof-of-concept setting which had all the right Star Wars bits but was not as beholden to existing canon. Seeing potential here, I went online to see if I could get a second-hand copy of the Old Republic Campaign Guide, saw the price tag of £200, and then gave up on the idea.

Savage Sabre Team/Savage Counter-Strike/Tom Clancy's Savage Six
and
Savage Dozen/Kelly's Savages/Inglourious Saveges/Where Savages Dare
Years a go I played in a BRP-based game in which we played the parts of SAS operatives dealing with a hostage situation. It didn't last long, as the GM didn't think BRP was deadly enough as it was and doubled all weapon damage, so our team was all turned into red mist within minutes. Even so, it has always stuck with me as a viable game concept, and it's something which would work with Savage Worlds, although any such game would be more on the pulpy side, so it would perhaps be better off used to emulate those brilliant 60's and 70's WWII adventure movies.

This one could be a winner, but it does have some potential problems. There is a definite danger of it falling into a formulaic mission-based structure, which may not be a problem but might chafe for some players. There's also the possibility that it might be a bit mundane for some tastes, as I'd be keen to avoid the supernatural, although pulling in some Bond-type silliness or piles of Nazi gold might well alleviate that.

It's not something I've explored, but there's perhaps some potential in throwing this idea into the future, and running some sort of Space Marines or Starship Troopers type game.

Savage Feng Shui
I love Feng Shui as a setting, but the rules seemed to me to get in the way of the fast-and-loose feel they were trying to create. Savage Worlds has the right feel and the pace is just right, so this is one idea with which I've been toying for a while. It's another hybrid setting, but with plenty of guns and car chases to scratch that modern gaming itch, and it's broad enough for anyone to find something they like within. The only potential problem I foresee with this is that while Savage Worlds covers almost everything Feng Shui did, there's one curious omission in that it has no martial arts rules to speak of -- beyond the wonky ones from Deadlands -- so there would be some work needed to include this rather essential element.

Savage Cthulhu
As a BRP-diehard, it would feel like a betrayal on a cosmic level to run a Mythos game in anything other than Call of Cthulhu -- I had to shower for three hours after playing Trail of Cthulhu -- but I could see Masks of Nyarlathotep working quite well in a more Savage style. I'm just not sure I could live with myself afterwards.

Savage Final Fantasy
Bringing in some more technological elements into the bog-standard fantasy setting might make all the difference, but I'm not sure it's getting far enough away, so this is the least developed of my ideas. I'm also not sure it's worth emulating a video game when one can just play the video game, but that's a longer subject for a later post. This one is probably a non-starter.

So there you have it. I'd like to get away from fantasy, not out of any dislike for the genre, but just because we're already doing so much of it and I'd like some variation in my gaming. Feel free to chime in with any suggestions and while I've focussed on Savage Worlds here, I would be more than happy to have a look at any BRP-related recommendations.

One Issue Campaign, UK Edition: Part the Second

Right, so in the first post, I went through White Dwarf #67 and pulled out most of the material suitable for use in a game; now I'm going to try to hammer it into a campaignish sort of shape.

Right away I realise I have a problem: I have no map. Of the games I have to hand, Rogue Trader has a starmap, but one that's already well stocked with detail, and I'm not that fond of the sample map in Labyrinth Lord; it's a decent enough campaign map, but I'm not getting the right feel from it in this case. Instead I'm going to see what I can build from the material in the magazine, which also lets me off the hook in choosing a system for all this, as I'm still not ready to make that choice yet.

So, what have we got? There's some setting information in the adventure A Murder at Flaxton; aside from the titular village, we're told of the towns of Brecor to the north and Zerler to the south, as well as another nation across the sea, called Veridor. So that's the starting point, and I think I'll also use that advert for Games Workshop stores -- the one with the parachuting pygmy orcs -- and convert the seven shops into settlements in the game world. Quick and dirty campaign map below!

I've already identified hobgoblins and orcs as major humanoid races in the setting, and there are enough dwarves in the magazine to make them the third racial group. Humans are conspicuous by their absence -- although I suspect distant Veridor is a human nation -- but we've got a barbarian culture to put somewhere, so let's make them humans.

For some reason, D&D hobgoblins have this east Asian -- Mongolian usually -- aesthetic, so let's use that and combine it with the samurai and ninja miniatures we uncovered in the previous post. Our hobgoblins then are generic Oriental types, which ties in with the Peking Duck adventure; we'll set that in our capital of Ravenscourt, which is cosmopolitan enough to have a hobgoblin restaurant, and the Tongs in that scenario are now a hobgoblin criminal gang. Let's also turn the scenario's mafiosi into dwarves; we'll call them the "Iron Ring" and their chief enforcer is a dwarf nicknamed "The Juggernaut" for his special ability to smash through any obstacle with ease.

The head of the Iron Ring is a dwarf named Silenjax, who has made many an enemy in his time. What follows is an actual classified advert from this issue:

Rukin, hobbit extraordinaire, seeks vengeance on Silenjax, dwarven scum. May your beard grow lice and wither, you disgusting relation to Jock the American.

These in-character small ads were a much-loved part of the old Dwarf, and they reappeared in the mid-1990's with the gaming magazine Arcane. Did Dragon have something similar?

Ravenscourt is also abuzz with talk of the upcoming election. The current Lord of the Living Stone -- essentially the dwarven king -- is developing a reputation for being rather addled and absent-minded, with the Stone Parliament grumbling incessantly -- behind layer after convoluted layer of etiquette, of course, because it just wouldn't be seemly to openly criticise the Lord -- about this or that gaffe he's made. The Iron Ring have no wish to lose the freedom they've enjoyed under the incompetent rule of the current Lord, so they'll attempt to rig the election so he stays in power.

As an example of the government's impotence, a village not two days' ride from the capital has been the subject of raids by a mysterious warrior, and the populace has had to resort to hiring mercenaries such is the lack of decisive action from the government. We'll slot Thrud and Lymara in here.

To the north, Broadmarsh is the site of the Monster Colosseum, where all manner of exotic beasts are brought to fight in the arena for the entertainment of the crowds. People travel from all over the kingdom and beyond to watch and take part, but there have been grumblings -- again, not open criticism, for we are dwarves, not uncouth barbarians! -- of late that the prices for entry are too high; a number of interested parties, including both hobgoblin Tongs and the Iron Ring, are looking to get involved in a rival setup, and players could take advantage by capturing monsters out in the wilderness and selling them to the highest bidder. They might even get involved in setting up their own arena. The smugglers/slavers from A Murder at Flaxton are probably involved somewhere too, and the highest bounty of all has been offered for the legendary, possibly mythical, Jabberwock.

Recently, two adventurers named Critchlow and Harrison, one a warrior and one a wizard, went to capture a green dragon for the colosseum. The manager of the arena took it as a bit of a joke at first, but is now a bit worried about them, particularly as the wizard Harrison is an impulsive sort given to random and unpredictable behaviour; we'll work up some kind of random table for him.

The dwarf kingdom exists in an uneasy peace with the hobgoblin nation -- which we will call the Western Court, after the location of Games Workshop's Birmingham branch -- while the human barbarian tribes wander about in the southern regions, and orcs roam across the northlands; the orcs have of late been using unusual tactics -- such as parachutes -- in their raids, the result of one of their chieftains being possessed by an insane spirit that is trying to turn the greenskins into an army of conquest. I'm thinking that it's the spirit of some old crackpot inventor who was never taken seriously in life, and is now exacting vengeance through weird science and gonzo tactics. The orcs don't mind that old chief Jukka -- name pinched from the classified ads -- has gone a bit funny, because the raiding and pillaging is even more fun as a result.

That spirit is not the only one causing trouble across the land. A banshee plagues the town of Arndale, her cries causing a death each night, while across the mountains in Goodramgate, the people not only have to contend with parachuting orcs, but also a spectral black hound with fiery red eyes and a tendency towards PSYCHIC VIOLENCE. Further south, not even the famed soldiery of Broadmarsh can do anything about the malevolent Will-o-Wisps haunting the town's outskirts, driving away trade and leading travellers to their doom. Even the capital itself is suffering, as poltergeist activity is on the increase in Ravenscourt, yet another crisis for the Stone Parliament to watch unfold, powerless to intervene.

These baleful undead should be trapped on another plane, locked away by the magic of the Vivimancer Agaard -- name borrowed from Paul Agaard, Games Workshop's new (in 1985) events manager -- but the Vivimancer has grown bored of his lot and has let these beings go loose, in the hope that they will be tracked back to him in his lair on the plane of Elysium and he can be given a final death. Agaard's house servant is a centaur called Cowley. Cowley likes to wear a bowler hat as he attends to the Vivimancer's flower gardens, and I imagine him to be your typical snooty and superior Jeeves type, only a centaur.
 
As an aside, I discovered that The Gameskeeper is still there today, so well done to them!

As luck would have it, deep in the barbarian lands to the south is a portal to other planes and dimensions. It is in the control of a beautiful but excessively violent woman named Ashley who goes to battle sky clad and swinging twin broadswords; she has managed to get the portal to work in one direction, plucking warriors from across the multiverse -- here are our GURPS lot -- to fight at her side, but her true goal is to use it to escape this world.

The other barbarian tribes are either unaware of Ashley's plans or are busy with other concerns; the fifty-year-long autumn is due to come to a close, and the druids and shamans are turning their spiritual energies towards preparing for the Long Winter to come, as they cannot merely flee underground like the dwarves. They also have to deal with a beast they call Hiihtajantie -- name again stolen from the classified ads -- a vast purple gargoyle-like thing which has of late been stealing livestock and even the odd tribesman. Hiihtajantie is the size of a dragon, and the glowing lights which orbit its head are said to have a number of magical effects, including hypnosis. As the barbarians are an insular sort at the best of times, the arena owners up north haven't yet heard about Hiihtajantie the Disco Beast.

That's enough to be getting on with, I think. I've used almost everything from my initial list, and I've discovered some more bits and pieces while doing so. I'd start the campaign off with A Murder at Flaxton, then there are plenty of options for the players to explore. They could get involved with the organised crime element, engage with the politics of Ravenscourt, or spend their time monster hunting for the colosseum. At some point they might run into the ghost problem, which would then lead on to some planar travel and a big fight with an astral hippie. As for a system, I still haven't made that choice, although I'm leaning towards some kind of BRP variant, perhaps RuneQuest or maybe the core BRP book itself. That said, there's enough common ground between BRP and D&D that one could convert the Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest material over with relative ease.

So that's that. I have too much gaming on my plate as it is, so I don't think I'll be using this any time soon, and as such I release it to the community. Do with it what you will!

The Golfbag of Avalon

Here's a quick follow-up to the last post, with Guy providing some more data from his researches. He confirms that the first edition of RuneQuest has near-identical wording to the second edition regarding the experience system, but he has also been looking at the oft-forgotten stepchild of BRP, the wonderful and brilliant Pendragon:

Pendragon 1st edition (1985)
all skills: success + stress + referee discretion
- Requires success *and* gamemaster decision for adding a check mark: "There are times during play when the gamemaster tells the player to check one of his character's skills. This means that the character has used the skill in a time of crisis and may lean from the experience. This box is marked with a check-mark only when the skill is used successfully, and only when the gamemaster says the player may do so." (Experience Checks, Player's Book, page 39)

The second/third edition has almost identical wording, and my memory of the fourth edition is that it uses the same experience system, although I don't have a copy at hand.

Golfing: 78% (or, Familiarity Breeds Confusion)

One persistent criticism of Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying system in its varying incarnations over the decades is that of "Golf Bag Syndrome", but it's not something I've ever encountered in all my years of playing BRP-based games, so I've often been baffled by how pervasive the criticism is.

BRP works on a percentile roll-under system, so a character might have "Shotgun 57%" on their sheet, which means that the player must roll 57 or less on a d100 to succeed with that skill. The sheet will also have a little box next to that skill, and this tiny box is part of the subsystem used to simulate character development.

(I'll try to make this as not-boring as possible, but there's only so exciting this stuff can be.)

Under certain circumstances, this box is ticked -- "checked" if you're a Colonial -- and then at the end of the session or scenario,
the player rolls a d100 against any ticked skills; if they roll under the current value -- a "success", although there's no actual skill test being performed -- then there is no change, but if they roll over -- a "failure" by normal in-game rules -- then their score in that skill increases by a certain amount. This represents the character learning from their experience, in particular their mistakes, and the more competent a character becomes, the less they have to learn.

It's quite an elegant experience system, but it's been misrepresented or misunderstood over the decades, and it's this confusion which leads to Golf Bag Syndrome. The idea is that a player uses a skill, gets a tick, then pulls another skill out of their "bag", gets a tick, and so on until everything is ticked, and the game becomes some bizarre collecting exercise.

The thing which always confused me was how these players were getting ticks with such ease, when all the incarnations of BRP I knew placed all kinds of restrictions on how the ticks were awarded. I have three versions of the system to hand at this precise moment -- the Games Workshop-published third editions of both RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu, and Chaosium's fifth edition of the latter -- and all three are quite clear in stating that ticks are only given when a skill use is successful in a stressful or notable situation, and even then only at the GM's discretion. This is far from the automatic collection of ticks outlined by the Golf Baggers. Fifth edition Cthulhu suggests that ticks be given by default for a skill roll of 01 -- a critical success, more or less -- but that's also not quite the same thing.

(I was surprised to discover that Cthulhu doesn't give a tick for a critical failure, as it's something I've always done when running the game.)

It's not, I admit, an exhaustive sampling of BRP's many guises, but it's still interesting to see that there is no sign of Golf Bag Syndrome in these version of the rules. So where does it come from?

Stormbringer, apparently.

Guy Fullerton of Lord of the Green Dragons -- although everyone in the western hemisphere is a member of that blog -- and Chaotic Henchmen Productions did a very decent thing, and instead of following the standard operating procedure of the internet and throwing his toys out of the pram, went to his books and dug out actual quotes and references to the old Golf Bag. Guy's a veteran Stormbringer, er, guy, and he's seen this glitch in action many times over the years. With his permission, I'm going to relay his findings:

Stormbringer (2nd edition boxed, 1" thick box, 1985):
- "If … your player-character scores a hit, then your character will have a chance to improve his weapon skill with the weapon that scored the hit. If you score a hit, but it is parried, you did not truly hit, and so there is no improvement by experience in such cases." (Section 3.3.1.1, Players Book, page 37)
- "If your character uses a skill while playing a game of Stormbringer, note that he has done so, and when the game is over you will have a chance to see if his skill has improved." Note that the rule does not explicitly require a successful use; it only says "use". However, the example of improvement shows a character successfully using a skill. (Section 4.1.2, Players Book, page 50)
- I looked through the gamemaster sections for additional requirements/prerequisites for gaining of a chance, and I found nothing.

So, in 1985, Stormbringer was pretty lax on experience requirements. The next two editions are more or less the same, according to Guy, except these particular rules change their positions within the text.

The only version of the game I've played is 1993's Elric! which I've always liked for the unnecessary exclamation point. Of this edition, Guy says:

- Requires success and gamemaster decision: "Sometimes, but not always, your gamemaster will instruct you to check a skill just used successfully in play." (Experience, page 51)
- Offers guidance for the gamemaster decision: "When an adventurer succeeds with a skill in a dangerous or stressful situation, the gamemaster may grant the player an experience check on the adventurer sheet." (Experience Check, page 151)

This is very close to what Call of Cthulhu fifth edition says, which suggests that there was either some attempt to consolidate BRP in the mid-1990's, or this edition of Stormbringer borrowed its text from Cthulhu rather than RuneQuest; I do recall that the layout and format of this edition was quite similar to fifth edition Cthulhu.

Guy also has a copy of the bog-standard setting-agnostic BRP core rules from 1981, and its only requirement for a tick is a successful use of a skill.

Some more data, again from Guy:

RuneQuest 2nd edition (from 1979-ish):
- Weapon skill rolls don't require an unparried hit to garner a check mark; any hit will do: "During the bookkeeping phase of each melee round (see Chapter III) the player should keep track of whether the character managed to land a blow with a weapon (it doesn't matter if it does damage, bounces off armor, or is parried) or managed to parry another attack." (Learning by Experience, page 23)
- Other skills: "To learn a skill by experience, a character must use it successfully in conditions of stress." (Introduction, page 44)

Call of Cthulhu 2nd edition (1983):
- "When a character uses a skill successfully during play, the keeper may allow that character's player to put a check by that skill." (Rewards of Experience, page 15)
- There is no separate weapon skill section.

Basic Roleplaying (2002)
- Requires success on a skill for a chance of improvement: "… check over [the] character sheet to see what skills were used during play. If your character succeeded in using skills, they should have been marked on the sheet." (Experience, page 8)
- The rest of the text content of the book looks largely similar to the 1981 version.

One could argue that Chaosium were cracking down on the Syndrome by the mid-90's, but BRP's backtracking means that it's all a bit inconsistent, and it becomes apparent that there is a possible reason both for the prevalence of Golf Bag Syndrome as a criticism of BRP, and my complete inexperience -- heh -- of the phenomenon. I first encountered the system through Call of Cthulhu, which is more strict than most versions of the game -- although the 2004 quick start rules allow a tick on any successful skill use -- while Guy got in through Stormbringer and proceeded to Golf Bag his way through the 80's and 90's.

So it seems to be that BRPers tend to pick up their habits from the first version of the system they encounter, and carry them through to other versions. I have seen this in action: my first Cthulhu GM, despite using the fifth edition rules, kept on bringing in things from RuneQuest and Cthulhu's fourth edition, entirely without conscious knowledge. I wonder if the broad similarity between BRP flavours also has the downside of concealing the -- sometimes important -- differences between them?

(Of course, sometimes you do want to mix and match, and the close familial similarities are more helpful there; I use the Elric! serious wounds table in my Cthulhu games, for example, and the recent big yellow BRP book is a wonderful toolkit for players of any of the variants.)

So I wonder how many people out there think they're playing fourth edition Stormbringer but are really playing the second edition? Or think they're playing Call of Cthulhu but are really playing RuneQuest, only with librarians? Not that there's anything wrong with any of that of course, but perhaps we should be more observant and discerning when using our chosen rulesets, if only to avoid missing something cool; the upcoming seventh edition of Call of Cthulhu apparently has some clever new rules ideas in it, and it would be a shame if they were overlooked simply because BRP is so very familiar.

Thanks again to Guy for being a good sport and digging out all the data.

EDIT: There's been an update on all this, drawing in some data from Pendragon.