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Alex Greene

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  1. Alex Greene
    Magic is tricky to implement in any roleplaying game. Implementing it in a modern game is problematic, to say the least.
    First of all, let's address the main issue that very few game designers have actually come from a profession which practiced magic, either of the stage variety or of the occult variety. Not many workplaces send out advertisements saying that they are hiring wizards and witches. There aren't many people on LinkedIn who pursue occult interests - or if they do, they keep it off their feeds.
    The issue of magic in roleplaying games is that they are presented as some form of superpowers - wizards flying, summoning fireballs, creating rays of intense cold, conjuring walls of fire or entities of pure shadow and darkness. None of this really presents magic as something magical -what we would recognise as displays of supernatural prowess, the marshalling of occult forces, and the unleashing of arcane powers. Magic should not look like displays of CGI superpowers in some summer tentpole movie.
    Let's take a look at what is called The Subtle Art.
    The Subtle Art
    Let's start with a definition of magic.
    Magic is the Art of making things happen.
    Magic makes things happen which would otherwise not be likely to happen. Your chance of being shot by a dog is low, but not zero, for instance. Magic makes the odds of something weird happening so much greater as to be almost certain.
    The force which defines magic is the Will of the magician. All workings are an act of Will, to bend reality to favour the magician's desired outcome - whatever that outcome may be.
    The greater the Will, the more likely that the magic will trigger the necessary changes. But here is where roleplaying games get things wrong.
    Small Hinges Open Big Doors
    Magic is not about big, flashy effects. The best example of this heinous sin is the Mythras Core Sorcery spell Wrack, which casts a spectacular spray of harmful energies towards the target to overwhelm them. The image accompanying this spell shows a wizened old man casting a spray of darkness from his hands. Only, what is the sorcerer's goal - to expend all that energy in a big flashy spray, or to inflict damage on the target?
    Consider a subtler-looking spell which has a similar effect - the sorcerer dangling a poppet of the target over an open brazier, lowering it slowly towards the fire as the victim screams in agony from flames which they alone can feel. Or perhaps, the sorcerer jabs a pin into the poppet's face, causing the target to feel a lancing pain between their eyes.
    The sorcerer could simply tie a red thread about the target's right arm, temporarily paralysing it, or begin dropping alcohol onto the poppet's mouth to induce a state of drunkenness in the staggering target.
    The power of the magician comes from the application of their accumulated body of arcane knowledge to accomplish major effects through the expenditure of as little force as possible. You can make a pendulum swing wildly from one almighty push, or through a series of small, well-timed pushes. Magic is the small push, applied many times to achieve a great effect. Magic turns on small hinges, but those tiny hinges open huge doors.
    Invocations
    Magic operates on a number of levels, called invocations. The lowest levels of invocation begin with a much-overlooked level of magic: the most subtle of all. Note that where specific spells from Mythras Core are mentioned, it is only to show mechanically what a specific level of magic is capable of.
    Perceiving.
    This invocation is at the level of information - just observing, without applying meaning to what is being perceived. This information can be seen, heard, felt, smelled, or tasted - and it does not have to be physical - the magician could be picking up on activities on the spirit planes, or gathering information on the microexpressions and body language of people nearby to read their emotions and reactions. This is the level of cold reading and perception of the astral realm of the local area and local spirits.
    Knowing.
    This invocation is one level up from the level of Perceiving. At this level, knowledge is drawn from the generalised information field surrounding the planet. Every living thing generates an information field, containing the sum of their actions and decisions. This level of magic taps into that information field to obtain the knowledge the magician needs.
    This level of perception incorporates divination, sortilege, Tarot cards, runecasting and oracles such as the I Ching, as well as astral travel and communing with spirits. Whatever has to be plucked out of the air, rather than observed happening in one's surroundings, comes into this category, which is at the level of data. This is the level of empathic and telepathic mindreading.
    Revealing.
    The next level of invocation is Revealing, which opens up levels of understanding concealed from the magician. This is the lowest level of knowledge; and at this level, the magician is discovering phenomena not known to them, not deductible from existing clues. This is deep level knowledge, the equivalent of "X Ray vision," or a deep telepathic probe.
    Understanding.
    The highest level of perception magic, this invocation brings together what the magician has obtained from the lower three levels, to produce a model which allows the magician to understand the why, as much as the what and who. This is the level of wisdom, sometimes called illumination.
    Nudging.
    The lowest invocation of influence, this level merely accentuates something which is already going on. Examples: A running person finds their speed being increased or decreased, or if they are turning left they find themselves almost being pulled more strongly in that direction - or conversely, to the right, if the magician wishes for the runner to change their direction.
    Whether this operates on a physical level (such as increasing a fire's intensity) or an emotional level (such as making a hungry person even hungrier) depends on the target; but in general, nudging spells work more efficiently on minds than they do physical phenomena. Spells such as Haste and Hinder from Mythras Core would come into this category. Spells from Mythras Core such as Attract Harm, Draw and Repulse also come into this category of invocation.
    Warding.
    This invocation of control is about applying the Will of the magician to reinforce the target's existing reality against something which could cause it to be changed. Example: a spell to allow a fast runner to continue to run quickly, by deflecting a magical spell from a second magician intended to slow her down; or a working to protect somebody's mind from being read, or to prevent a spirit from possessing the person so protected. Damage Protection, Spell Protection, and Spirit Protection from Mythras Core would come under this category.
    Swaying.
    The invocation of overt control, this is about completely overriding the target's existing condition. Whereas a nudging spell causes an object in motion to go a little faster, or a hungry person to feel more hungry or for someone who felt hunger for a piece of meat to feel hunger for bread instead, this spell compels a stationary target to move, for instance, or compels a mind to think a thought that it had not been thinking at all (such as imposing a desire to eat in the mind of someone who had not been hungry).
    At this level, workings can also stop a running process entirely. Example spells include Animate, Fly, Dominate and Enslave, as well as Imprison, Banish, Evoke and Summon. It can be argued that Tap (Characteristic) fits in here. Most of all, the Abjure family of spells sits firmly here, as does Transfer Wounds.
    Concentrating / Attenuating.
    This is the invocation of Enhance and Diminish Characteristic, Grow and Shrink, Palsy and Smother. This enhances and augments a particular aspect of the target, making it physically larger or smaller, stronger or weaker, and in particular with living beings raising or lowering their characteristics. Spells of healing which boost the target's healing rate come into this category. Spells which weaken the damaging effects of elemental forces, such as making fire less intense, also come into this category.
    Transforming.
    The previous invocations more or less kept the target intact. This level alters the target's fundamental nature, changing features of the target or even remaking the target into something else. This is the level of Sculpt, Transmogrify and Shapechange. Invocations of this type leave the target changed. Some forms of healing magic work at this level, too - their effects are permanent, in that the injury is permanently removed, but such spells cannot prevent the target from acquiring new injuries later on down the line.
    This is also the level of deaging / youth / aging suspension magic, such as the rare Tap (Youth) and Abjure (Aging) spells.
    Creating / Destroying.
    The ultimate invocations, these weave something into existence out of nothing, or conversely rip apart its pattern, causing it to disappear from the world. These invocations work best against inanimate substances, conjuring fire or ice from the air for instance. Workings at this level are rarely cast: lesser spell effects can be used with greater effect. Do you really need to conjure up a wall of ice, for example, when you could transform the water vapour in the air into a wall of ice, or - better yet - create a strong sense of aversion in the mind of a pursuing enemy, simply letting their own minds stop them from crossing into the room you are in?
    Remember: small hinges open big doors. If the goal is to create an avalanche, it might be less effective to unweave a large section of an overhanging snowbank to destabilise it, than to magnify the sound of a gunshot.
    Manifestation
    The second key to your workings is how you wish the working to manifest. Here is where your spells get to look and feel occulty, supernatural, arcane, and scary. Manifestations are how your magician establishes an arcane connection with the target. Some of these manifestations only work at sensory range; others have no range restriction.
    These manifestations always look, sound and feel scary and occult, such as items covered in mystic symbols or daubed in blood. They are meant to be scary. In a modern Mythras game, if your spells are not scary, they aren't magic.
    The process of creating a manifestation is not quick. Even a quick chant could take up a number of combat rounds; and while some workings can be prepared on the fly such as sigils or charms, others can take hours or days to prepare in advance.
    This can be represented by an appropriate skill check, which is listed with each type of manifestation. See "Skills" following.
    Chant
    This is most commonly encountered out in the field. Your character chants something unintelligible, the skies darken, a wind picks up, and weird flames engulf their enemies. Your character must know some chants to intone or sing, which means the magician must be free to speak and to gesture. This manifestation includes use of gestures. (Acting, Dance, Musicianship, Sing, Seduction)
    Sigil
    Your magician takes time to draw a veve, or paint an inscription or diagram on a wall, or to slip a piece of paper inscribed with runes under the target's door. The written word is the medium through which your Will is imposed on the world. (Art, Craft)
    Circle
    More elaborate than a sigil, a full circle takes several minutes at least to draw on the ground, for example in chalk or salt. More permanent circles can be painted onto the ground, taking hours or days to prepare. (Art, Craft)
    Brew
    Something which is consumed, which can be anything from a pinch of something soluble to put in a drink, to a batch of soul cakes, or a well-brewed hearty beer, or a shampoo to rinse into your hair. This can extend to cosmetics, soaps, waxes, powders or candles. The more militarily-inclined might experiment with using Semtex as the consumable medium for somewhat explosive spells. The chalk your magician uses to draw a Circle, for instance, could be infused with a spell in its own right. Brews have a limited lifespan; they must be used fresh. (Craft (Brewery, Cookery, Cosmetics))
    Poppet
    A poppet is an effigy of the target. It can be any size from a small, crude voodoo doll, to a life sized effigy stuffed with straw, with a photo of the target's face stuck to the effigy's "head." Poppets can be used at unlimited range against the target. (Art, Craft)
    Tag
    Another classic occult tactic, tag spells use tissue samples from the target, or pieces of clothing worn by the target. Nail clippings, hair, even blood and teeth, can be used. Tags can be combined with poppets for a greater connection. Tags have a limited lifespan, but can be used at unlimited range against the target. (Craft)
    Declaring Your Working
    When your magician character wants to create a magical working, you need to declare the following to the Games Master.
    - The invocation;
    - The manifestation;
    - The target;
    - The goal;
    - The time taken to prepare the working.
    Magic is going to be a slow process. The necessary gathering of occult materials and forces, the settling into gnosis, all take time. If the ground has been prepared in advance, such as a poppet or tag or circle, then the magician needs only settle into a state of gnosis and, in that state of mind, link together the invocation and the manifestation.
    The following can be used to establish how long it may take for a magician to enter the requisite state of gnosis.

    Magic is a slow process, which seems to have very small effects - but those effects can lead to profound changes. Small hinges open big doors.
    Skills
    The primary skill here is Gnosis (INT + POW). The magician can use this skill to enter a state of gnosis, which enables them to cast their workings. The manifestations of the workings may be prepared ahead of time and carried on the magician's person, such as a sigil or packets of powder for brews, and the magician need only use their chosen method of gnosis (meditation, dance, ingestion of some sort of herb) and take the time to enter the gnostic state.
    If the magician wants to speed up the process, for instance if their Gnosis skill is 56% and they want to enter gnosis within 1d6 combat rounds rather than 1d6 minutes) they can accept an increased grade of difficulty in the Gnosis check for each step down the table. In the above case, they need to accept two grades of difficulty to be able to enter gnosis in 1d6 combat rounds, rather than 1d6 minutes.
    Once the magician has entered a state of gnosis, they remain in that state for the duration of the encounter, unless they are injured or they choose to leave the state of gnosis.
    Once they have entered gnosis, the magician can use pre-prepared manifestations (such as a brew or a sigil) with a time of 1 combat round to cast.
    The skill used to prepare the manifestation is important. Optionally, the magician may make an appropriate skill check to create the manifestation in advance. If the check is a fail or a fumble, the manifestation is of insufficient quality to create a link; the working automatically fails. If the check is a critical success, the manifestation actually makes the Gnosis skill check at the beginning of the encounter one grade easier.
    Magic Points?
    This setting does not need Magic Points. Your magician characters don't need to spend, or recover, Magic Points from doing workings. The act of magical creation to make the manifestations attracts sufficient power from the universe to make the workings viable when cast.
    Shrine, Temple, or Laboratory
    Depending on your character's tradition, they may set up a sacred space to study and prepare the manifestations, and to meditate and practice their chants. Within their sacred space, whether it be a shrine, a Temple, a Lodge, or a Laboratory, all Gnosis checks are one grade easier. The environment is designed to make it easier to enter a gnostic state quickly and more deeply. It is in a state of gnosis that the inspirations come to create new invocations, and new manifestations.
    Grimoires
    Each new invocation developed by the magician can be written down in a Grimoire. Specific workings (specific invocation and specific manifestation) can be written down as Rotes; these can be prepared in advance, and always take 1 Combat Round to cast regardless of whether the magician is in a state of gnosis or not.
    The magician can remember a number of Rotes up to their INT score. Anything beyond that will require that they gain access to the required Rote from their Grimoire (requiring 1d6 Combat Rounds to access, then 1 Combat Round to cast).
    Rote descriptions must include the following - Invocation; Manifestation; Goal. If the Manifestation requires difficult-to-obtain materials, such as Semtex, heroin, gold, uranium, or some endangered wild flower, these should be written down as well as possible substitutes such as parsley for cannabis.
    Experience Rolls
    Creating Rotes requires one Experience Roll per new Rote created. Learning a new invocation requires 2 Experience Rolls. Learning a new manifestation requires 2 Experience Rolls. New invocations and manifestations each require 1 month of study. If there is a teacher, their Teach skill can reduce the time to learn by 10% times the critical range of the teacher's Teach skill.
    A Peek Into The Grimoire
    Next week, we'll look through the magician's Grimoire and list some workings, including their invocations and manifestations, as well as the kinds of goals and targets they are expected to have.
  2. Alex Greene
    I thought I wouldn't get into magic systems in my Modern Mythras blogs, but recently I've been watching some old classic movies such as The Devil Rides Out and The Wicker Man, and they reminded me of something which can have its place in a modern Mythras setting.
    The Occult.
    Here's the thing. Magic systems in all roleplaying games suffer from one plain, boring fact.
    They aren't magic.
    I mean it. Nothing since the original TTRPG has ever come close to the heart stopping terrors of real world occult practices. It's all just been a list of "spells" which might as well be comic book superpowers. Your "magic man" is just someone who's carrying a list of special effects, which might look good if this were a Hollywood movie with a big SFX budget and a couple of supercomputers to whip up the CGI.
    But this is a roleplaying game, and real magic comes from the imagination. So should the magic in these games.
    The Occult And Horror
    Magic comes from occult sources, and the occult is serious business. If it isn't scary, it isn't magic or you're not doing it right.
    The Occult and Power
    Magic should be a tool used by people who seek power, whether as protagonists or as antagonists.
    Magic and The Magus
    The four pillars of magical practice, the Four Powers of The Magus, are - To Know; To Will; To Dare; and To Be Silent  - or Velle (to Will), Audere (to Dare), Scire (to Know), Tacere (to Keep Silent) in the original Latin.
    To Know acknowledges that Magic is a process of self-knowledge. The goal of the Magus, Witch, or other practitioner is Knowledge, because Knowledge Is Power.
    To Will means to have the wherewithal, the desire, to apply the magic to the world.
    To Dare means to go beyond what people are expected to do, to transcend the ordinary experience in pursuit of the extraordinary.
    To Keep Silent means to keep one's counsel and secrets, and not just blurt out everything to every rando.
    Magic and Lifestyle
    To be a magician doesn't mean that you get to fling around fireballs. Magic is an unconventional lifestyle. It means being an exceptionally knowledgeable nerd type who dresses weird, often has bizarre dreams, and plays musical instruments like ocarinas.
    Magicians don't go along the roads that magical characters do in fantasy novels - there are no "ice sorcerers," "darkness sorcerers," "machine mages" or "shadow witches" in the real world, only practitioners. Some may style themselves witches, sorcerers, but a lot call themselves occultists. Few people actually take on official titles such as wizard, vitki, magus, druid and so on, and these are usually of cultural significance.
    Magic and Mystique
    With a practitioner, there is usually something a little bit more to them. There's always something up their sleeve. You cannot be better than a half-assed thaumaturge if you show everybody your tricks.
    WHether your magician is a protagonist or an antagonist, there has always got to be a sense of something hidden behind the scenes; something concealed; something they don't want you to know. If, at any time, a magician is completely exposed, they instinctively wrap themselves in the shadows of ignorance to cloak themselves from too much scrutiny.
    Magic and Mental Toughness
    Magicians and other occult practitioners tend to look unflinchingly at the reality of the world. It shows in their eyes. There's a light burning behind them which is usually only a reflection of what they are seeing.
    That makes them less likely to feel ordinary levels of fear. Fear of death, public speaking, nudity - they never seem to bother practitioners.
    Not even bad dreams bother them, which is a sign of something. What it is a sign of, I leave you to imagine.
    Magic and Mind Control
    The Power of Suggestion is always a powerful tool at the disposal of practitioners. Hypnotic language, gestures, use of spiral patterns, mandalas, even herbs, music or mystical arts: whatever is at hand, magicians will learn to use with great effect.
    Easirt to convince a person to run indoors because they believe it is going to rain, than to spend hours unbalancing thermal columns of rising air over a nearby body of water to actually induce rain.
    Magic and Mundanity
    Practitioners may find that their magic works along the most boring, ordinary, mundane lines. Demons do not pop up out of thin air into that magic circle; streams of rainbow coloured lights do not fly from the mage's fingers; and walls of fire don't pop up at the snap of the fingers. Yet they still accomplish strange, often beautiful, and frequently terrifying effects through sheer coincidence: a mist might descend over an area to obscure the magician and their companions, or lightning strike the exact tree under which the magician's enemy was hiding.
    Magic and Modernity
    Modern practitioners do a lot with little nowadays, and what they can do is astonishingly impressive if they are attuned to the modern milieu and expectations. A practitioner could use a mobile phone to cast a spell ("Like to charge; retweet to cast") or to carry around their grimoire of known, rote-codified spells. Rituals can be held online, to great effect because they can involve masses far greater than one can squeeze physically into a tiny little room.
    Magic and Modern Mythras
    To see what sorts of spells, workings, charms, talismans, divinations and so on can be incorporated into a modern Mythras game, tune in next week where we will be opening the Grimoire of the Modern Mage for Mythras.
  3. Alex Greene
    Roleplaying game adventures have been shown to benefit greatly from structuring them like stories. This has not always been the case. The earliest released tabletop RPG scenarios have been straightforward "dungeon delves," where the characters have focused their attention on purely tactical concerns such as the effectiveness of their combat skills, the optimisation of the damage they inflict, and so on.
    Structuring an adventure like a story allows you to run individual dungeon delves - or, in the case of modern games, tactical missions to take some physical objective such as a warehouse, an office under siege, or the location of a heist - as part of something greater. They give such combat scenarios context.
    The structure we are addressing here is the Three Act Story.
    In the case of modern Mythras games, adventures which come in the form of a three act story allow the Games Master the luxury of being able to design tactical missions to occupy entire sessions within the story. The story structure of the adventure adds context to such tactical combat-related pursuits, because their place within the story has meaning.
    Three Acts, Nine Beats
    The three-act structure is divided into smaller stages. At each stage, progress is made within the adventure. Decisions are made, characters learn things, and there is rising action and tension right up to the final confrontation.
    Between the acts, there are major turning points. These feel like reversals, and in fact they are. Sometimes, the reversals feel like almost complete defeat for the characters. And yet, despite being crushed by the bad guys, the characters manage to rally around and bring the fight back to the antagonist - and either win, or in the case of escape or rescue scenarios - survive.
    Act One: The Setup
    Act One sets up the characters, their background, and the story.
    Exposition
    At the start of a story or campaign, this is Session Zero, chargen and character building. This part of the adventure establishes who the characters are, what they value, what motivates them, and what they want. You’ll also use this beat to paint a clear picture of your characters' world. What’s your normal? What challenges do they face? Who’s important to them?
    Inciting Incident
    This is the event that sets the adventure in motion. The inciting incident presents your party with a decision.
    The adventure type is established at this point. It could be espionage, a romance, a chase, a rescue, a heist - this is where you lay out for the players what they will be doing in the next few sessions.
    This beat forces your characters to make a decision that will alter the course of their life.
    Plot Point One
    This is the moment when your characters actually commit to the adventure presented by the inciting incident.
    Plot Point One can happen immediately after the inciting incident. Or you can give your characters time to cling to their comfort zone, ignore the decision, or receive guidance from a mentor. This requires adding in a scene containing an encounter. If they choose to ignore the encounter, up the stakes. Involve a loved one. Entangle them in the very core of the adventure. Or you could have the antagonist make their presence known, as if to warn the characters of the consequence of ignoring them.
    In the end, they must make a clear, decisive choice. And make it obvious that the decision will set your characters’ path in a whole new direction.
    Act Two: Confrontation
    This act is the reason for the adventure. This is where you pay off the promise of the first act. Here is where the adventure, mishaps, hard-learned lessons, and budding relationships come to the characters.
    Rising Action
    Here, you introduce the characters to a world or experience that is completely different from everything they know.
    Introduce new allies and enemies. Nail your characters with obstacles that expose their weaknesses and challenge their assumptions. Expand on the central conflict and help your reader get to know the antagonist better.
    The greatest source of tension is the unknown. It’s not really about beating the final boss, because your characters just started the level. Right now, they’re dodging the bullets and learning the rules of the world.
    In a fantasy adventure, here is the perfect place to install a dungeon delve. This part of the adventure is where a chunk of the tactical action takes place - your characters are raiding a suspected drug den, maybe you're hunting down a nest of vampires (if you're borrowing from After The Vampire Wars) or fighting off Disruptors (if you're running a Luther Arkwright scenario).
    Midpoint
    This part is smack in the middle of the adventure. Here is where you add a major event, discovery, or twist that points your characters in a more dangerous direction. In fact, this should be the most dangerous obstacle your characters has faced yet.
    Of course, the definition of “danger” depends on the nature of your story. Your rom-com heroine doesn’t need to spearhead a drug bust or avenge her mentor’s death. It’s enough for her fake dating scheme to turn into an all-too-real engagement scheme.
    In the case of, say, an Escape adventure, here is the scene where the characters' attempts to pick the lock on the door seems to succeed, only for them to discover that behind the door lies a brick wall.
    The antagonist may seem to have won, and the characters' plans look to be utterly defeated. In an espionage game, the characters are surrounded by gun-toting thugs or knocked out by the villain who released gas into the room to incapacitate them. In the case of a rescue mission, this is the bit where the xenomorph snatches away little Newt just before Ripley can reach her. In the case of a mystery, the characters discover their prime suspect dead, and they are back to square one with all of the clues they have gathered turning out to be red herrings.
    Plot Point Two
    Your characters prepare for the danger ahead. This could mean training, gathering advice, personal reflection, a solid pep talk, or even a period of denial and avoidance.
    Whatever preparation looks like for your characters, this beat should reflect their growth. This is the moment when they go from reactive to proactive.
    But this is the part of the adventure where the characters confront their Dark Night of The Soul. This could be the part of the story where the antagonist flexes their muscles and shows their full force, or the full extent of their menace.
    This part of the adventure is intended to make the characters, and by that I mean the players, feel despair at the scale of the task ahead of them. Time, then, to wrap up the session and, the next time, open with ...
    Act Three: Resolution
    The final three beats of this story, this is where the beleaguered characters rally around, gather their resources, even level up. If this is the end of a campaign, you are allowed to give them as many Experience Rolls as they need to complete their character progression.
    Regrouping and Gathering Resources
    Build their skills as far as they can go. Resolve all conflicts existing between characters and their Connections (Allies, Contacts, family, lovers, loved ones, even Rivals). Gather your strength. The final stages of the conflict are upon you.
    By this stage, the characters will have confronted all their fears and weaknesses. The antagonist will not be able to attack them through those flaws again.
    They can’t win this battle without facing their fears, acknowledging their weaknesses, and confronting the false belief that has been holding them back. And let’s be real: that’s a lot of things to have to do in a pinch. So it’s not looking good.
    ‍Climax
    The hero gets to their feet as dramatic music plays. Their Starship emerges from Spacedock as triumphant music swells, but it's bittersweet because everybody knows she is not coming back from this one last mission.
    In the climax, your character uses the lessons they’ve learned and their natural strengths, old and new, to make a mighty comeback and claim victory.
    The climax is usually a one-scene situation, especially in thrillers, adventures, and mysteries. But it doesn’t have to be. If it fits your story and genre, the climax can unfold over a few scenes.
    Denouement
    This is the time to release the remaining tension. The denouement is the final beat where you tie up loose ends, restate the theme, and demonstrate your characters’ transformation. Whether it is a continuing adventure or the end of a campaign, the characters return to their pre-adventure existence, laughing and joking on the Bridge of the ship as it sails off towards some nebula, or riding along in the back of the van with the people they'd rescued, or emerging from the courthouse to see the villain being hauled off in chains.
    Wrap up the adventure, take your notes, assign Experience Rolls - or if this is the finale, thank your players.
    Just remember the one most important lesson about storytelling -

    Give your adventures a three-act structure. The individual details of what goes on during the adventures may deviate from your script as written, but the structure of your story, the challenges and obstacles you place between the characters and their victory, will make the players feel that every part of the ride - highs and lows - was worth it.
    And if you do your job well, they may come back to play many more adventures, and/or recount the thrilling tales of their characters' exploits to others. Give them what they want, and they'll all live happily ever after.
  4. Alex Greene
    Character generation can be done in a number of ways. One of them involves the tables listed in Mythras Core - including the Background Events and Family tables - but there is another method.
    Lifepaths.
    Originally created for Traveller, Lifepaths - which were focused on careers in that 2D sfrpg - can be useful methods to allow a character to develop a little history to them, beyond the Background Event table (a modern version was published last week in this blog).
    Each Lifepath should be unique for each character. They indicate the path the character's life took from around age 14 or some arbitrary age. 14 is the default, because it includes the last four years of one's formative memories - their strongest, most life-changing ones.
    The years during which your character lost their childhood, and became the adult they are in play.
    Dice Needed
    You'll only need a d6 or a d10 for these tables.
    Starting Play
    Roll on the Family tables in Mythras Core to establish your character's family as they were at age 14. If you don't fancy that, consider just creating your own family from scratch, or deciding that your kid had been in the system for some reason (and you get to pick that reason, whether it involved your character losing your parents, or the State intervening to pull you away from an otherwise chaotic life).
    The First Four Years
    These are times for childhood sweethearts, or childhood enemies. If your character went to school, these are times of facing down the schoolyard bully, of boring lessons, or of skipping school altogether and spending your days kicking around the back alleys or back country, losing yourself to the streets or the land.


    Passions
    Here's where you can choose your Passions, as described in Mythras Core.
    Culture and Career
    At this stage, you can choose your character's Culture and Career, as described in Mythras Core.
    Values

    Lifepath Events
     
    Once a year from age 14, roll on the table below to see what happens each year till the time your character enters play.






    Cash Table
    Starting cash is just that - the amount of money your character can call upon, in the form of an independent income, once they enter play. This cash is a liquid asset. Property, vehicles, and material goods such as weaponry, jewellery and so on, do not count - this is income the character does not have to convert from some other source, e.g. selling off heirlooms.
    This cash can represent a steady income from a job which requires minimal attendance, a trust fund, interest from a lottery win, or ill-gotten gains from some low-maintenance scheme which just runs itself such as blue chip investments in the stock market.
    Roll 1d10 twice, once for the Cash Tabls column and once on the Level of Wealth column. If you rolled "enough to live on for 1d6+6 weeks," you'd have a bit less cash on hand if you were Middle Working Class, than if you'd rolled "enough to live on for 1d6+6 weeks" and you'd rolled "Upper Class, Bottom Rung."

    Entering Play
    As Games Master, you are encouraged to get the players to develop new Allies and Contacts during play, and to make sure they roll on the Cash and Level of Wealth table.
    Don't forget to ask them to complete the final step - to describe their characters' name and general appearance. Round it off by letting the players describe what they'd expect to find in the character's pockets, and with that you are good to go.
    Next Week
    Starting Play in Modern Mythras requires an Inciting Incident. Next week, we'll go through the Three Act Structure which informs play from the small scale (adventures) to the grand scale (campaigns).
  5. Alex Greene
    Let's look into your characters' back stories.
    There is a point to looking into the back history of the player characters in a modern setting. Backgrounds can set stakes for the Games Master to leverage; but they can also serve to ground the player characters in the setting, making them part of the setting, belonging to the story.
    Here is a modernised version of the Background Events Table from Mythras Core. These are for inspiration purposes. You can either pick, or roll, your background event. The table is broken up, but it's all one d100 table.










    There is so much potential for character development. Mythras Core has an extensive set of background tables for generating family connections, to deepen your characters' origins. I'd recommend familiarising yourself with those tables on page 25. Though look at pages 21-24, as well - there is a lot of material there which can be used in a modern campaign without modification.
    We'll be looking at adopting a technique pioneered by Traveller in the next blog: Lifepaths.
  7. Alex Greene
    Imagine, now, a chargen session from a fairly standard fantasy roleplaying game. Pseudo-mediaeval background, all swords and horses, the bad guy's a sorcerer who wears a silk frock and lives in a tower at the edge of the country, they always look like this guy -

    and has Wrack:-

    and we need serious characters to take this guy seriously.
    So here's the conversation.
    Player: Okay, that's the characteristics and attributes rolled, er, culture, profession, skills, oh yeah and Combat Styles.
    GM: Yeah, I recall you spent an awful lot of time choosing those Combat Styles.
    Player: They're the best balance of cultural aesthetic and stopping power.
    GM: I got you. Now, Passions.
    Player: Forget that.
    GM: Doesn't your character care for anybody? Hate anybody?
    Player: Yeah, I, er, hate that bad guy. The Wrack sorcerer one in the frock.
    GM: No, not that. I meant someone in your past -
    Player: Yeah, okay, that guy with the pornstache once drove by me on a rainy day and splashed me, and that's why I want to cut his head off -
    GM: Okay, that's a bit dark, but do you have folks back home, a childhood sweetheart, anything?
    Player: Nah, I'm good. Let's get to the tower so I can start slaughtering monsters.
    This might sound familiar to some of you. Some Games Masters might be guilty of letting this sort of thing ride because their games are all just dungeons through which the characters roll, slaughtering creatures indiscriminately.
    Games set in a modern world aren't like that.
    Note: I'll be referencing some of Lightspress Media's sourcebooks for their DoubleZero game. It's set in a modern world, and characters in this setting need to rely on their wits and skills alone. No access to supernatural abilities or powers to save the day. You can take the settings and just port them right into Mythras without needing to tweak any systems, because the game is pretty much light enough, rules wise, that you can run the game using the Mythras Core Rulebook or Mythras Imperative, though Mythras Firearms and Mythras Companion would be really handy to have also.
    Stakes
    Stakes are things or people who are important to the player characters. They may be loved ones, offspring, family members, pets, friends and so on. Other stakes include one's reputation and honour; money; freedom; and even, in some cases, lives.
    Here's what game designer Berin Kinsman of Lightspress Media has to offer about stakes in DoubleZero: Mystery:-
    Stakes are the potential risks or consequences that the player characters face in an adventure. The stakes can be personal, such as the loss of a loved one or the damage to the player characters' reputation, or they can be societal, such as the continuation of a crime wave or the loss of innocent lives. They might be more global, like saving the world or preventing a disaster. Stakes help to create tension and suspense in a story, and can make the players care about the outcome. High stakes also make a character's choices and actions more meaningful, and drive the plot forward.
    That book offers the following stakes for mystery genre adventures:-
    The life of the victim
    In many mystery adventures, the victim's life is at stake and the player characters must solve the mystery to save them. This should create a sense of urgency and pressure. It can motivate them to keep working and to overcome any obstacles that they encounter.

    The safety of others
    In some cases, the stakes in a mystery adventure might be the safety of others, such as the victim's loved ones or the general public. If the culprit is not brought to justice, they might continue to pose a threat to others. The player characters must solve the mystery to protect those at risk.
    The reputation of the player characters
    The stakes might be the reputation of the player characters, who are trying to prove their worth. If they fail to solve the mystery, they might lose the respect and trust of others. They must overcome this obstacle to achieve their goals.
    One other stake, not mentioned in that book:-
    Proof of Innocence
    In many mystery dramas, the police scoop up the wrong suspect for murder, and it is up to the player characters to uncover the clues to prevent this innocent third party going down for a crime they did not commit. Even if the innocents are the characters themselves.
    The stakes are somewhat different in a game themed around romance (such as Lightspress Media's genre book Romance):-
    In a romance story, the stakes are often related to the development and success of the romantic relationship between the player characters. Some common stakes include:
    • The potential for the couple to achieve their happily ever after and find fulfillment and happiness in their relationship
    • The risk of the couple breaking up or experiencing a tragic ending if they are unable to overcome the challenges and obstacles that stand in their way
    • The impact of the couple's actions and decisions on their personal lives and the lives of those around them, such as friends and family members
    • The potential for the couple to grow and learn as individuals and as a couple, and to become better people as a result of their experiences in the romance.
    Overall, the stakes in a romantic adventure often revolve around the potential consequences and rewards of the couple's actions and decisions, and the impact that these have on their relationship and their personal lives.
    The first big setting for DoubleZero, the spy setting Licensed, has these stakes:-
    BETRAYAL OF TRUST
    Deceiving and betraying others can have serious stakes for both the player characters and the people they interact with. They may be forced to lie and manipulate others to complete their mission, but this can also lead to mistrust and alienation from those they care about. The player characters may also be deceived and betrayed by others, which can put them in danger and complicate their mission. In some cases, the stakes of deception and betrayal can be life and death, as characters may be willing to do anything to protect their interests and survive.
    ENEMIES WIN
    If the player characters fail to achieve their goals, their enemies can achieve their own goals, which could have serious consequences for the player characters, their organization, or the world at large.
    EXPOSURE OR CAPTURE
    If the player characters are discovered by their enemies, they may face severe punishment or even death. Being exposed can also compromise the success of their mission and put others at risk. They must constantly be on guard and take steps to avoid being discovered, such as using disguises and false identities. If they are captured, the player characters must use their wits and training to escape and continue their mission or face the consequences of failure.
    FAIL THE MISSION
    The mission may be of critical importance to the player characters' country or organization, and failure could have dire consequences. They may face personal repercussions for their failure, such as being fired or punished. In some cases, the stakes of failing may be global, as the mission could have far-reaching effects on international relations and world events. The player characters must therefore do everything in their power to succeed.
    INJURY OR DEATH
    Player characters may be trained in combat and other forms of self-defense, but they are still at risk. This can have serious consequences for them, as well as for their mission and those they are working for. They may be willing to sacrifice their safety to complete the mission and protect others. The threat of injury or death adds tension and suspense to the story, as the players wonder if their characters will survive and succeed.
    LOSS OF RELATIONSHIPS
    The player characters' work might also put their personal relationships at risk, such as causing strain on their family or romantic relationships, or causing them to lose friends or allies.
    LOSS OF REPUTATION
    The player characters may be working for a government agency or organization that values its reputation and standing in the international community. If they fail their mission or are exposed, it could damage the reputation of the organization and undermine its ability to operate effectively. They may also face personal repercussions, such as being ostracized or losing the trust of their superiors. The threat of loss of reputation adds another layer of tension to the story, as the player characters must strive to protect their reputation and that of their organization.
    PERSONAL HARM
    The player characters might also face personal harm or injury as they carry out their missions, such as physical injury, psychological trauma, or death.
    PROFESSIONAL CONSEQUENCES
    If the player characters fail to complete their mission, they might face consequences such as being fired, demoted, or punished by their superiors. They might also face the failure of their mission to achieve their intended goals, which could have serious consequences for their organization or for global security.
    Stakes and The Modern Mythras Game
    Before plunging into a Mythras game set in the modern world, it is a good idea to look at the stakes involved. Perhaps something in the characters' backgrounds, Cultures, Professions, or of course Passions, can supply you with something or someone they can care about. Something which will prompt them to become embroiled in the story, entangled in it, and perhaps even cause them to want to take risks to save people they love, or to block efforts of Rivals and Enemies before they cause damage to their reputations, for instance.
    Look to the above examples, for instance. Your characters should have something to protect - a resource, a loved one, their name. Those stakes should be at risk of being jeopardised at some points in the campaign. The characters must do something to prevent some awful loss from happening, which would set them back big time.
    Having a stake in the game allows you, the Games Master, to use them as a central part of the Turning Points for Acts I and II of your stories or campaigns. More about that later.
    Where to get those stakes?
    A good place to generate loved ones or more abstract connections and entanglements to complicate the characters' lives is through background events. We'll be coming to that in the next post.
  8. Alex Greene
    Let's look at Backgrounds in our modern Mythras game.
    What do Backgrounds look like in the main Mythras game? Let's look at the Core Rulebook.
    Background Events
    Background Events are notable things that have happened in the character’s life before he began his career as an adventurer. Some are formative; some are fortunate and some are unfortunate. Background Events are optional, but using them adds to the character’s history, and can be used by creative players and Games Masters as hooks for scenarios or even complete campaigns.
    If using Background Events you may feel free to choose an event that appeals or roll randomly. Random rolls may produce very interesting, but potentially conflicting results. If a roll is not to your liking or seriously disrupts the idea and concept you have for your character then do re-roll the event. Background Events should enrich the character – not disrupt it.
    If your starting character is older than the Mythras standard, then you may gain multiple rolls on this table (see Age, page 31). If you roll a result twice, re-roll one of the results. If two results contradict each other either discard both and roll again, or agree with the Games Master how best to make both results work together.
    Background events uniquely define a character, because they reflect their different paths, the roads down which they travelled to get to where they are. Unlike Mythras Core, based in a fantastic world, the modern milieu can be far more dependent on a person's background because they root the character to their culture, and they can inform the other players and Games Master on how the character is likely to react to a crisis.
    An example of a person whose background is important is a character, Velvy Schur, from the 2023 season of a long-running BBC TV show, Silent Witness, which focuses on a team of forensic pathologists. Velvy Schur came to the show early in January 2023, at the start of their 26th season, as a young, eager pathologist who is eager to learn everything about the world.
    Velvy Schur comes from an Orthodox Jewish background. According to the back story, Velvy has been shunned by his strict family, and has spent several episodes finding his place in a more secular world.
    There is an article on Velvy Schur here. The character is played by actor Alastair Michael, who says that his character has brought a greater understanding of his own Jewishness to his personal life. On a personal note, I wish the actor much success in his journey, and I love his portrayal of a man bereft of his culture, questing to find a new home and fam, and also to find a connection to his past despite the severance which clearly burns like an open wound.
    I've been tempted to create a Modern Background Events table, but there are some really good tables in The Design Mechanism's roleplaying game Destined. They may need a little tweaking.
    Maybe there'll be something for you soon, right here on this blog.
    Backstory
    Backgrounds are why, for instance, two soldier player characters, both born on the same day, coming from the same neighbourhood, with the same characteristics, skills, and Passions, right down to the Combat Styles, can still be totally different persons.
    One might have been born and raised in relative prosperity, to a loving family of soldiers where several generations of the family served with honour and distinction. Character A might be a really good soldier, even officer material - but they may be labouring under a heavy burden of expectation from their family that they will be following in their parent's footsteps.
    Character B might be born into an immigrant family, a second generation citizen who loves the country they were born into, and became a soldier to serve and protect that country and, by extension, all of the people from their parents' culture who were given a home there. They may even be a soldier to take the fight to the country from which their parents once came, to help put down the insurgents who drove their folks out of their homeland in the first place.
    Different backgrounds - different reasons for being in that uniform.
    I know, there was a bit of real world politics there. But modern Mythras does have the risk of politics coming into it, and yes, it can be polarising; but this allows each player to bring something to the gaming table that a fantasy scenario in some far-off shared world or galaxy far away cannot have.
    Backgrounds allow the players the chance to tell stories about their own selves, their own backgrounds and cultures. And they allow players a chance to explore what the backgrounds mean to them.
    This gives them a stake in their characters and their development, and what happens to them. And stakes bring meaning to any game. The higher the stakes, the greater the meaning. And meaning brings immersion, which adds to the enjoyment of the game.
    We'll explore this theme further, next week.
  9. Alex Greene
    One topic has been dominating gaming for the past few weeks. I thought I'd drop a short blog post to address this situation.
    OGL 1.1.
    On a personal note, this matter bothers me. As a gamer, Games Master, and product developer, I quite enjoy the whole experience of gaming. I've been using roleplaying games to explore all manner of topics, from diplomacy to sexuality to, frankly, NSFW stuff which I have kept away from public consumption.
    Many of the games I enjoy carry the OGL license at the back, and it does bother me that some scumbags are trying to rip up protections which had been ringfenced by the old license.
    Then Paizo came along with this announcement.
    You can go and read it on their website, but there are highlights I can share with you tonight.
    For the last several weeks, as rumors of Wizards of the Coast’s new version of the Open Game License began circulating among publishers and on social media, gamers across the world have been asking what Paizo plans to do in light of concerns regarding Wizards of the Coast’s rumored plan to de-authorize the existing OGL 1.0(a). We have been awaiting further information, hoping that Wizards would realize that, for more than 20 years, the OGL has been a mutually beneficial license which should not–and cannot–be revoked. While we continue to await an answer from Wizards, we strongly feel that Paizo can no longer delay making our own feelings about the importance of Open Gaming a part of the public discussion.
    We believe that any interpretation that the OGL 1.0 or 1.0(a) were intended to be revocable or able to be deauthorized is incorrect, and with good reason.
    We were there.
    Shots fired.
    The announcement continues.
    Paizo does not believe that the OGL 1.0a can be “deauthorized,” ever. While we are prepared to argue that point in a court of law if need be, we don’t want to have to do that, and we know that many of our fellow publishers are not in a position to do so.
    And then Paizo drops the mic.
    We have no interest whatsoever in Wizards’ new OGL. Instead, we have a plan that we believe will irrevocably and unquestionably keep alive the spirit of the Open Game License.
    As Paizo has evolved, the parts of the OGL that we ourselves value have changed. When we needed to quickly bring out Pathfinder First Edition to continue publishing our popular monthly adventures back in 2008, using Wizards’ language was important and expeditious. But in our non-RPG products, including our Pathfinder Tales novels, the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and others, we shifted our focus away from D&D tropes to lean harder into ideas from our own writers. By the time we went to work on Pathfinder Second Edition, Wizards of the Coast’s Open Game Content was significantly less important to us, and so our designers and developers wrote the new edition without using Wizards’ copyrighted expressions of any game mechanics. While we still published it under the OGL, the reason was no longer to allow Paizo to use Wizards’ expressions, but to allow other companies to use our expressions.
    We believe, as we always have, that open gaming makes games better, improves profitability for all involved, and enriches the community of gamers who participate in this amazing hobby. And so we invite gamers from around the world to join us as we begin the next great chapter of open gaming with the release of a new open, perpetual, and irrevocable Open RPG Creative License (ORC).
    Paizo then patiently outlines what this means.
    The new Open RPG Creative License will be built system agnostic for independent game publishers under the legal guidance of Azora Law, an intellectual property law firm that represents Paizo and several other game publishers. Paizo will pay for this legal work. We invite game publishers worldwide to join us in support of this system-agnostic license that allows all games to provide their own unique open rules reference documents that open up their individual game systems to the world. To join the effort and provide feedback on the drafts of this license, please sign up by using this form.
    The closing lines offer hope to us all.
    We’ll be there at your side. You can count on us not to go back on our word.
    Forever.
    We haven't heard from many other game publishers. Stellagama Publishing are working on a contingency plan. At least one game publisher has sworn to drop the OGL document from their future core rulebooks and supplements.
    Lightspress Games, one of my favourite publishers outside of TDM, has released a book, for free, as Public Domain. You can use terms found in Berin Kinsman's book Open Glossary and use this book as a reference in your own published fantasy adventure modules. Being public domain, terms such as "good" and "chaotic" and "dragon" can be drawn from Open Glossary. I recommend adding a link to the book on DriveThruRPG in your own works.
    Here's the link.
    The whole OGL mess has not ended. As of the time of posting, it's only just begun. But between Paizo and other publishers, including ones who jumped in behind Paizo such as Chaosium, it's not hopeless.
    I'll get back to talking about Mythras next week. I mean, unless someone else does a Wizards all over the gaming industry.
  10. Alex Greene
    So I'm back, with more ramblings on modern day Mythras. This first post of 2023 is short. Here's a summary of some of what's to come this year.
    Backgrounds - Where your character comes from is as important as where they are now.
    Lifepaths - An option, creating your characters through a lifepath a la Traveller.
    Origins - Borrowing from Scott Crowder's option for character generation as presented in M-Space Companion.
    The Arcane - Exploring different paths of occult power, including looking at sourcebooks from M-Space, Luther Arkwright and even Destined.
    All these are to come in 2023. Stay on this frequency.
  12. Alex Greene

    Festive Break

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    I'm taking a break over Yuletide.
    The last post for this year goes live tomorrow, Sunday, December 18, at 22:00. There will be no posts on December 24 or December 31.
    This blog will come back on the air again on January 7, 2023.
    Yuletide Blessings and a Happy 2023 to you all!
  13. Alex Greene
    Theoretically, you can run an entire Mythras Modern game based solely on your characters' Passions. In this article, we'll be looking at Passions, and how they can apply to the modern Mythras setting.
    Passion Plays
    So many stories can be driven by Passions, and not just the Adventurers'. A man can be driven by obsession to pursue his ex, and the Adventurers have to protect her from his violent pursuits. The Adventurers could be among the passengers of a flight which is hijacked by terrorists. Or they may be hired to escort a young prodigy to a performance, despite the youngster's reluctance to be parted from her fresh new girlfriend ... whereupon the characters may find that the prodigy's parents have a less than wholesome ulterior motive behind this mission.
    Whole adventures and even campaigns can be driven by a desire for something, a fear of something or someone to be overcome, or simply the wish to do the right thing ... even if the right thing is not immediately obvious.
    As has been pointed out in a previous post, your character should pick three Passions. One should be central to your character's Career, one should be a Passion which keeps pulling the character away from the day job (and propels them into adventures), and the third one could be either positive or, more likely, negative.
    A character who has a wife and kid back home might have Love (Family) as their third motivator, but Thrillseeker in the third slot would be far more interesting, not to mention painting the character as a bit of a deadbeat.
    Hamartia
    As much as characters like to be seen by their players as invincible, it is far more interesting to give them a hamartia, tied to at least one Passion - such as a family for the thrillseeker.
    A hamartia is a fatal flaw - a common device in fiction. Superman's hamartias are Kryptonite, magic, light from a red sun, and the normal humans whom he calls his friends. Other superheroes have their hamartias, and not the green rocks kind - often, their weakness would be their secret identity being compromised, or some villain using a loved one as leverage, and so on.
    A character's hamartia can even be a personal flaw, such as alcoholism, or being a daredevil and thrillseeker, always being drawn to the high-risk activities such as BASE jumping off the tops of skyscrapers or breaching security at Area 51 to see if there really are advanced stealth planes retrofitted with captured alien technology, or even real aliens, dead or alive.
    If the character follows their hamartia Passion, they could get into some sort of trouble. It could be any kind of trouble - with the law, or with one's family, or with organised crime, or similar.
    However, there should always be some sort of payoff - the thrill of discovery, the endorphin rush of surviving that BASE jump, and so on - to make the risk totally worth it.
    Driving Passion
    In 2022, Renegade rebooted the old World of Darkness game Hunter: the Reckoning. In this reboot, Hunters are Driven: their central driving Passion lends them dice to succeed in tasks which would be impossible otherwise. In this setting, their Drive would probably offset the Difficulties of skill checks, much like a Passion can be used to augment a normal skill, such as an engineer's Passion of Fix Anything augmenting their Mechanic skill. Perhaps the Intensity of their Passion could augment the relevant skill in the same way as the Augment Skill Talent of Mystics from Mythras Core.
    Your characters could likewise be driven by their highest Passion. It could just as easily lead them to victory as to trouble - a character who has a Passion linked to a grand vision he received in a dream could succeed by means of that Passion more than his skills - "if you build it, they will come," and so on.
    The Driving Passion should really be something which gives the character hope; give them a reason to get up off the floor when they have been beaten down; give them a reason to live.
    Each player should think carefully about what that Driving Passion could be, or should be. And tie in their other two Passions, and even their Career and Skills, to that Passion, since it is likely to be this Passion which sent the character off in the direction of that Career in the first place.
    A Passionate Life
    Your character should be passionate. They should be fired up to do things their peers cannot, and will not. Whatever draws the characters towards fires and fights, or has them standing in the open air under the roiling storm clouds with lightning flashing all around them, should be one of the most powerful motive forces in their life.
    Even if the Passion is something more prosaic and less adventurous such as Master My Field Of (Career) or Become (Ruler Of Some Corporation), it should be something the character acknowledges as integral to their lives, and the force behind their greatest successes ... and their most embarrassing failures and defeats.
    Because it's all totally worth it, no matter the cost. And that's all part of the price they pay for living lives of Adventure.
  14. Alex Greene

    Mythras Modern - Combat

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    This week's blog post looks at combat. Frankly, this is my opportunity to review Mythras Firearms.

    Modern Combat
    In the modern world, "combat" typically means "armed conflict," which is synonymous with "firefight."

    Mythras Firearms
    This title was probably the most - coveted Mythras supplement in 2021.

    What does Mythras Firearms teach you?

    What do you think are the most useful skills in modern combat scenarios? Curiously enough, Combat Styles are at the bottom of this list.
    In order, the most useful skills have got to be:-
    - Perception: you need to be able to be aware of your surroundings. Clear those corners. Check those angles. Work out where the vantage points are, particularly in a built up area with overlooking rooftops and windows everywhere.
    - Insight: to read the room. You're going to be either in an entirely empty room, which should trigger your suspicions right away if you'd been expecting targets or hostages, or you're going to be bursting into a room full of people who are going to get angry that you're interrupting their poler match or something.
    - Evade: Pretty much essential in any firefight, because once the bullets begin flying, you do not want to be standing out in the open.
    - Oratory: not only useful in rallying the troops, Oratory is used to communicate tactics to one's subordinates. This skill also incorporates military hand signals for silent communication between teammates in one's unit.
    - Knowledge (Tactics and Strategy): Tactics are how you win the current battle. Strategy is how you end the battles and come home. You need this for two things: one, like a generalised large-scale combination of Perception and Insight to work out where all the targets are, and what you think their leader is doing, and also so you can work out what to do in the fight, and how and where to move your teams to neutralise your enemies and come back alive, with any hostages intact if there are hostages in the situation.
    Contents of Mythras Firearms
    The book goes right into it, detailing new Combat Actions, new and modified Special Effects, and new Spot Rules for firefights. Juicy stuff, followed by a section on creating your own firearms, with rules for new Weapons Traits.
    What comes next is a nice set of tables for different firearms, starting with Black Powder arms (you are allowed to stock up on these for Fioracitta, by the way), then modern firearms and a whole load of energy weapons and exotic guns. They're all there, waiting for your characters to grab them up. Use them in the modern game, or in Luther Arkwright, After The Vampire Wars or your own setting.
    The book doesn't go into the tactics of fighting against armed targets, nor the hazards of running into a built up area, possibly at night and in pitch darkness. There are books available on the internet which are helpful here.

    Source: http://www.thinklikeahorse.org/images3/building clearing raid.pdf

    Source: https://ufpro.com/us/blog/itcqb-one-man-room-clearing-tactics
    Go and look up these sources. Your characters will thank you for it.
    I am assuming that I'm addressing players who've never been in a job which has exposed them to FIBUA or CQB; people who never served. Fighting in Mythras Modern is not like fighting in Mythras Core. You do not ask if you can attack the enemy after spending your AP on a Charge. You don't, because the enemy will have unloaded the mag of their AR-15 into your character and you'll be rerolling a new guy.
    Conclusion
    This has been a surprisingly brief post for me to write. The most important takeaways from this have been that combat in Mythras Modern is fierce, ferocious, short, and deadly; your characters will need a bunch of non-combat skills to survive, primarily Perception and Evade; and you'll need to plan battles to involve your whole unit fighting together if you want your character team to see the light of day.
  15. Alex Greene
    In our previous posts, we've explored Cultures, and checked out Careers. So now it's time to look at the Skills.
    The Skills chapter of Mythras Core pretty much covers everything you need to know about using those Skills - difficulty levels, augmentation, trying again, opposing skill checks, and so on. If you want to brush up on the basic rules on rolling skills checks, begin with Mythras Core Rulebook, pages 37-38, then pages 50-52.

    New Skill Check
    The Skill Value Check is something I'm borrowing from a forthcoming Kelestia Productions title, HârnMaster and The World of Kèthîra (HMK). You use the critical range for your skill check (10% of the skill roll you make at the time, not the skill level on your character sheet). So if your skill is 67%, and it's a Hard skill check, and you're using the Simplified Difficulty Grades Table on page 38, the critical range for your skill check will be the critical range for (67% - 20%), i.e. the critical range for 47%, or 5.
    Make your skill check.
    If the skill check is a Critical Success, add +1 to the critical range value. An ordinary success doesn't do anything. A normal failure deducts -1, and a fumble reduces the critical value by -2. So if the above Hard skill check gave a Critical Success, the value would be 6; a nomal success would yield a value of 5; a normal failure would give a 4; and a fumble would give a 3.
    Some skill checks will yield unique answers (e.g. magic rolls), and fumbles could produce unwanted results despite the character's success, but in general the player should compare the final figure with this table below.

    These could be the equivalent of Enhancements (page 66 of Mythras), little flourishes added to the character's skill check.
    A lot of characters have high to very high skill percentages, and it is highly unlikely, even with a fumble on a Herculean roll, that they would roll a zero or below on the above table; but even with a positive result, Grandmasters could still face some sorts of complications resulting from a fumble, even if they do land - literally - on their feet.
    This new type of skill check ensures that (a) a fumble on a critical skill check becomes unlikely to kill the character, even if it is a dangerous, high-risk skill check and their base skill level is very small; and (b) even a Grandmaster can still make humiliating mistakes, even with all the odds stacked in their favour.
    Use this kind of test when your character is faced with a skill test such as Athletics to parkour across a gap between two rooftops, Explosives to defuse a bomb, even Seduction to make a move on the Ambassador's wayward daughter. Anything with a life-or-death outcome.

    Standard Skills
    A character's Standard and Professional Skills are very much a product of their Culture and Career. It's entirely likely that even the most isolated of characters are going to have a very different spread of Standard Skills to the list given in Mythras. That is due to the very different Cultural expectations of modern characters.
    Standard Skills Lists
    Urban and Suburban
    Athletics STR+DEX
    Brawn STR+SIZ
    Bureaucracy INTx2
    Computers INTx2
    Conceal DEX+POW
    Customs (INTx2)+40%
    Dance DEX+CHA
    Deceit INT+CHA
    Drive DEX+POW
    Endurance CONx2
    Evade DEXx2
    Influence CHAx2
    Insight INT+POW
    Native Tongue INT+CHA+40%
    Perception INT+POW
    Sing CHA+POW
    Stealth DEX+INT
    Streetwise POW+CHA
    Swim STR+CON
    Unarmed STR+DEX
    Willpower POWx2
    Rural
    Athletics STR+DEX
    Boating STR+CON
    Brawn STR+SIZ
    Conceal DEX+POW
    Customs (INTx2)+40%
    Dance DEX+CHA
    Deceit INT+CHA
    Drive DEX+POW
    Endurance CONx2
    Evade DEXx2
    First Aid INT+DEX
    Influence CHAx2
    Insight INT+POW
    Locale INTx2
    Native Tongue INT+CHA+40%
    Perception INT+POW
    Ride DEX+POW
    Sing CHA+POW
    Stealth DEX+INT
    Swim STR+CON
    Unarmed STR+DEX
    Willpower POWx2
    The different spreads of Standard Skills are due to the prevalence of bureaucracies in pretty much every modern state. From buying groceries to purchasing real estate, everything leaves behind a data trail, and Bureaucracy is the fine art of getting access to those data trails, whether to track people down or to make life miserable for them.
    The same deal goes for Computers - everybody has one nowadays, and they make and receive calls, take photos, post to social media, and create all kinds of documents detailing every aspect of their lives, from the number of hours they sleep at night to their pulse and blood sugar levels, to things like pictures of their cats, videos of police atrocities, and sex tapes. Many people run their entire businesses and lives through their mobile phones, and it makes sense to at least have Computers as a Standard Skill, even if they only know how to open apps with that skill.
    Locale has been swapped out for Streetwise for Urban and Suburban Cultures, simply because the likelihood of someone from a thoroughly-urbanised 'hood knowing the difference between wild belladonna and a patch of nettles is very low, as compared to them reading the street for signs of brewing trouble. Locale has been left in for Rural Cultures, as have Ride and Boating - though some Cultures come from locations where Boating is more prevalent than either Ride or Drive (such as coastal regions) and some Rural Cultures might swap Pilot for Boating, e.g. locations with great expanses of wilderness such as Australia's Outback.
    First Aid is likewise missing from the Urban and Suburban lists. If your character's concept is First Responder (paramedic, Doctor, other kind of health care official, lifeguard, mountain rescue, lifeboat crew and so on) you can leave in First Aid as a Standard Skill. Swap it out for Streetwise, if you like, unless your character is running a criminal sideline in dealing to make money.

    Professional Skills
    There are a lot of changes from Mythras Core.
    Acting CHAx2
    Acrobatics STR+DEX
    Art POW+CHA
    Bureaucracy INTx2
    Commerce INT+CHA
    Computers INTx2
    Courtesy INT+CHA
    Craft DEX+INT
    Culture INTx2
    Disguise INT+CHA
    Electronics DEX+INT
    Engineering DEX+INT
    Explosives DEX+INT
    Forgery DEX+INT
    Gambling INT+POW
    Knowledge INTx2
    Language INT+CHA
    Locale INTx2
    Lockpicking DEXx2
    Mechanic DEX+INT
    Medicine INT+POW
    Meditation INT+CON
    Musicianship DEX+CHA
    Navigation INT+POW
    Oratory POW+CHA
    Research INTx2
    Ride DEX+POW
    Science INTx2
    Seamanship INT+CON
    Seduction INT+CHA
    Sleight DEX+CHA
    Streetwise POW+CHA
    Survival CON+POW
    Teach INT+CHA
    Track INT+CON
    Bureaucracy - a Professional Skill only to Rural Cultures; a Standard Skill to Urban and Suburban Cultures. Practically mandatory for anyone who works within The System, whether they are bureaucrats, law enforcement, military and so on.
    Computers - likewise, a Professional Skill only to characters who come from any Rural Cultures, particularly the Off The Grid Subculture. If you need to hack a system, you'll need Computers.
    Electronics - as for Mechanic Skill, but specifically for repairs and electronics of all kinds, rarher than physical items - that's the province of Mechanic, below. You'll need this skill to defeat electronic security systems, alarms, laser tripwires and so on.
    Explosives - the ability to plant, analyse, and defuse explosive devices.
    Forgery - the skill of creating not only fake identification devices such as cards, cloned phones and so on, but also the ability to create a convincing paper trail, and even to manipulate and doctor audiovisual media, from social media photos to audiovisual evidence of UFOs.
    Knowledge (specialised subject) - A new Skill, replaces Lore. Represents the depths of a character's personal knowledge about a particular subject (the specialised subject).
    Language - There is no separate Literacy skill here. The rise of Babble and Duolingo makes it virtually impossible not to learn a language's written form at the same time as the spoken form.
    Locale - listed as a Professional Skill only to Urban and Suburban Cultures. Remains a Standard Skill to all Rural Cultures and Subcultures.
    Mechanic - Replaces Mechanisms skill, but retains the same functions.
    Medicine - Represents one's personal knowledge of healing and long-term treatment of illness, injuries, and wounds. Includes surgery and surgical medicine. More modern than Healing in Mythras Core, because this SKill can be used for more advanced medical and surgical procedures than simple poultices, bloodletting, trepanation, and application of leeches.
    Meditation - The only magical skill included in this list, Meditation allows a character to double their recovery from fatigue, lost Prana Points - see the post on Magic - and Tenacity. It can also augment Endurance and Willpower checks.
    Research - An all-new skill. Represents the ability to dig through non-bureaucratic records (which requires Bureaucracy) to come up with information. Can be used to augment Bureaucracy, Knowledge, and Science checks.
    Ride - this is a Professional Skill only to Urban and Suburban Cultures and their Subcultures.
    Science (specific science) - An all-new skill. Represents knowledge within the specified field of Science, e.g. Mathematics, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Zoology, Botany, Organic Chemistry, Pathology, and so on.
    Streetwise - Only a Professional Skill to characters from any of the Rural Subcultures or the Rural Culture itself.

    All The Skill In The World
    These skills lists describe the character's occupational strengths - the skills they are best at, and weaknesses - the ones with the lowest values. They don't necessarily point to the character's personality, only to their skill strong points. Rather, the character is the sum of their Culture, their Career, their Skills, their Passions, and their Backgrounds - plus whatever touches are given to them by the player.
    This look at Modern Mythras Skills does not take into account two sets of skills: Combat Styles, and Magic Skills. These will be covered in the last two posts from this blog for 2022, before I take a break.

  16. Alex Greene
    Mythras set in a modern game can look so different to games set in more traditional fantasy settings. Even contemporary settings such as After The Vampire Wars has elements of urban fantasy, but a modern setting combined with a Mythras engine can incorporate elements of science fiction, horror, or even mysteries.
    Let's look at the Cultures available to modern characters - there are Urban, Suburban, and Rural, but these can be divided into subcultures - Urban, into Criminal and Militant, Suburban into Underground, and Rural into Off The Grid and Wandering.


    Urban
    The world's human population has tended to cluster in cities. Cities, towns, and similar locations are crowded, usually filthy, smelly, and often the driving force behind their civilisations' advancements. Cities are also the traditional centres of power, particularly capital cities which are the centres of civil governments and the highest courts in the land.

    Skills
    Standard Skills
    Deceit, Drive, Influence, Insight, Perception, Stealth, Unarmed.
    Example Combat Styles
    Civic Defense, Close Quarters Combat, Fighting In Built Up Areas, Self Defence.
    Professional Skills
    Bureaucracy, Commerce, Computer, Engineering, Knowledge, Mechanisms, Research.
    Cultural Passions
    - Loyalty to your fam
    - Represent your people
    - Protect your assets, financial and otherwise
    The Urban Voice
    The first I heard about the trouble was when my sister posted to Facebook. She put a video up on Messenger for me, and that was when I saw it for the first time - the big, ugly flying drone which took out that armoured truck. We were chatting about it on Whatsapp when those Feds came out of the woodwork and confiscated the phones of everybody in the area at the time.
    So I took her video, and made it viral. There was no way those MiBs could make the evidence of their crimes disappear on me.


    Criminal
    Criminals are people who break the law. Honestly, that's practically everybody. The law is there to be broken, sometimes. Some people believe in honour among thieves; other people don't. Criminals can be sane but evil; opportunistic; scheming; desperate; sometimes sociopathic.
    But this is the subculture of people who make a career out of illegal activity - organised crime members running rackets, career burglars, counterfeiters selling fake designer goods, drug dealers, sex workers, scammers ... you name it.
    Skills
    Standard Skills
    Athletics, Brawn, Deceit, Drive, Evade, Stealth, Unarmed.
    Example Combat Styles
    Drive-By, Muscle In, Self Defence.
    Professional Skills
    Commerce, Culture, Gambling, Knowledge, Lockpicking, Sleight, Streetwise.
    Cultural Passions
    - Chase that payday
    - Keep your friends close
    - Omerta
    The Criminal Voice
    Look, I never did what they say I did, Your Honour. I was just waiting on that street corner, with a package a friend had given for me to hold onto while he went into the house next door. Yeah, the boarded up old house covered in graffiti.
    How was I to know it was drugs, man? I don't know what those two undercovers rolling by the corner seventeen times told you, I never touch the stuff! Hey, sometmes I do wish I'd gone down the road my brother took, though. He's a second storey artist. Almost no place he couldn't get into. Mind you, he's doing the fourth year of a ten stretch so I guess he should have put in more training in running fast than in climbing, maybe.

    Militant
    Some people are not content with their lot. For some reason or other, they want to smash everything down. From homegrown terrorists who want to be internet famous to protestors who block major thoroghfares and stop commuters getting to their workplaces, to karens driven by hubris and a mobile phone camera, to ex-military snipers shooting at civilians from the back of a car, militants are angry, driven, and violent.
    Skills
    Standard Skills
    Brawn, Conceal, Drive, Evade, Perception, Stealth, Willpower.
    Example Combat Styles
    Close Quarters Combat, Combat Sniper, Drive-By, Knife FIghting.
    Professional Skills
    Craft, Culture, Demolitions, Engineering, Mechanisms, Oratory, Streetwise.
    Cultural Passions
    - Hate the Enemy Civilisation
    - Hurt People
    - Make Somebody Pay
    The Militant Voice
    Look, they call me and my crew vigilantes, but we're only trying to keep the streets safe. Have you seen them lately? They're crawling with all sorts of criminal scum, and it's our job to do what the cops can't do, and we've got to go in there and take the trash out.

    Suburban
    The suburbs are far from the streets of the inner city, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing going on there. Sometimes, the strangest people gather behind closed doors even as their envious neighbours keep spying on them through twitching net curtains.
    Skills
    Standard Skills
    Conceal, Deceit, Drive, Influence, Perception, Unarmed, Willpower.
    Example Combat Styles
    Self Defence, and three other Combat Styles. Keep them surprising. Nothing's going to chock your players than to see that harlmess non-player character soccer Mom suddenly come over like Sarah Connor and pull an assault rifle out of the trunk of her car.
    Professional Skills
    Pick seven Professional Skills. Make them surprising; your peaceful-looking suburbanite could surprise you with an in-depth knowledge of Acting, Disguise, Sleight and Stealth, or their knowledge of how to run an illegal cannabis grow in their back yard.
    Cultural Passions
    - Keep It In The Family
    - Protect The Neighbourhood
    - Watch Strangers
    The Suburban Voice
    It's a lot quieter out here than in the inner city, buddy. That means everybody round here knows everybody, and we're all up in each other's business. You're a stranger to these parts, so on behalf of the Citizens' Committee, we're going to keep a close eye on you, pal.

    Underground
    The suburbs are a hotbed of closed-circle activity. Everything from swinging parties to actual occult rituals, chances are you'll find some group of suburbanites going at it as though the world were coming to an end. They are closed minded, secretive, and mistrustful of most strangers. And they are connected - if anything happens to one of them, everybody knows about it; and if a kindly stranger jumps in and helps out someone in distress, they become somewhat of a local hero. There is never any middle ground.
    Skills
    Standard Skills
    As for Suburban.
    Example Combat Styles
    As for Suburban.
    Professional Skills
    As for Suburban.
    Cultural Passions
    - Keep It Behind Closed Doors
    - Protect The Secret
    - Close Ranks If One Of Your Circle Gets Busted
    The Underground Voice
    Okay, here's the thing. I'm not going to take you into the back room until you promise to do two things. First, you've gotta leave your hangups at the front door back there, right? Second, when you go in, put your car keys in the big bowl in the centre of the room. I'll get to that shortly. I promise. Is your blindfold comfy? RIght, then, here we go.

    Rural
    Out in The Sticks, The Boondocks, The Back O'Beyond, whatever you want to call it. People are fewer and further between, you are more likely to encounter an animal than a person on your morning commute, and the affairs of the leaders of nations seem like a fantasy.
    Rural people know what's really important, and they band together if there's trouble of any sort.
    Skills
    Standard Skills
    Athletics, Boating, Brawn, Endurance, Locale, Perception, Unarmed.
    Example Combat Styles
    Basic Fisticuffs, One-Handed Firearms, Two-Handed Firerarms, Knife Fighting.
    Professional Skills
    Commerce, Survival, and Track. Pick another four, at random, to reflect the fact that a lot of rural people pick up the oddest skills in the name of self-sufficiency.
    Cultural Passions
    - Care For Your Land
    - Keep Strangers Out
    - Circle The Wagons In An Emergency
    The Rural Voice
    Well, son, I can't rightly say where that thing went. Could've gone down to the Williams farm, or taken a sharp left and gone up the road that takes you right back to the big town of Tolerance, twenty miles thataway. Yes, I think that might be where they went. I suggest you go and follow it, understand?

    Off The Grid
    Sometimes, you just have to get away from it all, and find some out of the way place so remote that nobody can find you or track you down. No cell coverage. No internet. No power, beyond maybe a little generator in a shed out the back. No running water. Who knows what kinds of crazies set up their homes in such places ...
    Skills
    Standard Skills
    As Rural.
    Example Combat Styles
    As Rural.
    Professional Skills
    As Rural, except swap out one skill for Demolitions if you are creating some swivel-eyes Unabomber type.
    Cultural Passions
    - Get Off My Lawn
    - Get Off My Lawn
    - Get Off My Goddamn Lawn
    The Off The Grid Voice
    *smashes window* *sound of an AR-15 being racked* You Feds'll never take me alive!

    Wandering
    Some people live for the road. They are the ultimate in living off the grid. The perfect example is the literary character of Jack Reacher - always living out of a suitcase, metaphorically speaking. Wanderers can either be living like survivalist Ray Mears, or form part of a caravan of travelling folk following a route, such as funfair carnies.
    Skills
    Standard Skills
    Athletics, Boating, Drive, and Ride. Pick any three other Standard Skills. Deceit and Insight are always good.
    Example Combat Styles
    As for Rural.
    Professional Skills
    As for Off The Grid.
    Cultural Passions
    - Keep Moving
    - Keep Your Head Down
    - Keep Yourself To Yourself
    The Urban Voice
    Hey, don't mind me. I'm just passing through.
     
    Modern Cultures
    Your characters can come from a broad variety of different Cultures in the modern game, as compared to the four simple Cultures from Mythras Core Rulebook. You can have fun creating characters from the above Cultures, or mix and match and come up with Cultural backgrounds of your own - Police, Military, First Responder, Academia, the Clergy ...
    If you can think about it, I'm sure you'll have a great time creating it.
  17. Alex Greene
    The cover image this week is of a landmark district in an American coastal town, Cape May, New Jersey.
    So let's take a look at the basic unit of any Mythras adventure, the player character.
    Since pretty much every sentient being on Earth is going to be human, we can stick to the human template for characteristic and attribute generation as presented in Mythras. No elves, halflings, orcs, goblins or Tolkienesque creatures.
    After The Vampire Wars presents rules for Fae, Vampires, Werewolves and so on. We can look at non-human beings in a Mythras Modern setting later - for right now, all the characters, and antagonists and non-player characters, are likely to be human. Before we enter the Twilight Zone, it is important to establish a baseline of what I laughably call "normality."
    Characteristics and Attributes
    The characteristic generation system outlined in Mythras, page 6, works just great for a modern setting. Create your character's basic STR, CON, SIZ, DEX, INT, POW, and CHA the same as in Mythras.
    There are no Magic Points. Use the term "Prana Points" from Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels. You can also use the Tenacity rules from that sourcebook, if you don't have Mythras Companion.
    Other Attributes are just the same: Luck Points, Hit Points, Movement and so on.
    Standard Skills
    Page 11 of Mythras introduces every character's Standard Skills. Use the list on page 11, with one exception: Locale.
    It's highly likely that Locale skill won't be part of their repertoire of skills. The advent of supermarkets in the latter half of the 20th century saw a steep decline in people's ability to hunt and forage in the wild for food, and the introduction of online shopping effectively killed off Forage skill for good, apart from a handful of people in organisations such as the Scouts and Guides, people with military training, and a few weird people who insist in living off the grid.
    What skill replaces Locale as a Standard Skill will be covered in a future chapter, Skills In Modern Mythras.
    Cultures
    What sort of Cultures will one expect to find in a modern Mythras game? The most common are Urban, Suburban, and Rural, but there are others: Underground, Militant, Wandering, Criminal, and Off The Grid. Each Culture and Subculture will have its own Cultural Passions, Cultural Skills, and Voice - and next week, we'll cover those in detail.
    One thing - as well as the Culture you come from, you can also be more specific, and indicate where on Earth you come from. An American from the Deep South will view the world differently to a Brit from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a French sommelier who works in a Paris cafe, an Australian train conductor, and a Delhi jitney driver. All Professions come from Urban Cultures, but each Terrestrial Culture has its own unique vibe, worldview, and Voice.
    This means that you can play a character from your home town and cultural background, and your character's worldview can be your own; or you can choose an authentic, realistic lifestyle completely other than yours, and live through their eyes. Youtube vlogger, parish priest of a small village in Kent, ex-US Marine, plasterer from Chepstow, motorbike courier from Cape May ... you're an adventurer, and in this game you will be walking a mile in the shoes of people you could bump into just around the corner.
  18. Alex Greene
    Let's open up the doors to your imagination, and take a stroll.
    - You're a bunch of ex-military types, all surviving members of your unit. You're the squad leader, and you and your buddies are driving along a country lane to the Badger's Drift, the pub in town. Tonight, however, your weekly trip down the pub is interrupted by a brilliant light lancing up into the sky. It's coming from a saucer-shaped vehicle which is sitting in the middle of the road ahead.
    - You're a hypnotherapist. Your new client has just turned your world upside down. 'My husband,' she has just said. 'I think he's trying to kill me.'
    - You're hanging around the apartment block where you all live. One of your buddies is demonstrating a weird new ability of theirs - they can practically predict the future. They've persuaded you all to put in bids for tomorrow night's lottery. Two unmarked black Cadillacs suddenly roll up. They don't look like the local drug dealers' cars - they drive Lexuses.
    Four men pile out of the Cadillacs. They are practically identical - black suits, black fedora hats, white shirts, black ties. Black shades. They are all tall, slender, and gaunt, like undertakers. They walk funny as they approach your crew.
    What do you do?
    And what game are you playing?
    Well, what you do depends on your characters, your backgrounds, and your training.
    But the game you're playing ... is Mythras.
    Modern Setting
    The background for the game doesn't really matter. Whether you're riding a destrier to Castle Porovel in the Principality of Lambida, a flycycle tooling along at Mach 2 across the Great Plain to meet the Grass Kings of RIngworld, or a quadbike through the New Forest for a rendezvous with the Lymington Ley Line Explorers, Mythras can be used for them all.
    The focus for the next few weeks' worth of blogs is on a modern setting. Ideally, the stories can be set anywhere in the last ten, or up to ten years into the future. As of the publication of this blog, that's anything from January 2012 to December 2032. But if you like, you can set your stories in any time period which people call "modern" - from the 1950s through to the 2040s, if you like.
    What makes this era familiar?
    - Transportation: The modern game has modes of transportation available which allow you to travel anywhere on the globe; from bicycles to aeroplanes, from quadbikes to helicopters, from roller skates to trucks. Want to have your characters travel from Holyhead to Paris? They can hop onto the Dublin ferry, and from there arrange for overseas or air travel to France, or they can go by road to Manchester and hop on a plane from Manchester Airport. The world is only a few hours away.
    - Communications: The internet has opened the world to your fingertips. Everything from emails to VOIP chats, ro old fashioned phone calls, texts and social media posts. If someone has an online presence, you can reach them.
    - Information: Along with the ability to connect with anyone, anywhere, the internet has brought the world's knowledge to the palm of your hand. Your cellphone can access vast libraries of data, knowledge, and literature, from all over the world. You just need to know where to look, and how to look.
    - Business: We live in the age of capitalism, where a modern businessman can run their entire life from the comfort of their cellphone. From keeping track of your finances to actually paying for goods and services contactlessly, But even before our cells became such versatile tools of commerce, we're familiar with credit and debit cards, loans and overdrafts, and paying for goods with plastic.
    - Weapons: There is an entire supplement, Mythras Firearms, which looks at these. Guns, guns, guns. Something which would make fantasy settings far more interesting, and the fight scenes all too brief.
    A Look At All Things Modern
    This is the start of a series, looking at all the different options available to Games Masters of Mythras who want to adapt the Core Rulebook to a modern setting. In the coming weeks, we'll be looking at modern backgrounds, modern skills, modern Passions, and a good long look at the supplements Mythras Companion and Mythras Firearms.
    Then we'll be looking at different kinds of modern settings, and presenting ideas for different kinds of modern scenarios and campaigns to whet your appetite.
    So settle into the driver's seat of your favourite car, turn on your entertainment centre, and listen to your favourite tunes as you set off on a long trip through all things Mythras Modern.
     
  19. Alex Greene

    Hiatus

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    I'm going to take a hiatus this week. Next week, I's like to take a look at a setting which needs a setting book.
    Mythras Modern.
    I'm going to work on looking at adapting Mythras to a bunch of other settings, too, over the next few weeks.
    One thing I intend to do, during this time, will be to review Mythras Modern and Mythras Firearms, to showcase how to use these two documents to adapt Mythras to the modern game.
  20. Alex Greene

    M-Space Speculations

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    So we've been looking at M-Space for so long now, I'd almost forgotten that the core of this blog has been to look at Mythras. I'll get back to the fantasy stuff soon enough. But for right now, let's look at what we've been reviewing these past two months, and see what we can do with it beyond creating more clones of Traveller settings.
    After all, this is a setting for science fiction.
    As is The Twilight Zone.
    Let's open the door, then, to another dimension ... a place of the senses, the emotions, the imagination.
    Let's open ... the doors of your mind.
    Let me in. I'm a hypnotist.

    Playing M-Space, Not Traveller
    Playing M-Space as if it were a clone of Traveller is probably a huge sin against Frostbyte Books' game. M-Space is not Traveller. The expectations of Traveller do not apply here.
    Or not always.
    Traveller is explicitly a space opera setting. Lyndsie Manusos, in an article on Bookriot, listed some other subgenres of science fiction. These include:-
    Hard Science Fiction
    Science and technology predominate. Heavy concept stuff. The Expanse, more than The Orville.
    Soft Science Fiction
    Characters take the focus away from technology and science.
    Military Science Fiction
    Characters are likely to be military or ex-military; the main plot has to do with glorifying war and/or military life, or if the characters are in civilian life, the military is never far away.
    Space Opera
    Space-based soap opera. The technology is virtually ignored; the focus is on people, and the relationships between them. A lot of personal fight scenes, and plenty of chrome - silver lame suits, robots, rayguns, green alien princesses.

    Space Western
    Lawless and gritty adventures, desert and prairie planets, frontier towns, life on the fringes of society, both physical and social. Honour, duelling, even ditching vehicles in favour of riding on horseback like bloody savages. This is the world of Outland, some of the worlds and settings of Judge Dredd, and 2000 AD's Strontium Dog.
    Steampunk
    A subgenre created by WIlliam Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. Steampunk posited a what-if: what if the Information Age had its genesis in the Victorian era, with cogs and valves replacing computer circuitry? Later, it developed into "mad scientist fashion," and the original ethos was lost.
    Apocalyptic
    This is end-of-the-world science fiction. Things go wrong, and the world we know it comes to an end. This is the story of the lead up to the end, as the characters can only look on in horror at the unfolding devastation all around them. Depressing as hell.
    Post-Apocalyptic
    This is set after the Apocalypse. Humanity has been reduced to a state of savagery. It's dog-eat-dog, and the setting emphasises nothing but the ugliest, most savage sides of humanity - brutality, scheming, murder, depravity. Boring as hell.
    Dystopian
    This is set in some alternate world where everything works, but it's crap, frankly. We're talking about fascism winning, and we're stuck in a right-wing world where you see nothing but more brutality, scheming, murder, depravity. How people can get hot for Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Equilibrium, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid's Tale, and The Man In The High Castle, is beyond me. They were meant as warnings, not instructional manuals. Depressing as hell.
    Horror
    This is an interesting subgenre. The best horror science fiction setting is, IMO, HOSTILE from Zozer Games. They have captured the feel of movies such as Saturn 3, Outland again, and most of all Alien and the Alien franchise. However, and this is the fun part, this subgenre doesn't confine itself to the boundaries - it is quite happy to reach out and discolour virtually every other kind of science fiction in grim tones.
    Comedy
    This can be the world of Red Dwarf, or a setting which regularly lampshades the tropes of other science fiction franchises. A prized and well-loved example is Galaxy Quest.
    Silkpunk
    The youngest subgenre, coined by Ken Liu to describe a future world where art and magic and poetry predominate over technology and science. A graceful, positive setting, and a fresh aesthetic which seems to draw from its older sister ...
    Solarpunk
    A post-scarcity genre, Solarpunk is a world where technology and Nature come together to create a universe where life flourishes, greenery and animal life are abundant, and humans and other species dwell amid an abundance of resources; where conflicts arise when humans need things which society cannot supply.
    Episodic
    Each story is its own, self-contained unit. The characters may be the same; their vehicles, their devices, may be the same; but each episode has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Often an anthology, sometimes each story can involve different characters with absolutely no connection to other episodes whatsoever, where each episode is a different setting completely, with a different tale to tell, somewhat like the different incarnations of The Outer Limits, Tharg's Future Shocks and Terror Tales from 2000 AD, or ... The Twilight Zone.
     
    Example Settings
    The default setting of M-Space might well be the far future, and everybody could well be happy to run it as a space opera, but the game can be used to branch out into different genres so very easily.

    They Walk Among Us
    The setting is the modern world. Humans are living out their lives, little realising that some of their number are extraterrestrials. There could be one species, slowly infiltrating humanity one person at a time (Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Captain Scarlet), or the invaders could have planted their species instead, sometimes even using humans to gestate their alien offspring (The Midwich Cuckoos) or just have them arrive on Earth and try to adjust (Skizz, Third Rock From The Sun, ALF). Humans could work for some government department to investigate sightings of vehicles and individuals (The X-Files).
    Rescuers
    The most famous example of this subgenre is, of course, Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds. A secretive group sends forth technologically-advanced craft to rescue beings from danger zones. They face dangers themselves, but ultimately courage and an attitude of "never say die" prevails.
    Adventures In Time
    Journey to the past, the future, or face down monsters in the present day. The crown of this subgenre is worn by Doctor Who, of course - but your characters could play some sort of Timebusters, heading into the past to stop miscreant time travellers from rewriting the present and destroying the future. Examples: Doctor Who, The Time Tunnel.
    Adventures In Space
    Say hello to Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels. This is a game which has already been covered in a Mythras title, but nothing says you can't just steal great big chunks of that book and port them to your M-Space story. Vibro beamers, psionic synaptic puppetry, parallel universes ... go for it.

    Terra Quadrant
    Part solarpunk, part silkpunk, the universe of Terra Quadrant is set towards the end of humanity. Influenced by Luther Arkwright, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Odd John, and Peter J Carroll's Liber Null and Psychonaut and Liber Kaos, this is the last era where humans are recognisable in their appearance and behaviours. The species is on the verge of becoming a Type II civilisation before they have adjusted to life as a Type I civilisation. Humans are meeting other species which are themselves evolving past being Type I civilisations; together, they are heading rapidly towards becoming a single, united Type II civilisation, or even Type III. In the meantime, individuals are capable of some incredible feats, such as Spacejaunting within the galaxy and beyond, dimensional travel to different universes, and even time travel.
     
    Alternatives
    Alternative Starship Drives
    Many space opera settings are themed around Starships, the vehicles of choice for the settings. Traveller gave us a standard, the Jump Drive, which confines the Travellers to the local area - they can only advance a few parsecs each week, and explore the next few systems next door, which can be pretty confining if all the planets in the sector are desert planets with fery low populations and few facilities to repair or maintain their ships.
    High Guard, however, gave examples of alternative drives - the Space Folding Drive, whose jumps are instantaneous, but which require 24 hours to recharge; and Warp Drive, which allows for FTL travel through Einsteinian space (like the Destiny in Stargate Universe). Hyperdrive and Warp Drive are two different animals, in that they work in different ways: hyperdrive opens a hyperspace conduit through which the ship travels, and warp drive just circumvents the limitations of relativity by distorting space into a warp bubble, capable of travelling faster than light.
    However, these drives involve the ship travelling throught he void, and the rating of the ship (factor 1 through factor 9) is the relative velocity of the vessel through space, which can be measured in parsecs per week (like Traveller), or a lot faster - such as the Long Jump Hyperspace II engine from Larry Niven's Known Space setting, which negotiated the parsecs at a rate of one light year per 1.25 minutes.
    But what if your characters did not need to travel in ships at all?
    Alternative Modes of Travel
    Frank Herbert's Dune series gave us "travelling without moving," another form of space folding drive. "Travelling without moving" sounds rather like Teleportation, a psionic power. Imagine taking the concept of Dune's Spice Melange, and applying it to a setting where some people who took that drug could teleport between star systems, rendering the need for most space travel obsolete. If those people happened to be natural psions, gifted with Teleportation, and the Spice Melange merely amplified their range to allow them interstellar travel, such beings would become integral to the story as the characters would be depending on their teleporting friend to get them to the next system.
    Unless they were all capable of Spacejaunting ...
    The twist ending of Alfred Bester's The Stars, My Destination was not the telekinetically-active PyrE which was the great secret that humans were willing to go to war for, but rather Gully Foyle's Spacejaunting, which allowed characters to teleport to worlds thousands of light years apart. Spacejaunting also allowed for time travel to the past and the future.
    Yet another form of space travel is Stargates, both small and large. Stargate, and the series Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe also had gate travel, where artificial portals allowed characters to visit different worlds in this, and later other, galaxies. The Glen A Larson show Buck Rogers In The 25th Century had Stargates which were set up for Starships - a concept also used extensively in Babylon 5. In the latter series, only large vessels (Capital ship size) could house the massive hyperspace engines to allow them to open their own Jump points, and ships needed to open Jump points at the point of origin and destination, and navigate through hyperspace by following subspace beacons.
    Alternative Technologies
    You aren't restricted to following the Tech Level tables from Traveller. Your tech level development could embrace psionics once it reaches the point where humans would be reaching for the stars in Traveller. Your TL 13 characters might be able to Spacejaunte, or communicate telepathically over light years, or your tech level development could reach the point where you develop the first bioships, organic vessels which turn out to be the only vessels able to travel FTL since they are psionically active, and use telekinesis and teleportation for their modes of travel.
    Mundane Science Fiction
    This setting eschews all the fancy technologies altogether. Your characters are just ordinary people in the modern world. It's about them using their technologies of the day - mobile phones, spirals, the internet, modern scientific equipment - to resolve conflicts such as alien invasions, and so on. Your characters can be military, or spies, or even left field occupations such as journalists, entertainers, or ordinary people off the street, facing off against aliens, cloning, strange new tech, and so on.
     
    Imagination
    In the end, imagination is the key to your stories. Use M-Space as the basic rules, but remember that M-Space does not create the settings; nor does the CRB bring them to life.
    You do. You and the players.
  21. Alex Greene
    And so we come to it at last. The final chapter of Frostbyte Books' M-Space, and the Appendices. I'm not going to review the index, merely point out that the index is bookmarked, so if you want to get to a particular place in the PDF in a hurry, go right to the back of the book, locate your bookmark, and click.
    So the final chapter of M-Space is devoted to Life Forms - the equivalent of Traveller's Animal Encounters, and Mythras' Bestiary / Creatures / Monsters.

    You know, once I'm done with reviewing Frostbyte Books' material, I am going to miss these delightful illustrations.
    The Life Forms chapter is only six pages long, and it covers some non-sentient beasties and one sentient alien species, the Grept.
    The Reptore are illustrated on page 146. To save you going back sixty pages, here it is.

    These fearsome predators are used for "Stay out of the long grass!" scenarios. They do seem very nasty.
    Next are Deep-Sea Gobblers, primitive aquatic life forms the size of orca, who are on the verge of developing a sentient civilisation. So they could be classified as a sentient species, maybe.
    They are followed by the Woog, a species of literal scroungers, foragers basically, with a talent for hiding. They can be found on several worlds, and the speculation is that they find their way into Starships which then spread them about on the worlds where they touch down.
    This is an illustration of a Woog (page 187).

     
    Next are the Lava Swamp Morac, and these creatures and occasional riding beasts are illustrated on page 84. I don't think I poached the pic from 84, so here it is.

    Lastly, there are the psionic Grept. And we've already seen a picture of one.

    Grept politics is based around psionic ability. They have a strict caste system, and there's a story hook to get characters involved in Grept politics.
    And that's the last chapter of the M-Space Core Rulebook.
    Appendices
    There are five Appendices, labelled A through E. Each is short, and covers something related to some earlier chapter in the core rulebook.
    Appendix A is a useful Starship design walkthrough, to help the readers who might find the whole process daunting.
    The Appendix guides you through the procedure of creating a small Starship called an Explorer, for around 4 people - a small player character party. The narrator uses the rules on page 101 to add quirks and features to the slightly old Explorer ship, called the Aajege (Gesundheit!).
    Would you like me to create a few future blog posts devoted to creating a bunch of Starships and/or alien species? Please send feedback. I could do with the walkthroughs myself.
    And so to Appendix B, which is an example of Starship combat, supplied by Colin Brett, with a handy link to his website. The protagonists are the Gamma Star, the generic space fuzz, and the Speeding Blade, the poirates arrr.
    Right. The stage s set, so FIIIIGHT!
    Enter Captain Kurt Intolerance, and dashing swashbuckler Sasha Reeves. You might be wondering whom I have put my money on ...
    The action is both narrative and crunchy. The Appendix includes Bridge dialogues on both ships. Though I don't think you need to say "Aye aye" when "Aye" will do. I'll have to dig up one of my old contacts to confirm the protocol. Ex-Navy. Sweet. Keen sense of humour.
    The action pans out over several admittedly tense pages. Who wins? Who ends up screaming in fury and vowing vengeance? Read on. I'm not going to spoil it for you ...
    So Appendix C is one page long, and it's got some additional Careers for you to look at. These are Assassin, Entertainer, Law Enforcement, Noble, Scientist, and Soldier.
    Appendix D introduces the Skills Pyramid and Expert Characters. These also expand the character generation options.
    Finally, Appendix E expands upon the Extended Conflicts section with some sample Extended Conflicts - Quicksand, Asteroid Field, and Rickety Bridge.
    Fin
    And then that's it. Page 229 has some Acknowledgements, and a fine bunch of people they are too - they're you, basically. BRP Central are given top billing. Without you, M-Space 1.2 would not have come about, and Frostbyte Books might not have survived much past M-Space v 1.0.
    There are adverts for The Triton Incident (and, by extension, Elevation) and M-Space Companion, and then the Index.
    And with that, my review of M-Space Core Rulebook ... is done.
    Thanks to everyone who's stuck with me to this point. I want to come back to M-Space, starting with the next post, called Speculations, about the kinds of settings and scenarios M-Space can support, while also looking at supplements already on the market.
    And so, before bowing out of the core rulebook, one last look at the full M-Space wraparound book cover.
    Let's go ... out there.

     
  22. Alex Greene
    This week, we will be looking at the aliens of M-Space.
    I'm not going to lie; you're going to have to take notes. This chapter deals with the basic biological blueprints for creating real, strange aliens, rather than the bumpy-headed humanoids you know and love from TV and movie science fiction (or fantasy, for that matter).
    There's a lot to take in. What is your world's biosphere like? How and where did your alien species evolve, and why did they evolve? What makes your designed species unique? And how do these rules translate into being able to use the alien creation rules as chargen rules, the same way as Mythras just presents you with the tweaks for how to chargen an individual from a creature template?

    Strangeness
    The first universal factor is Strangeness. This imposes a penalty to interactions with members of that species. The higher the Strangeness, the harder it gets to interact with the aliens meaningfully.
    Strangeness: 1-100, where 1 represents Earth-like, 50 Alien and 100 Really strange. The Strangeness parameter adds a good overall picture when interpreting the dice rolls in the creation process. A low Strangeness value will indicate small variations on concepts well-known on Ear th (physiology, behaviour, culture). A high value means you should interpret many of the results as differing wildly from what’s common here.
    A later sidebar points out that it also affects First Aid and Medicine rolls, using alien technology and so on.
    Biosphere
    The next part of this chapter can appear daunting to the first time GM or player. Some might wonder whether it is necessary to generate the alien species' homeworld's biosphere, biodiversity, and other details. The greater the Strangeness, however, the weirder the biosphere. "My ancestors spawned in another ocean than yours," and so on.
    An example of Strangeness acting as a barrier to communication is Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and the Gethen. Another example of high Strangeness was Ted Chiang's "Story Of Your Life" which became the movie Arrival (2016). Strangeness, and the overcoming of it, was the theme of the story.
    Yet other authors such as N K Jemisin and Octavia Butler have approached alien contact in their own stories.
    The section details things such as the rough size of mature alien individuals, their Frame (endoskeleton, exoskeleton, or squidgy), their Symmetry, Limbs, Segmentation, and classifications such as Grazer, Pouncer or Trapper. Next are Habitat, Advantages, Disadvantages, Life Span, Communications, Natural Weapons, and then on to Characteristics.
    There's a section on how the aliens appear, and the difference between low-powered and high-powered aliens.
    Tech levels can be determined by average species INT. It takes a minimum level of INT to sustain a species' average Tech Level. 
    Next to follow is Cultures, and the range of cultures available to the species; Law Level, Tech Level, cultural values, such as beliefs, taboos and so on; conflicts; population density; and a host of other details. This chapter is, at the very least, exhaustive. Seriously, it covers so much - right down to little things such as the aliens' foreign policy, and individual alien characters' Passions.
    It doesn't go as far as asking what cutlery they use and whether they pass the port to the left or the right, but the alien creation chapter leaves very little else out.
    My recommendation is to go to the part which describes the aliens' physical forms first - size, shape, behaviours - then characteristic ranges, INT range, corresponding TL. Leave much of the rest to later episodes, where you can run the equivalent of Amok TIme and Journey To Babel or similar Star Trek episodes.
    Or something out of Stargate SG-1, Farscape and so on.
    TL;DR: You don't need all of this if you just want the basics, like creating a psionic species which looks like sea urchins on pointy little legs, or a species of generic bumpy headed humanoids who speak perfect English but who are green skinned or have cybernetics and so on.

    Worldbuilding
    Here's where a lot of attention tends to focus, next to the ships and starship combat, and the physical combat between characters.
    Anyone who played Traveller will know how much fun it is to create solar systems. It's almost as much fun as designing starships, or playing the trade game, or designing alien species, or wait ...
    Okay, alien species building is a subgame in and of itself. Use the Worldbuilding chapter first to design your systems, and then conjure your biospheres and dominant sentient species. You do need your imagination. A lot of imagination.
    And perhaps a lot of borrowing from your library of SF books. Do you want a planet of all Odd Johns? A world which was successfully taken over by the species which chose Earth in John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos? Do you want a planet which is tearing itself apart because they have discovered a lichen which yields an immortality serum which only works on one marginalised segment of society, but which kills the affluent? Here's where you come in.
    If you're familiar with Traveller worldbuilding, you will find the process familiar. You begin with the star or stars in the system, then a number of planets. One of those worlds really should be in the habitable zone if it is to be suitable for native life, and for humanoid characters to be able to live on the surface of the world.
    Again, you can design your worlds' size, atmosphere, hydrographic percentage, and so on, just as if you were going through this process with Traveller.
    The next part is mapping out the star systems. You can use the Traveller system of subsector and sector hex grids, or find your own system. Hex grid maps are given in this core rulebook (as well as Odd Soot), and the short chapter ends with blank sheets for hex grids and systems, as well as a filled example.

    Wow
    The information in both these chapters is pretty dense. First timers might find it difficult to get through. M-Space really needs some examples of species creation to show the readers how it's all done.
    Let's start with the Pelacur, who are a humanoid species.
    Strangeness: Let's make this 20%. They are a little bit weird, but generally they look and act kind of like humans.
    Biosphere: Their world is a garden world, with a broad range of biomes, as diverse as old Terra. Maybe a little more so. More exotic jungles, not so many deserts. Mountains, rainforests, temperate inhabited regions. A great diversity of different Pelacur physical types.
    Frame and Symmetry: Endoskeletal, bipedal, bilateral symmetry.
    Classification: Omnivore Gatherer.
    Habitat: Like humans, these can be found everywhere.
    Advantages: Enhanced Senses (smell, taste, touch), Psionic, Poison (see below), Enhanced Charisma (see below)
    Disadvantages: Eggs, Hibernation
    Poison: Pelacur secrete a pheromone which befuddles most other species, increasing oxytocin, dopamine, and phenylethylamine levels. It makes most humanoid aliens become dopey in love with them.
    Enhanced Charisma: As for 95-00, Intelligence or High Intelligence, but for CHA.
    Appearance: They look roughly like this.

     
    These are the clearest pics I could get of Proteus, the Homo eximia antagonist of Bryan Talbot's graphic novel The Legend of Luther Arkwright. The Pelacur looked like this before The Legend of Luther Arkwright ever came to being.
    Sexes: Pelacur only really have the one gender. Binary genders confuse them, but they have adapted to the binary species from other worlds in the centuries they have been starfaring.
    Arts: Pelacur appreciation for art is as profound as that of humans. They adopt human styles and art, though they retain their own music and poetry.
    Behaviour: In Harmony, Social (small groups).
    Communication: Scent, Body Language, Language, Telepathy.
    Characteristics: Physically, slightly higher than human average CON; high POW; very high CHA.
    Appearance: Naturally hairless except for eyebrows, eyelashes. Slightly translucent skin; when irritated, you can see blood in individual capillaries in the face and body. Larger eyes in proportion to the head. Large irises, smaller pupils but more room for expansion (can see better in low light conditions).
    Tech Level: Actually higher than you would imagine. Pelacur do not have ships of their own. They travel on other species' ships, humans in particular. What is generally not known is that they invented their own FTL drives independently, but abandoned their own FTL in favour of becoming travellers and wanderers in other species' vessels.
    If pressed, they could resume shipbuilding - and their vessels would exceed the best TL humans could ever offer. Their homeworld is a TL 17 paradise, but no humans have ever been permitted to learn of its location, let alone visit.
    Technology Areas include Chemistry, Communication, Economics, Medicine, and an Unusual Technology (advanced teleportation capable of operating over thousands of light years).
    Details of their homeworld remain unknown, but Pelacur colonies are terraformed paradises, with vast green spaces growing between elegant, labyrinthine arcologies.
    Food: They can eat what humans eat, but once in a while they require a dietary supplement - a pill, taken monthly. Any human who takes that pill dies.
    Lifespan: Nobody has ever seen a Pelacur die of old age. Nobody even knows if Pelacur age at all. Perhaps it's those damned pills they take ...
     
    So that's it for the Alien Creation and Worldbuilding chapters. Next week, we look at Circles and Psionics - oh, and I'll be taking a sneak peek at the Circles rules for Odd Soot, with a promise to give them a much greater, in depth look when I get to that rulebook (hopefully, about the time of the release of the first Odd Soot campaign book, due out soon ...)
  23. Alex Greene

    Saturday's Post

    By Alex Greene,


    writing
    Saturday, the post continues its look at M-Space with a review of its rules for Circles and Psionics.
    Also, would anyone like a complete post detailing the Pelacur species from my previous post? They are turning up, along with some favourites from Castrobancla, in a setting called Terra Quadrant. I'm working on that setting to submit to Frostbyte Books for a possible future sourcebook either for M-Space or for a new project Clarence Redd has been working on, which I can't wait to review for you when it eventually comes out.
  24. Alex Greene
    Imagine a compelling game involving your character and a strange, motley crew of ragtag colonists, aliens, criminals on the run, psychics who are trying to kick the habit, and even a cyborg and an android. Maybe even a hologram character ...
    Your ship is massive. It's organic, like Tin Man or the Lexx. Its fuel is exotic particles absorbed from the local star. And the occasional asteroid and comet or small planetoid. Your adventures have you dropping in on some solar system, and you remain there for a week while your ship charges up for its next FTL transit. You're explorers, but you're not working for some paramilitary; nor are you some commercial endeavour, grubbing for money, negotiating with brokers for freight cargos and passengers.
    This is not Traveller. This is Frostbyte Books' M-Space. The stars you touch here are very different. Your ship sings to them. And some of them answer back.
    Welcome to part 3 of our look at M-Space. And in a packed blog post tonight, we will be looking further at the basic game systems, expanding upon the cursory scrutiny we gave the Game Systems chapter last week with a look at Extended Conflicts and Spot Rules.
    Game Systems Redux
    So you basically roll the target number or less on a d100. 01-05 is an automatic success; 96-00 is an automatic fail. That's basically it. You don't need criticals and fumbles, though the mechanics are described here for use only when the results are to be entertaining.
    The game can be very simple to play. The next part is the rules section for opposed rules, but hold that thought till you get to Extended Conflicts below.
    And differential rolls are used mainly in various kinds of combat - physical combat, psychic combat, social combat, danceoffs. You know the drill. Again, though, check out page 42, to which we will be coming shortly.
    Luck Points are contentious. Does science fiction need luck? SF really needs to be run on logic. Your characters should not rely on some deus ex machina dropping a pocket franistan on the road right in front of the characters. However, Luck Points are useful in mitigating poor player choices or lousy dice rolls, if the GM does not understand the fine art of fudging. And again, if a fumble is more entertaining, save the Luck Points, and go with the consequences of either a complete calamity or a win with a cost.
    The next two parts cover game time - see the sidebar on page 37 for examples - and a section on injuries and healing.
    I'm wondering whether or not there should be new sections here on social injuries and healing, and Tenacity injuries and healing, among other rules. Something to think on. Or just leave it to the Extended Conflicts. We're almost there.
    The section on character improvement rounds off this section. Here is where M-Space shines compared to Traveller - the latter game does not really reward characters with a lot of improvement. Your characters must spend weeks of in-Jump training to build themselves up; and there is a strict limit to how many skill levels they can have. M-Space uses the Mythras model for skill improvement, relying on Experience Rolls to build skills by increments. Since the increments are measured in percentiles, progression feels less granular, and one gets a sense of accomplishment with each adventure.
    So now you've familiarised yourself with the basic system rules, time to move on to the next section. Yaay, it's Extended Conflicts.

    Extended Conflicts
    This is the most versatile conflict resolution engine I have seen. This is something you can use for an extended haggling session with some store vendor (Commerce versus Commerce), for fast talking through red tape (Deceit versus Bureaucracy), for SERE (Track versus Evade), or for any kind of social conflict.
    There is an example of an extended conflict given - Nedra in a heated argument with Egil. But let's make things more interesting - Joanne and Alexandra in a conflict of mind versus mind, where Alexandra is attempting to hypnotise Joanne. Joanne has a Willpower of 67% and Alexandra's Influence skill is 76%. Joanne's INT is 13; Alexandra's CHA is 16. That gives them Conflict Pools of 13 and 16 respectively. Joanne is resisting Alexandra's hypnotic skills by sheer Willpower and intellect.
    So the basic rule is that both protagonist and antagonist roll their skills. If both succeed, the highest rolled success wins that round.
    Round 1, Joanne wins easily, rolling a 66 to Alexandra's 40. Joanne can take a bite out of Alexandra's magnetic charisma. Joanne's player rolls 3. Ouch. Alexandra's pool is now the same as Joanne's. Alexandra is outwardly unaffected, however, and presses on with her attempt to hypnotise Joanne.
    Round 2, both succeed again. Joanne's roll is 23, and Alexandra's 70. As the winner of the round, Alexandra carves 5 points off Joanne's pool, reducing it to 8 to her 13.
    Round 3, Joanne fails her roll, and so does Alexandra. Neither make any headway that round.
    Round 4, Joanne fails her roll, and Alexandra succeeds. Alexandra slices off a full 6 points from Joanne's pool, reducing it to 2. Since this is less than half of Joanne's full pool, her next Willpower check is at Hard - 47%.
    Round 5, both parties succeed again - but while Joanne's 37 roll is a healthy success, Alexandra wins the round with a 52 roll. Her attack yields 3 damage, which reduces Joanne's conflict pool to zero. With a blissful sigh, Joanne gives up and slumps into a hypnotic trance before the gloating Alexandra. Joanne will now carry out her new mistress' commands without question ...
    Example Extended Conflicts
    There are some really fun extended conflict examples given - cheating at poker, chase scenes, dinner party, persuading someone. I recommend you look at this whole section. It even gives an example of quick and dirty physical combat if you don't want to go mucking about with the whole combat section.
    Which, by the way, is coming up.

    Combat
    Ah, yes, the combat section. Pages 54 - 74. It should look, sound, and feel familiar to you. The rules can be found in Mythras Core Rulebook, after all.
    I'm not sure what percentage of gamers head straight to the combat sections of any game book nowadays. I guess it's still significant, because this chapter takes up two whole sections, between this bit and the Simplified Combat section following from pages 75 - 77.
    I must confess, I tend to gloss over the combat sections of every single roleplaying game I ever buy. There are plenty of ways to create conflict in a game other than deadly combat. Battles can have outcomes other than slaughtering or being slaughtered. I would love to see a combat section which focuses on objectives and Combat Styles other than maximising physical damage with the sole intention of killing the recipient of the character's hostilities.
    Between the Extended Conflicts section, the main combat section, and the Simplified Combat section, though, M-Space delivers on its promise to offer at least three different forms of combat in its pages. More, if you count Starship Combat (next week).

    Spot Rules
    This section covers everything else which is trying to kill your characters, such as falling, fatigue, fires, and
    Legal section: DO NOT complete that word!
    - inanimate objects.
    This last section's brief. It cannot cover everything - poisons, diseases, conditions, radiation, and so on. Basically, if it causes damage, work out the Intensity, which might as well be divided into Standard, Difficult, Formidable and so on, and have your characters make Endurance checks at that level of difficulty to avoid symptoms, fatigue, points of damage, or just plain old dropping dead.
    And that is it. All your personal combat needs are covered here, and a lot of other sources of damage. The rules cover an incredible diversity of situations, and it is well worth getting acquainted with them, in particular Extended Conflicts.
    Next week, we focus on the M-Space rules for starships: design, combat, and advanced combat.
    You know where to come. Hatches reopen in seven.
  25. Alex Greene
    Welcome to Part 2 of this review of Frostbyte Books' M-Space. Last week's blog introduced you to the game, and specifically to the core rulebook.
    Let's take our first look at the contents, starting with Characters and Game Systems.

    Characters
    M-SPACE characters can be everything from starship pilots and bounty hunters, to journalists and librarians! All depending on what type of scenarios you want to play.
    -- the core rulebook
    That's always promising. Characters in science fiction are so diverse. They can range from just ordinary, unskilled people (Gully Foyle from Bester's The Stars, My Destination) to diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers (Babylon 5).
    Do we really need to play more paramilitary types in army boots? That's a sad thing that Traveller is all about - its legendary character generation subgame was heavily skewed towards your characters coming from some sort of pseudomilitary or paramilitary, or plain old boots and ribbons military, force. This reflected game legend Marc Miller's (praise be unto him) life, but not all of us can claim to have gone through such regimented mills.
    The Characters chapter goes through the system, explaining calmly to newcomers about the crunch. This is a great way of bringing in the less experienced gamers, as well as anyone whose first roleplaying game is M-Space.
    Which would be so neat.
    Why do so many of these figures seem to have no faces? You're meant to imagine your face inside those helmets.
    So think of a character, one who's living a life that is so different to you. And here's the thing. They are living a life. Tabletop games always present your characters to be played like game pieces - but here, as you're going through the chargen process outlined from page 9, let your minds imagine who your character is, and what life they are living, and realise what their life is like, beyond the numbers.
    Character generation is fairly standardised from Mythras. You start with a character concept, roll your Characteristics, derive your Attributes, choose Standard SKills (including Combat Styles), Culture and Career, spread bonus skill points around, select your gear and equipment, and you can be good to go from there.

    The portraits put faces to your imaginations. They are reminiscent of the output from the Artflow website.
    Skills are clearly explained, pages 15 - 22. Go and pick out your character's favourite skills - the ones they are best at. They are based on your Culture and Career, and these are listed from page 23.
    Traveller players, please notice the huge difference between Traveller and M-Space chargen. No Lifepath. You don't start at age bupkhes and work your way up through the ranks while avoidng mishaps and praying for promotions, commissions, and Life Event 34 where you can go and roll your psionic talents. Here, if you want your characters to start off as a Rural farmboy on a desert planet and turn into the Galaxy's super psion saviour of the galaxy, be my guest, but be notified I find your lack of imagination ... disappointing ...
    Please check out those three Cultures, and all the Careers. You can choose a Career whose name is not on the list, but select the Skills spread from a Career which is - for instance, "Teacher" can use the Scientist skills set from page 225, emphasis on Teach; and your Assassin character from page 225 could replace Track with Demolitions and be more of a Terrorist type.
    Page 28 is where you can have fun. Passions have been described in this blog here. But you know how science fiction has traditionally steered well away from passions. Characters fight to save worlds, galaxies, entire universes - but they never struggle to find the right emotions to feel when something weird or disappointing happens. The Luther Arkwright series dealt with passions - Luther's despair, Anne's agony, Victoria's pain in the second book Heart of Empire, the fear of the natives of the Perfidious Albion parallel in The Legend of Luther Arkwright - and every character felt some sort of passion, from the huge libidos of the protagonists to the hatred of the antagonists, from Cromwell in Book 1 to Proteus in Book 3.
    Give your characters Passions. Give them a setting where they can express those Passions. Because these are how your characters can bring the setting, and the adventure, to vivid life at the table.

    Game Systems
    This next section covers the basic stuff - dice rolls, opposed dice rolls, differential rolls, injuries, game time, character improvement and development, and that's it for this chapter.
    Basically, everything you need to create a character and play an M-Space game are here, if all you want to do is to play a game where all you want to do is crunch some numbers. There is no Gamesmaster section in this book to describe how to roleplay, rather than rollplay - perhaps this is a weakness in the book, because Gamesmasters really should read the Gamesmastering chapter of Mythras Core Rulebook for that - but these two chapters are all that you need to create and run the characters you will be using in this game.
    Next week, we're looking at Extended Conflicts, Combat (including Simplified Combat), and the Spot Rules. The week after that, we'll be looking at everything that makes this a science fiction game - pages 86 to 155, covering Starship Design and Combat, Alien Creation, and World Building.
    Thought Of The Week
    M-Space is a game which presents you with the opportunity to create characters who are people, not just former soldiers and combat drones. Just after completing my look through of M-Space, I'll be looking at M-Space Companion with its expanded options for player characters - options which really open out options for your characters - but this game, as it is, presents you with a great opportunity to create characters whom you can look at as persons, rather than as collections of numbers on a sheet.
    Your characters are more than just "that schmoe running around shooting things with a big gun." This game allows you to create that schmoe who runs with a gang of people, putting on plays or running heists or solving scientific problems or debunking local ghosts as bad guys in rubber masks, getting into scrapes with the law, hopping from galaxy to galaxy, avoiding crooked cops and honourable crims, and carving out legends at every star they touch.
    Stay tuned. See you here next week.
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