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.

Absolutely Nothing!

Yesterday Stuart posted some musings about wargaming, and it got me thinking about the fine art of pushing little tin lead white metal soldiers about a table.

As a teenager I did a fair bit of wargaming, although it was all of the Games Workshop variety, aside from one afternoon playing The War Machine mass combat rules from the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. I have a poor head for tactics, one that borders on the comedic -- some of my opponents might say moronic -- so I was never much good at these games; I won my first game of Warhammer Fantasy Battle with a bold undead cavalry charge and thrashed a GW staff member at a display game of the then-new Epic 40,000, but aside from a long unbeaten run at Warhammer 40,000 -- because Genestealers were very, very broken in the first two editions -- that was the extent of my success as a general. Even so I still had great fun playing, before rising costs and rules changes -- in the case of 40K a combination of both, with the increase in the basic army size in the third edition -- pushed me out of the hobby.

Also, if I'm honest, I'm rubbish at the painting. I have a smidegeon of artistic talent, but I can't transfer that to the painting of figures to save my life. My neon pink Genestealer Cult is an embarrassment to this day.

So that's why I don't play these games any more, despite there being a sizeable community of tabletop wargamers here in Brighton. I'd love to play, but I can't afford an army and even if I could, it would look like a four-year-old painted it. A blind four-year-old. With no hands.

Even so, Stuart's post woke my long-dormant love of wargames, and so I did some poking around. Even after being out of the hobby for over a decade, I knew enough to know that Warmachine is a popular alternative to the Nottingham hegemony, and I've seen some of the models in use in our various role-playing game campaigns, so I know that they're well designed bits of kit. The game is based around small warbands -- just like the Warhammers back in the day -- which might make the painting a bit less painful for me, and the game's emphasis on the mechanised warjacks with infantry as support reminded me of the Workshop's Space Marine, my favourite of all their wargames, despite being no more successful at it than anything else.

Then I saw the cost of the models, comparable to GW's pricing but for even less stuff, and that killed my interest in Warmachine. Maybe if I win the lottery. In the meantime, the world is spared my neon pink Cygnar warjacks.

So that was that, but then for some reason the Dreaded and Unmentionable D&D4 popped into my head, perhaps because it's often criticised as a wargame masquerading as an rpg. I don't think that's entirely fair, as it's more that the strong emphasis on the combat system makes it very easy to ignore everything else, but it did get me wondering about what could happen if one embraced that criticism and played D&D4 as a wargame.

The first step would be to create an interesting battlefield, with lots of environmental features to add some tactical flexibility to the game. Pits, areas of difficult terrain, things to climb on, and so on, nothing too unfamiliar to the average wargamer. After that's done, there seem to be two options:

• Classic Mode in which one -- or more -- player creates a party of heroes and pits them against a monstrous force. This would be D&D4 as written, more or less, only there'd be no plot or role-playing, as the emphasis would be on the battle, which has the handy side-effect of heading off the problem of the fight taking up the entire session, as so often used to happen.
• Total War in which the players decide on an XP budget as described in the DMG, then buy monsters -- which need not be actual bug-eyed beasties -- and set them against each other. This version would feel much more like a traditional wargame.
  

I don't know how exciting it would be, or if D&D4's mechanics are too involved and complex for a wargame, but based on my experience of it, I don't see why it shouldn't work. This is more or less what the Dungeon Delves book does, after all, it's just less honest about it.