Alex Greene

Enter a fantastic world unlike any other you may have encountered before. A world of larger-than-life characters and situations. A world of pomp and beauty. A world written with love, where passions can often accomplish more than weapons. Welcome to The Elder Isles; the Ten Kingdoms. Welcome to Lyonesse. Loving Tribute The late Jack Vance (1916-08-28 - 2013-05-26) was an author of fantasy, science fiction, and mystery stories. Born John Holbrook Vance, he created numerous settings which have become well-loved among their fans, notably the Lyonesse and Dying Earth settings. Vance's Dying Earth setting was an inspiration for many of the magic systems found in tabletop fantasy roleplaying games. Spells with evocative titles such as Whimsy's Marvellous Bloviation, which expunge their formulae from the mind once cast, originated from the pen of this American author. The fantastic wonders known as IOUN Stones also originated with Vance's Dying Earth. And then there are the three books of Lyonesse - Suldrun’s Garden, The Green Pearl, and Madouc. This epic tale is a rolling story of ambition, and passion, and exploration. The unique setting is quirky, larger than life, and colourful. Pageantry and ceremony abound. Protagonists are heroic. Antagonists are narcissistic and cynical. And despite terrible trials and tribulations, ultimately the noble and heroic protagonists prevail. Roleplaying In Lyonesse The Mythras sourcebook Lyonesse, by Dominic Mooney, Dave Morris, Pete Nash, Mark Shirley and Lawrence Whitaker, with Viktor Haag, presents the setting of Lyonesse as a venue for tabletop roleplaying. Players take on the role of Adventurers in the Elder Isles, in the time period where the ambitious King Casmir is hatching his schemes. This book, which weighs in at more than 500 pages, covers the following sections: an Introduction, which goes over a basic introduction of how tabletop roleplaying games work and the basic things you need to pley (you know, dice, pen, paper, and so on); a summary of each book of The Lyonesse Saga and the main characters; a history of the archipelago known as the Elder Isles; a chapter which details the Ten Kingdoms important to the Lyonesse saga - geography, history, people, politics, and culture. The book then describes the societies & religion in more detail, illustrating peculiarities of each of the Kingdoms, their cultures and religions. The next chapter, Chapter 6, focuses on character creation, and this is the first part of the book which covers explicit game mechanics. The crunchy matter continues in Skills (Chapter 7); Passions, Oaths, & Luck (Chapter 8), and Economics. Chapter 10, Towns, Villages, and Feasts, allows the creation of unique and quirky towns and villages. This chapter also boasts one of the greatest rules sets to be found in any roleplaying game - The Vancian Meal Generator, emulating Jack Vance's passion for describing the most sumptuous feasts found in any fantasy setting, and a subgame in its own right. Seriously, you could use this Meal Generator to create descriptions for banquets fit for gods, and forget about all that mucking about with swords. The book returns to crunch with a look at the game system (Chapter 11), and combat (Chapter 12). These rules cover circumstances such as damage sustained by defenestration, jousting, and crossing swords with brigands and ogres. Next is Chapter 13, dedicated to Lyonesse's magic systems. Magic is either Faerie Magic or Sandestin Magic. These are equivalent to Folk Magic and Sorcery, and Sandestin Magic requires the intercession of extraplanar entities called sandestins. Chapter 14 is a bestiary, and Chapter 15 covers other worlds and parallels, allowing characters to visit and explore those unique realms. The last two chapters list the series' Heroes and Villains, and cover notes for the Games Master on how to create, organise, and run adventures and campaigns set in the Elder Isles. Why Should You Play This Game? Lyonesse presents a world of sweeping, epic adventures, set in a carefully-crafted, lovingly-described realm. Your characters can have bizarre origins - they can be the creations of sorcery, or have faerie blood, for instance. Adventures could range from the characters attempting to find out who their birth parents were, to seeking justice or righteous vengeance, to exploring dangerous regions and battling ogres, to overcoming familial curses, or to preparing sumptuous feasts for visiting dignitaries renowned for their many appetites. Support For The Line Lyonesse has a couple of supplements, sold separately, to allow you to enter this world of wonders. Coddifut's Stipule and In High Dudgeon serve as introductions as to how the realm (and the rules) work. Coddifut's Stipule emerged before Lyonesse, and served as a taster for the main book. In High Dudgeon is a full adventure, which involves the Adventurers being plunged into the midst of a long-standing feud between two villages, High Dudgeon and Low Dudgeon. Both adventures have mysteries to solve. Coddifut's Stipule has enough information to allow it to be played with just the Mythras Core Rulebook, and it not only serves as a good introduction to Lyonesse, but to Mythras and to roleplaying. Fantastic Adventure This setting is truly fantastical. Adventuring in Lyonesse is lighthearted, yet at the same time deadly serious. The Elder Isles encourage the Passions, taunt the senses, and stretch the Gamesmaster's descriptive vocabulary to its limit. Don't use plain language where florid, fancy language will do. Capitalise Every Word, If You Have To. Lyonesse is opera, high comedy, romance, poetry, and above all epic adventure. The setting is not a time for characters to be timid. Boldness is the key to winning the adventures. You will either succeed with a flourish, and your praises sung throughout the Ten Kingdoms; or you will fail magnificently, and your fall be the talk of generations as generals and leaders take the lessons of your hilarious failures to heart. Above all, Lyonesse rewards magnificence and magniloquence. Stand proud; stride boldly; and hold grand, sweeping visions in your mind as you enthrall people with your plans. Then sit down and feast until your belly is practically bursting. Always be graceful; never be vulgar. Act like the world of Lyonesse is yours for the taking, and you might just hear chuckling from far up above; Jack Vance looking down approvingly at your attempts to keep the spirit of his ornate, over-the-top legacy alive.

Worlds United is The Design Mechanism's venture into the world of the pulp adventure genre. Imagine that the Solar System had turned out exactly the way Twentieth Century science fiction authors had imagined it. Venus as a humid jungle planet, Mars as the home of a dying civilisation, and rocket ships routinely travelling between these worlds and the Earth. Even a Moonbase or two, if you like. Now imagine a world where a cataclysmic event had caused humanity to take to the stars - something which convulsed the entire Solar System, but which forced the acceleration of every species in our system. War. Specifically, the invasion of Earth by the Martians, as chronicled by H G Wells in The War of The Worlds. Now bring the timeline forwards half a century ... or more, if you like. Welcome to Worlds United. A Sequel, Of Sorts Worlds United imagines a Solar System where humans and Martians have clashed, not once, but twice - a war which first took place on Earth, and later on Mars as well. Another sourcebook written by John Snead, Worlds United is a love letter to the pulp genre of science fiction from the turn of the century. In this era, writers such as Olaf Stapledon and Edgar Rice Burroughs imagined life on other worlds, Chesney Bonestell imagined extraterrestrial landscapes in glorious detail, and scientists imagined what life would be like on these different worlds, sometimes with scary results. History Humans and Martians have clashed twice in cataclysmic Worlds Wars - the first being during Victoria's reign on Earth, where Martians landed cylinders and deployed War Machines to annihilate human society, and to consume and enslave humans; where cannon fire was met with Heat Rays and Black Smoke. We know the outcome of that First Worlds War - the Martians fell to diseases for which they had had no immunity, which had begun attacking them the moment they landed on Earth. And so humans rebuilt their world ... and learned to use the Martians' technology, and developed flight and rocketry practically simultaneously. Gods, yes, Johnny, you can have Zeppelins in this world, if you want. So many different parallels have airships, and this world would not be complete without them either. Then in 1938, the octopoid Martians invaded again, and this time they'd had their shots, so they stuck around - but humans had had time to prepare, so they took the fight back to Mars, and this time they had nukes. Flash forward to the 1950s, now. Prop planes, jets, airships with helium rather than hydrogen, helicopters. A world where they designed big flying wings, maybe with a ballroom in one wing and a swimming pool in the other ... and skipped straight past that, to flying cars and interplanetary travel in the form of the silver locust ships of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Earth and Mars Mars is important to the setting. In this world, the Martians somehow had human slaves with them, some of which had come to Earth. With the death of the first wave of Martians, these free slaves now turned to the Terrans, offering their knowledge of how to use Martian technology - and also, to the Terrans' surprise, working psychic powers. So then, humans took to space, and found that Venus supported life ... don't laugh, this is a parallel, not our universe. Just ask those nice VALHALLA chaps in Zero-Zero next door. They'll give you a briefing. And Venus has snake people. And jungles. And dinosaurs. And I'm sounding like an eight-year-old. So there are friendly Martian-born humans, and friendly Venusian humans, and both species reveal that people from Earth had been transplanted to these worlds aeons ago by some unknown third party (Odd Soot's Luminarians? Traveller's Yaskoydray?) and everybody could interbreed, so fun. Plus Ophidians. Riding on dinosaurs. So you can make them look like Doctor Who's Silurians and Sea Devils (love those frilly collars) or imagine them however you like. The Setting Adventures What do the Adventurers do in this world? Exploration Your characters can be explorers. You can delve into the past of Earth, Mars, and Venus, trying to find what brought humans from Earth to the other two worlds, and to what purpose, and where they went. Discovery The Adventurers' job is to seek out new life, and perhaps they find it. And perhaps they find that they need Octopoids and Ophidians at their side to face this new life, these new civilisations. Diplomacy Your characters know that the Octopoid Martians still live in their submartian bunkers, regrouping, awaiting their opportunity to reach out and conquer again. Perhaps it is time for humans to adopt a different approach, and to reach out to the Octopoids with the hand of peace, to extend their psychic thoughts past the Octopoids' xenophobia and supremacism to touch the deep-seated fear beneath, and to show them a universe where humans and Octopoids can work together to build a new and better Mars where nobody gets left behind. War Stories It is 1960, and the Martians are at it again. The war is scattered across three worlds, and the Adventurers and their ship become the key to the salvation of humanity, or its doom. Alternate Setting: Ultra-Modern The 1950s and 1960s are far back in the past. The year is 2022. Some of the old Adventurers from those days are still around, impossibly young thanks to Venusian anti-aging treatments; and they are joined by modern day humans from Earth, Mars and Venus (as well as people who can claim ancestry back to all three worlds), as well as Octopoid and Ophidian Adventurers born on Earth. This would be a world shaped by the internet, mobile phones, and a communications network which is truly interplanetary in scope. The ships and vehicles have evolved out of gleaming steel cigars into wondrous, streamlined shapes. The Solar System is open for exploration, and every world can see what the Adventurers stumble across, streaming live across the cosmos. Alternate Setting: Children Of The Lens The Gifted have become a patrol force, policing the spaces between the worlds. Organised crime has risen to become a dangerous threat to human, Venusian, and Martian societies alike. Even the Octopoids have fallen victim to criminals from among their own kind. To fight these criminals, the Gifted receive special training, and access to the Lens: a psychic device worn on the wrist or around the neck; a device which enhances their psychic powers, and also acts as a badge of authority. Alternate Setting: Quatermass World Imagine The War of The Worlds, as imagined by author Nigel Kneale. Anyone familiar with British TV will recognise that name as the brains behind The Quatermass Experiment (a British space launch goes horribly wrong, and something is brought back from space), Quatermass And The Pit (construction workers discover a Martian vessel millions of years old, buried beneath London - "We're the Martians now.") and The Stone Tape (what we think of as "ghosts" are electrical recordings of intense emotions imprinted into the crystalline structures of stones and played out like recordings when they interact with the Kirlian auras of living beings). Alternate Setting: DOOM The year is 1995. UAC have set up a base on Mars. One day, all contact with Mars is lost. Worse: Phobos has disappared. You're the only humans on the surface of Mars. You hear hideous sounds coming from within the hangar. Here's a chainsaw. Good hunting. Themes The themes of Worlds United are Heroism and Optimism. Your Adventurers can be thrust into the heart of the adventure, armed with little more than gumption and wits; often, that is enough. Elements within this setting include:- Psychic Powers - Octopoids, Venusians, and some Terran humans have psychic abilities. These are important in this setting. Advanced Tech- Well, advanced here is "pulp era". Everything is silver or silver lame. The music of the spheres is played on a Theremin. Dirigibles and flying cars. Another Earth - Look at Africa in this setting. Your Adventurers can come from there. They are building a beanstalk space elevator on Mount Kenya. This is the plot of Arthur C Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise, set in the most beautiful parts of Africa. Diplomacy - Half of exploration is discovery; the other half is learning. Your Adventurers must be more smart than strong. They can do more with words and intelligent action than with fists or guns. Talking with alien beings is often more effective than shooting at them. Strangeness - Of course there have to be threats. Those threats can come from, say, Octopoids - which can be run as presented in the book: irredeemable, cold, vicious, xenophobic, regarding the worlds of Earth and Venus with envious eyes, slowly and surely still drawing their plans against us ... Or you could bring in an outside threat which wipes the floor with the Martians, if you like. Disruptors, maybe ...? Intelligence - Your Adventurers can lead the way as scientists. To quote The Doctor:- Crossover Potential I recommend enjoying Worlds United as a base setting. This is Science Fiction at its zenith in the Twentieth Century. Get to love the setting. But Worlds United can also work with other settings, even if only as a cameo. Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels is the most obvious answer to this, but you can have your characters stumble into Worlds United by other means - Destined heroes accidentally wandering in through a Portal power activated during a period of intense solar activity, or maybe Doctor Distorto hit them with a dimension beam; or your Seers from After The Vampire Wars could astrally project into this 'verse by accident, finding themselves occupying real bodies, using real powers, and having to chase down real enemies from their world who have taken refuge physically somehow. You can even create crossover potential with the more ephemeral world of FIoracitta, as the Avventurieri make a shocking discovery that the lifesaving herb ticho not only grows in abundance in Worlds United's Venus, but that the gods of the Ophidians and Longane all dwell in the hidden depths of that fertile world. Last, and this is a major selling point for diehard Mythras fans ... Venus, in Worlds United, is a planet-sized Monster Island. You can bring in everything from Monster Island and have them set up home here. Even the Kaiju, if you like. A New World Awaits You In The Off-World Colonies Worlds United presents you with a very optimistic science fiction setting. The "Golden Land of Opportunity and Adventure" is a glittering solarpunk universe which can offer temptations and terrors alike. Worlds United is a world where the following words from another optimistic science fiction TV series ring true. Come and play in the universe of Worlds United. You won't need any weapons more powerful than a teaspoon and an open mind.

The world around you is not what it seems. If you look out of the corner of your eye, you might catch a glimpse of something lurking in the shadows. Sometimes, whatever is lurking in the shadows turns its attention towards you. Good luck. The premise of John Snead's After The Vampire Wars is a world transformed by the discovery that the supernatural creatures of myth and legend, vampires in particular, have been living among you humans all this time, and you never knew. Until now. Back Page Blurb Here's the description on the back page. That says more than I can about the game. After The Vampire Wars is basically the answer to the question "What if the Masquerade from Vampire: the Masquerade or Vampire: the Requiem had been broken?" This is The Design Mechanism's foray into the urban fantasy genre. John Snead, the author and developer, spins a lavish and detailed history of an alternate Earth where all kinds of supernatural creatures have dwelt among humans for centuries, and the aftermath of a bloody war when the humans collectively saw through the veils drawn around their supernatural counterparts for the first time, early in this century (the 21st). The Setting When AtVW first came out, the year was 2017. The date of your game can remain in the modern age (2022, at the time of writing) or set in the future or distant past. Nothing prevents you from setting AtVW in 1917 if you like, with the Vampire War taking place against the background of The Great War, or even setting it in the 1980s in the dying days of The Cold War. In the sourcebook, however, the year is 2017. AtVW outlines a history of the world from 2008. In a story harking to the TV series Person of Interest, the US government began using modern street surveillance technology to identify vampires, with the ultimate agenda of exterminating the post-life species. The backlash from the vampire communities was devastating. Nukes came into play. A number of nuclear weapons were spirited away, including an entire US Navy nuclear submarine. The war dragged on for two years. The sourcebook mentions Russia and Ukraine, and the Eastern response to the outing of vampires. This is an alternate timeline, after all. The World of AtVW The modern, post-War, world of 2017 (or 2022, if you want to advance things to the present) is one where supernatural beings live more or less openly alongside people. They remain more or less separate from most people thanks to the supernatural effects of Shadowing (a phenomenon of supernaturally-imposed psychological denial imposed on people by the presence of the supernatural, similar to The Mists and Lunacy from Ony Path's Changeling and Werewolf settings). There are laws in place, and many supernaturals have limited human rights. Vampires have fewer rights than other species - something which rankles some vampire community activists. Seers Seers are humans who develop some form of supernatural powers. There are plenty of those in AtVW; shifters, vampires, the Fae and so on all have access to various powers, but only Seers can develop supernatural abilities (other than becoming a supernatural being, such as rising from the dead as a vampire). Seers are humans who regularly interact with the supernatural beings of the world. This makes them conduits to the human world, ambassadors, and go-betweens. Human seers can also be private investigators delving into the supernatural world on behalf of human clients, or working with supernatural clients to investigate human involvement in their world. Laws AtVW focuses on the conflicts - conflicts between the vampire and human communities; between vampires and other species such as half-fae, lycanthropes, shifters, and Seers; and political conflicts, when the agendas of one species, usually humans, comes up against the rights of other beings. Vampires have few rights. In some parts of the world, they have no rights whatsoever. Supernatural communities form pressure groups to fight for recognition and parity with humans. The Otherworld Sometimes, adventures take place beyond the confines of the physical world, in a place called The Otherworld; a land of "imagination, creativity, and memory" with ties to the half-fae, but also to dreamers, artists and others. And yes, sometimes The Otherworld has its own agenda, and individuals within The Otherworld have designs on the physical realm. Power Levels After The Vampire Wars introduced the concept of power levels, three tiers of character development and three levels of play. Street level, a default middle, and an epic scale where protagonists and antagonists possess incredible powers. Outlay Of The Book After The Vampire Wars is organised into chapters, beginning with Shadowing (there's a typo - it's spelled "Shawdowing" on page 7), which describes what it is, how it's triggered and its effects on human minds. It moves on to History, which outlines the development of the setting right up to current events. Chapters 3-5 are the crunch section - character generation, skills, and powers. Chapter Six moves on to cover The Otherworld, while Chapter Seven takes on Supernatural Society, and the various cultures present in the world and how they interact with humans, and with one another. Chapter Eight covers the supernatural species themselves, and Chapter Nine rounds off with Storytelling (rather than Gamesmastering), and how to run After The Vampire Wars for your players. Inspirations are listed on page 8, but there are a lot more modern inspirations, beside the obvious Anne Rice stuff - Poppy Z Brite's and Nancy Collins' books, for example. Inspirations which never made it to the list include more mundane books, shows, and TV series. Consider a modern cozy murder mystery show along the lines of Midsomer Murders where the victim is a supernatural being living uneasily with the human locals in Badger's Drift, or a grim and gritty setting such as The Bridge (Bron / Broen) with Saga Noren (Landskrim Malmo) as a Detective / Seer with autism and a very loose connection to the idea of conversational boundaries. Storytelling Please pay attention to this chapter. Page 134 outlines the major themes of AtVW. It is urban fantasy noir, which means secrets, loyalties tested, the past catching up to people, and betrayal. The lines between right and wrong are blurred, but justice is still clear, even if it does sometimes fall on the wrong side of the divide. It is about ethics, and cynicism versus idealism, and not so much about living with ethics, but with clinging on to what few ethics you have which haven't yet been eroded away by bitter experience. You can tell stories of faith tested, faith broken, and faith renewed. There is even room for romance in the shadows. AtVW does bring up the topic of romance - covered on pages 140 and 141. You have license to create such dark romances as you would find in Buffy or in Anita Blake (before the latter series went right off the rails). And yes ... if you want to, you can even create a slice of life setting like Being Human, or even What We Do In The Shadows. Final Word ... For Now After The Vampire Wars is currently just a single title, begging for product support. The setting can be tied to Luther Arkwright, Destined, or the rules and mechanics tied to any modern Mythras setting you like. AtVW can be used to support your homebrew world where the supernatural forces are present but still hidden, sucessfully concealed by very potent Shadowing; or you could run AtVW in Gemelos City, and have your half-fae characters stand alongside costumed masks such as Spiral, The Thaumaturgist, and Miss Destiny to fend off invasions of spirits from The Otherworld in a blending of the supernatural and the Godstrand. At the lowest level, AtVW can even be sneaked into an otherwise mundane setting such as Department M, and have your Seer characters help out trained superspies to ferret out some mad spy ring which has taken captive of a circle of vampires in an attempt to create supersoldiers from their blood. I recommend giving AtVW a go, if you want to run an urban fantasy which doesn't force you to trawl through volumes of back history and metaplot, and I'm looking at the World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness lines here.

Following from the last blog post, which looked at the newest Mythras setting, Destined, we're going to take a look at another Mythras setting, Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels. Luther Arkwright is The Design Mechanism's foray into a genre known as Steampunk. This genre of science fiction is characterised by strange, baroque steam-driven inventons, vehicles, devices and weapons. The Difference Engine by Wiliam Gibson and Bruce Sterling more or less made Steampunk mainstream, but the UK broached the genre first with the Bryan Talbot graphic novels The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Heart of Empire. Eternal Champions Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius was one incarnation of The Eternal Champion - a mortal being who exists in some form in every universe within a vast multiverse of parallels. This may have been inspired by Joseph Campbell's non-fiction philosophical work The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which may itself have roots in older heroes such as Beowulf and Legal team here. Stop it. Anyway, there you go. Bryan Talbot's eponymous Luther Arkwright was his answer to that other guy. The multiverse of Bryan Talbot is similar to that of Moorcock, but unlike Moorcock's setting which had a different Eternal Champion in each parallel, there was only one Luther Arkwright, unique across every parallel. Luther was gifted with the ability to plane shift on his own, trvelling from parallel to parallel as easily as ordinary people would wander into an adjacent room. In the graphic novels, there is a cosmic conflict going on, as an alien force known as The Disruptors destabilise individual parallels as part of a long-running master plan. The Big Picture is described in the Luther Arkwright sourcebook. This sourcebook also describes the protagonist force set up to combat these Disruptors, Project VALHALLA and the parallel known as Zero-Zero. This is where Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Universe comes in, because the player characters are Agents of Project VALHALLA, taking orders from the AI W.O.T.A.N. and travelling between parallels in a steampunk dimension ship to thwart the Disruptors wherever they turn up. Sourcebook Contents Player characters are VALHALLA Agents, wanderers between parallels. If you've never encountered this kind of setting before, think of it as like the TV series Sliders. The sourcebook has all you need to run adventures in the Talbotverse, but you'll still need the Mythras Core Rulebook for the basic game engine. The Arkwright Multiverse - Background information, the Grand Metaplot, and where the characters come in. Character Creation - The basic information on how to create your characters. Traits, Passions & Dependencies - Characters have special Traits, Passions, and flaws known as Dependencies. These set them above the run of the mill people, but also tint their heroic powers with downsides and weakness which serve to humanise them. Madness & Other Colours - A hard chapter to read through, this covers Tenacity, psychological conditions and the mechanical consequences of exposure to the horrors of the Talbotverse. Mind Games - This is missing from the blurb on page 5, but it covers Psionics and Mysticism. In addition to possessing his unique multidimensional talent, Luther is a master of psionics and mysticism. Your characters may not have Luther's singular existence and there may be parallel versions of them in a bunch of 'verses, but at least you can have someone who is a master of both Mysticism and Psionics, too. Technology - Here's where the Steampunk comes in. Weapons, armour, tools, equipment, and various sundry paraphernalia, all given a modern Steampunk twist, including using tech from different parallels. Firearms & Combat - Basically, everything from Mythras Firearms began its story here. This was probably the first Mythras supplement to cover firearms combat, and this sourcebook includes science fiction weapons such as vibro beamers. Vehicles - This is about how people get around both within and between 'verses. There are airships. W.O.T.A.N & The Disruptors - Here's the dirt on W.O.T.A.N., VALHALLA, and the Disruptors. Parallels - Information on landmark parallels, and how to create your own. Games Master Resources - Advice to Gamesmasters on running Arkwright adventures and campaigns, and stats on the major characters. On Thin Ice - An ice age grips Parallel 13.16.94, and the Disruptors are planning something bad. In this adventure, your Agents must go in, find out what they are doing, and stop them. The Arkwright Saga - The Grand Metaplot was explained in the Introduction, but here is where the book summarises both of Bryan Talbot's books. No substitute for reading the originals, mind you, but if you cannot find The Adventures of Luther Arkwright or Heart of Empire, these will have to do. Steampunk The fashions, and the mores, may be more Nineteen Seventies than Eighteen Seventies, but Luther Arkwright is proudly Steampunk in the manner of Jules Verne and H G Wells. Your characters might be content with driving around the English coast in Minis and making phone calls from iconic red telephone booths, and wearing late Seventies and early Eighties styles ... a fashion nightmare ... and the tech level available to the Agents effectively allows them access to modern conveniences though with a steampunk twist. Page 22 lists the different technological eras, ranging from the pre-industrial (roughly the late 1700s / early 1800s) through to the Nanotechnology and Spacefaring. The parallels which are of interest to the Disruptors would seem to be those which have a developed industrial base of some kind, often with a distinct reliance on steam. Superspies This setting is not for the faint of heart. The multiverse is not forgiving, and the price of failure is usually a bullet in the head. With stakes as high as the fate of entire parallels, the characters have to enter each battlefield world with circumspection. Luther Arkwright is as much a game of tradecraft (espionage) and intrigue (shifting loyalties, betrayal, treachery, mysteries, string pulling, suspense) as it is a science fiction steampunk romp. A Very British Adventure Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels is as quintessentially British as Doctor Who, fish & chips, and spelling colour with a u. Bryan's incredibly-detailed graphic novels draw an unmistakably British filter over the world. This sourcebook honours this by setting many of the adventures in some parallel or other of London, but you don't have to stick to London to set your adventures. It does, however, make for some truly bizarre imagery to see Union flags flying over Government buildings in Cleveland, Ohio, or Tokyo, and all the locals stopping at 4pm local time for tea. This is by design. A Very Different Adventure This book is available from The Design Mechanism's new store, in both PDF and hardcover. The game has been available for many years - it was originally a RuneQuest title and bore the RQ imprint - and in light of news that Luther Arkwright had been optioned in '21 for a TV series, as well as the next Luther Arkwright graphic novel set to be issued on 14 July 2022, this sourcebook - and its adventure supplement Parallel Lines - deserve to be revisited.

I have good news. The store had an exchange policy. So far, so good. Until this moment, I had no guarantees I would ever see a new laptop before the bank holiday. However, my notes for the next issue did not make it to the backups, so the hiatus stands. Hopefully, this thing will not be a lemon. But keep your fingers crossed.

I'm typing this from my tablet. The laptop from which I have posted all of my articles here to date went and died last Sunday. Worse, I got sold a lemon - and the replacement laptop lasted just 48 hours before it, too, was brown bread. Posts will resume as and when I can get crowdfunded for a new one. ALso, wish me luck because I have found a halfway competent tech guy who might be able to fix my old laptop. We'll meet for the first time on Tuesday.

This week, instead of looking at Mythras, we look at the latest core rulebook to emerge from The Design Mechanism. Enter a world of four colour Spandex action, where brightly-clad warriors for justice chase sneering bad guys across rooftops, and fight pitched battles in the grimy streets; where larger-than-life people stride through life like Colossi and dare to call themselves heroes. Put on your costume, take to the streets and rooftops, and stand beneath the silver light of the Moon, looking down upon the city, lord of all you survey. Welcome to Destined. Four Colour Fun Destined celebrates the four-colour comics which first appeared almost a century ago in the United States, which brought thrilling adventure and heroism to the jaded people of the United States of America. The 1930s were a time of desperation and despair. America had its Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl driving people away from their rural environments into the increasingly-crowded cities. The Great Experiment which was Prohibition had utterly failed - and worse, it had created an underclass of organised crime which enforced its own law with fists and knives and Thompson submachine guns. America was suffering from internal intolerance and racism, and living in denial of the wounds it had inflicted upon itself since the turn of the 20th century; but in Europe, an even greater wound was still sore and bleeding, as it began to settle from the convulsions of four brutal years between 1914 and 1918, combined with a virulent strain of influenza which had killed more people than The Great War. The world had suffered insanity, and people wondered whether anything would ever go back to normal. And then people like Bob Kane and Bill Finger, and Siegel and Schuster, brought sunshine into people's lives. Sunshine, and adventure, and hope. And now, almost a hundred years on, as the successors of the original comic book authors pick up the stylus and the keyboard and script new stories of those original heroes, and actors portray them in increasingly-spectacular tentpole movies, the battles of superheroes are set to be enacted around the gaming table. Time To Be The Hero So, Destined. From the front cover, which depicts two superheroes about to join in pitched battle on some city rooftop, the book makes it plain and crystal clear what to expect. Daring fights, deeds of derring do, and daredevils duking it out against double dealing and dastardly, er, deviltry. I hope I haven't run out of Ds for the rest of this blog post. Written by Mike Larrimore and Brian Pivik, Destined is the spiritual successor to the late Steve Perrin's Superworld. Indeed, Steve Perrin had been working on a revival of Superworld when he passed. Destined first arrived on The Design Mechanism's new web store on Easter Sunday, 2022. It arrived on DriveThruRPG on 2022-04-23. The Core Rulebook is available in Print On Demand and PDF formats. The description on the TDM website asks Who are you destined to be? From the description on the site:- Saviours and Scoundrels There is plenty for Players and Gamesmasters between the covers of this book. I know everybody has their favourite section - a lot of the readers are likely to turn to the Powers and Combat sections - so here is what you can expect. First up is the Introduction, which has the sections What Makes a Superhero?, How the Game Works, Overview of the Contents, Game Conventions, and Anatomy of a Hero. All of this is just a preamble, but take a look through it - the authors and artists capture the spirit of the source material:- Therein lies the appeal of Destined - the opportunity to play someone who comes in and saves the day. The main sections of the rest of the book cover Hero Creation, Skills, Powers, Tools Of The Trade (gadgets), Combat, Spot Rules (challenges and Perils), The Life Of A Hero (what your characters do in and out of their costumes), Creating Your Comic (the Gamesmaster's section), Welcome To Gemelos City (the main setting for the book, though you are under no obligation to set your game there - it's designed to be flexible enough that you can set it anywhere on Earth, even in our real world), and finally The Righteous and The Irredeemable (the major heroes, villains, and other players in Gemelos City). How To Build A Hero Character creation goes through a sequence familiar to Mythras players - Power Level (Street, Epic, or Paragon); Hero Concept; Origin; Characteristics; Attributes; Standard Skills; Culture; Career; Bonus Skill Points; Powers; Allotments and Gear; and Final Details, such as friends and family, rivals and enemies, events pertaining to their Origin, and the things that drive your heroes. Power level determines what kinds of adventures your characters have, whether they are at the level of something like The Question, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Agent May, Fitz / Simmons, Nite Owl, or Rorschach; Epic level, such as Spider-Man, Batman, Quake, Ghost Rider, Iron Man and so on; or Paragon level, the level of Storm, Colossus, Loki, Magneto and Squirrel Girl. Your Hero Concept could be drawn from any of the comics. Or you could create one of your own. The setting assumes that the superheroes of your setting grew up with a different lot of comics, or no comics at all. You could even be the first costumed heroes of your world, or there could have been a long-standing tradition of costumed heroics dating back many decades. The Gemelos City setting mentions an early 1800s hero, The Coachman. The default Gemelos City setting assumes that the powered heroes, the Doctor Manhattans of the world (Epic and Paragon) began emerging "fifteen years ago," and although it states that Destined takes place in the modern day (meaning that the Godstrand gene began Awakening in 2007, as of 2022), there are alternative settings available paralleling the Great Ages of comics, from its Golden and Silver Ages, to its Bronze Age where the tone began to get a little darker (the eras of Zenith, Watchmen, Transmetropolitan, and The Invisibles), to its Iron Age (epitomised by The Punisher) as well as the Modern Age, which takes elements from all the previous Ages). Crunchy Bits Once you get to the Powers section, you'll see that there is a rather interesting mechanic. The biggest concern about supers games like Superworld was that heroes would run out of gas in mid flight halfway between skyscrapers, or somehow underestimate the drain on their internal energies through extensive use of their powers, and suddenly they'd find themselve as weak and helpless as the baseline mortals they had been trying to protect. In Destined, your Heroes do not need to roll to activate their powers. You do not need to spend Power Points, either. There is a section on Automatic Successes. It's more or less the same kind of section you have in Mythras but it warrants looking at. A recent book which came out at the same time, DoubleZero by Lightspress Media, pointed out that your character can go through an entire adventure without rolling a single die. Destined is a game where such things are possible, even feasible - your hero will never end up watching their power beams fizzle and sputter just because they rolled a 98 on their activation check for example. Destined powers have Boosts, which extend the range, scope, or impact of these Powers. On their own, a Blast can take out a well-armed opponent, but adding Power Points to that Blast can do more, such as a Salvo which takes down multiple opponents simultaneously. The form the Blast takes is up to you. If you want eye beams or intense cold, radiation, fire, or ultrasonic waves, the stats are the same. There are Hero Templates to help you to design your character's concept, should you want your superhero to be a genius, a bruiser, an agile weaponsmith, an intimidating detective who works at night, or a Champion who stands on rooftops with the Sun behind them to reassure the citizens that All Will Be Well ... Origins are a big feature, and Destined has plenty of options for background events, Connections, and so on. It's not just about the hero's Origin story, but those of the people around them. Who knows about their secret identity? Who needs to be kept quiet about the Hero's double life? There is a quick cheat sheet on page 50 to allow you to get through the process of Hero generation very rapidly, followed by the Skills Pyramids (which have become a common theme of Mythras character generation). Background Events Tables Destined has multiple background events tables, most of which are tied to some sort of Origin or another. These Origins include Created (your Hero is a Construct like Vision), Experimentation (Captain America, Wolverine), Inherent (Zenith, Wonder Woman), Mutation (The X-Men), Mystical (Doctor Strange, The Invisibles, John Constantine, Zatanna), Technology (Iron Man, Batman, Green Arrow, Hawkeye), Training (Iron Man, Batman, Green Arrow, Hawkeye), and one extra-large table for general background events not tied to any particular Origin. Scary People ... And Then There Are The Villains There is so much to go through in this core rulebook. A novice gamer might find it a little daunting to go through, but rest assured - Destined is easy to read, and has a nifty guide to help you to go through the process of creating a character, assigning their Allotments (the gadgets and other resources they'll need for the adventure), Connections, Passions, and other details (such as secret identities). Gamesmasters are not left short, either. Organisations allow a Gamesmaster to create groups ranging from concerned citizens against costumed vigilantism, to police units, to specialised response units developed by the likes of Gemelos City to take down masks. Gamemasters are taken through the different Ages of comics, highlighting the main features of each era (Silver Age's black and white morality, the Iron Age's unnecessary brutality and Nineties ironic edgelordiness), and Gamesmasters are given a long look at such topics as duality (what the person's life is like without the mask, versus with the mask), how to create the atmosphere of your hero comic, movie, TV show and so on, how to run games (such as moving the spotlight around, putting fun first and rules second, collaboration with the Players to build your world), and so on. Towards the back of the book, the main setting is introduced. Gemelos City, a setting I fell in love with. A fictional West Coast version of Gotham or Metropolis, this gleaming city is a kind of hybrid between LA, San Fran and a huge helping of San Diego. The Twin City is split in two by The Divide, a river which forms a boundary layer between the rich Crown to the North, and the Ossuary and Brigadier Bay to the South where all the gang crime and poverty is. The major features of both halves are listed, from City Hall to Asphodel Park. History, important people, cops, celebs ... this book has it all. Destined also has villains. There is a definite theme to the villains. It is not for nothing that they all seem to come out of the books of Greek mythology. It ties in with a metaplot theme in Destined that the old Gods and Monsters are coming back in some form or another. Back then, the mighty heroes wore togas and loin cloths. Nowadays, it's form fitting Spandex and combat vests with lots of pockets. Either way, the Heroes are cut from the same Olympian cloth as their Classical ancestors, as if the stage were being set for Gods and Mortals to fight, with the Demigods and Monsters being the pawns in a renewed Manichaean chess match. Comparisons There are so many different superhero roleplaying games out there on the market. Ascendant and Aberrant are two very bright lights - with Aberrant making a comeback after a period of absence. Not to mention Mutants & Masterminds, Superworld and City of Mists and all the others. Both Ascendant and Aberrant begin with long intros, showcasing how the heroes began. Presented in comic book style, they're really just fluff pieces. In contrast, Destined rolls up its sleeves and goes right into the process of making the game about the Players. The villains and monsters are there for the Gamesmaster to drop in if they haven't got an idea of which villain is pulling off that bank heist. As Gamesmaster, you can create all of your own Rogues' Gallery, and make them the major players in your Gemelos City, or whatever other crime-riddled conurbation you happen to set your stories in. And you don't have to play superheroes, either. Going Off Script Destined is designed to allow your characters to run heroes. It doesn't matter if they don't wear Spandex. There's enough information in the core rulebook to allow your characters to play even as normal people - cops, first responders, firefighters, journalists, ordinary vigilantes ... even "Real Life Superheroes" armed with nothing more than a video camera and 100,000 Twitter followers. The book is designed to allow your characters to be anyone and anything they like. To tell the stories you like, whether it be superagents who now work for a special Major Crimes police task force, or a time travelling alien who stole his or her time machine, which looks bigger on the inside. End Notes This has just been a first read of Destined. Mike and Brian have poured an enormous amount of detail into this book, and it is designed to be the only book you'll need to play. You can bring in the Mythras Core Rulebook, but all of the main rules are listed here in Destined so even if you only had this one book with you, you could run the game. There is enough setting material, furthermore, to ensure that you can never run out of stories to run in Gemelos City, at the very least. If you've not played a superhero game before, I recommend Destined to be your first. If you've played superhero games in the past, I'd recommend Destined to be your next. This is a game which focuses on the heroes, not the powers: on the adventure, not just the combat; and on the heroic fight for justice, not just random battle scenes. Time to take a stand. What's your catchphrase?

Next week, for one week only, this blog will be celebrating the launch of Mike Larrimore's book Destined. Join us on April 23rd for some Mythras superhero roleplaying.

And so your adventure leads the Characters up to a vast bank of primal trees. They look at the pitch darkness beyond their sight, take a look at you, and decide to go around the trees. And you probably can't blame them. Line of sight reduced to a few yards; light levels practically at pitch blackness; and every sound they make probably carries for kilometres as if to tell every hungry predatory beast exactly where they are. You don't need to make a forest haunted or demonic to make the environment terrifying. Mundane animals, humans, and natural features alone can pose challenges for the staunchest Adventurer, without bringing in weird magical monsters. Terrain Depending on how dense the woods are in the area (hex, if you're navigating through a woodland map hexcrawl), line of sight, visibility, light level, terrain hindrance, and cover might be affected. The only places where you are likely to encounter roads and paths, other than desire paths marked out by animals, are in Cultivated, Light, and Medium forested areas. Terrain Hazards Getting Lost - A major hazard of travelling through unfamiliar territory is getting lost and losing your way. Before GPS apps on mobile phones, before even compasses, characters who get lost in the woods are likely to be doomed unless they can make those Navigation checks. If your Adventurer spots a landmark they are familiar with, the Navigation check becomes a lot easier; otherwise, it remains Difficult. Unstable or Treacherous Terrain - Gopher holes, exposed tree roots, loose stones, and similar hazards can trip up moving Adventurers, damage the legs of steeds, and so on. The ground can be slippery, particularly after heavy rainfall. Wet clay soil provides problems with traction, reducing Speed considerably. Other Hazards Biological Hazards - Pollen may trigger allergies. Poisonous plants from nettles to poison ivy, poison oak and so on can also geerate adverse reactions (treat as an infection). Likewise, insect or other creature bites can have an adverse effect - depending on the creature, they may range from irritation to bloodloss, to more serious diseases such as malaria, or even just kill your Adventurers outright such as snake bites or black widow spider venom. Falling Hazards - Tree branches breaking and falling, or even whole trees, can injure an Adventurer unwise enough to be walking underneath them. Temperature Extremes - Temperatures in the forest can range from one extreme on the weather table to the other in the course of a single day. Use the Mythras Weather Table on page 85 as a guide. Exposure is deadly to the unprepared; and depending on the Adventurers' Locale and Survival skill checks in picking out a suitable spot to build a shelter, those Endurance checks to avoid exposure can range from Easy to Herculean. Water - It is possible to die of thirst in a forest in the middle of a rain storm, if the Adventurer is untrained and incapable of collecting the water. There is also the danger of finding water which is undrinkable due to pollution, parasites, diseases, or even poisons from plants. Fatigue - All that pushing through the undergrowth can leave an Adventurer too fatigued to push on. Infections - A disease does not have to be something like necrotising fasciitis to be a danger. One of the hazards of the Amazon Ultra Marathon is the potential loss of a runner's toes through an infection as simple as trench foot. Untreated, gangrene can kill the Adventurer. Rare Calamities - Limited visibility means that catastrophic events from fluke lightning strikes hitting trees within a few metres of the Adventurer (anything less than 10 metres is enough to stun an Adventurer, even without the risk of a burning, lightning-struck tree falling down on them), to dangerous landslides following heavy rainfalls (deadly whether you are standing on top of the ground as it gives way, and even deadlier if you are passing underneath). Other such rare events could include hail, a tornado cutting through the region or, if your forested area is close to sea level and near a beach, a tsunami. Morale - Forests can be bleak places. Adventurers may need Willpower checks just to press on of a day, ranging from Standard all the way to Formidable. Resources And Equipment Adventurers need at least the following equipment to survive a journey through a forested environment of any length. Water Food Knife Shelter/ Shelter Building Equipment First Aid Kit Weatherproof Clothing / Raincoat Signaling Device - A mirror or lantern can be a lifesaver. Some means of making fire Cordage or Rope Surviving The Wild Wood Life is hard enough for an Adventurer, without having to worry about encountering implausible magical beasts or uncivilised rural people trying to kill them with banjo music. An adventure scenario pitting the Adventurers' Locale, Navigation, Endurance, Brawn, Willpower, Survival, First Aid, and Track skills against the harsh terrain of an unfamiliar woodland area can provide a story as memorable to the party as any dungeon delve.

A personal note before I begin this week's post. Last week's hiatus could not have been more timely. I ended up going through a week from hell. I am not entirely convinced it isn't going to turn out to be a fortnight from Hell, but at least the crises I faced this last week have been resolved. Can't speak for tomorrow's crises, but then again tomorrow doesn't exist yet. Ruination What do you think of, when you think of ruins? There are many types of ruins, but they all have the same ending: places which are no longer being used, for whatever reason. A ruin might have been abandoned due to economic reasons, or due to the death of the person who kept the community together. A place can be brought to ruin by enemy conquest, or by natural disaster. However it happened, a ruin is a place where dreams died, and the past can only serve as a warning to the present. Types of Ruin Here are some ideas as to what sort of ruin the Adventurers can find themselves in. Roll on 1d20 or choose. Age of Ruins Next, look at the age of the ruins. Roll 1d10 or choose. Claim To Fame Some ruins have a claim to fame; a place in the history books. Think of the ruins of Troy and Pompeii, of Sutton Hoo and Derinkuyu. Imagine the Great Library of Alexandria at its height and its nickname, "The Place of The Cure of The Soul." Imagine the now-vanished workshop od Tapputi, the world's first recorded scientist, chemist, perfumer, and the inventor of the distillery. Or your world's oldest amphitheatre, where the most famous historical playwright of your fantasy world once trod the sand and delivered her impassioned monologues, and entertained the crowds with philosophically-charged plays and parables? An abandoned hospital, thousands of years old, on the site of your world's first university, will be charged with a different kind of energy than the wreckage of a deserted psychiatric hospital abandoned due to an outbreak of plague ten years ago. How / Why Did The Ruin Form? Most ruins form from either economically-motivated abandonment, warfare, a natural disaster, disease, famine, conquest, invasion, ideological imposition, or the cessation of some form of resource on which the ruins depended. Economically-motivated abandonment: That's simply money. People stopped coming to the place, perhaps because the location was no longer central to the city and a new place had opened up in the centre of a new, expanded community. Consider a temple sited on a hill. The supporting city builds a new temple in the centre, and people stop coming to the old temple, eventually trigge3ring its abandonment as the priesthood move to the new temple. Warfare: The city of Troy was thought of as a Greek myth, until it was discovered (and then blown to smithereens by explosives. Go figure). Also, the capital of Ancient Corinth deserves a mention here. Corinth is the place where the Corinthians lived, accorsing to the Biblical Letters of Saint Paul. They were also mentioned in the Acts of The Apostles in the same bible. You can thank the Romans for destroying the place, and the sea for claiming the rest of it. Natural disaster: Consider Pompeii, smothered for more than a millennium by Vesuvius. Your ruins could be buried in several hundred feet of volcanic ashes, washed away by a tsunami, or even (in your fantasy world) partly obliterated by a falling rock. A very small falling rock, which made a big mess, like Chelyabinsk in 2013. Disease: A horrific way to go, diseases such as the plague, smallpox and so on can ravage entire regions of the countrydside. In the Harnworld setting, The Red Death (smallpox) claimed millions across Northwestern Lythia, including the island of Harn. The nation of Thonia (which has its own geographic module, published by Kelestia Publications) was all but rendered a barren wasteland. Thonia's thriving, yet isolated, civilisations were all but eradicated by the Red Death. Famine: Famine can also lay waste entire regions. Famine can be caused by a number of factors: war, disease, drought, natural disaster - but also stupidity. Cultivation requires effort, planning, and resources: a crop which fails can turn a paradise island into a Summerisle. Conquest / Invasion: Going back to the ancient city of Troy, and to Alexandria. In both cases, imagine what they would have looked like today, if they had not been scrubbed down to the foundations by some ugly brute invaders. The same goes for ideological imposition: look at all those Abbeys and Monasteries which were ordered shut down by Henry VIII. Cessation: Not exactly famine, as such, or even economic abandonment. Sometimes, a natural resource which drew people to a civic centre just dries up. Water from a natural spring (perhaps blessed by the Gods), or a herb which becomes extinct, or even some technology on which the rest of the region depends, but which becomes obsolete with the advent of a new technology (such as iron in the Bronze Age, or the mouldboard plough, or irrigation). Why Explore These Ruins? What would bring the Adventurers to an abandoned site? As Gamesmaster, you could think of a few reasons, but here are half a dozen ideas to set you off. Rescue: Someone has gone wandering away from the community, off into the wilderness, and they've become stuck somehow amid the ruins on the hill. Perhaps they fell through a sinkhole to an undiscovered complex beneath; or perhaps they might have fallen foul of some bandits who have taken refuge there. Either way, time is of the essence before the missing person is killed or dies of exposure. Reclamation: The ruins have now been bought up by a landowner, who wishes to develop the property. The Adventurers can be tasked with going there to clear out the monsters which have taken residence there, and which occasionally have been making forays into the town during times of famine. They could also venture there in order to find out some reason why they should not build there - perhaps it is credibly haunted, or there is still a trace of lingering plague there, and so on. Shelter: - The Adventurers are passing by, when a storm hits, or snow, or they spot an oncoming invasion, and the ruins provide shelter and concealment. Exploration: - There are rumours of a lost treasure of some kind hidden in the ruins. Don't knock this one: you never know when your clumsy excavations in the floor of an ancient Abbey may reveal a hidden copy of The Qur'an from the 13th Century. Diplomacy: - Circumstances might require a neutral meeting point for meetings intended to bring a war to an end, or to conduct some state of affairs between cultures or nations. What better place than a ruin which nobody can lay claim to, or even a ruin which has cultural significance to both parties (e.g. a ruined Abbey where a treaty had been signed between two warring nations six hundred years before, the first time both nations had gone to war with one another). Trade: - Your Adventurers have someone or something. The other side has someone or something. What better place to arrange the exchange than a place which has excellent sight lines for one or both teams' snipers? Or maybe they could go there with a genuine intent to swap ... Last Word In the end, a ruin can be more than just a place to store random monsters to chop into little pieces. If you think that the abandoned places of the world can be more interesting to explore without bands of wandering monsters, feel free to use the above guidelines to work out some adventures to throw at your Adventurers. Who knows; they could uncover a Derinkuyu in some unexplored part of the world, and build up a population in the tens of thousands livin underground, with themselves as the leaders of an entire community and the complex as their base of operations - or they could content themselves with building an underground home, and building a regional power base with trade coming to them. Just watch out for those ancient ghosts ...

This week's blog post will be delayed one week. I'm unable to finish it, due to a family emergency. I apologise for any inconvenience.

Rural environments lie between the cities and the wilderness. They are a broad liminal area, and as such they attract many kinds of encounters in between one state and the other. This article will look at ways to make rural encounters interesting to the Adventurers. Keeping The Players Motivated Okay, so the Adventurers have just left the city limits behind them, and before they get to the wild part of the world they have to get through all this farmland. This is probably the most boring part of any adventure, and most Games Masters would be all too happy to gloss over this bit to get to the good stuff and the weird encounters out in the wilderness. This part of any trip can actually be the stage for a load of unusual encounters which will keep the Adventurers on their toes. Liminal States The rural environment is a liminal state, and a petri dish for the cultivation of liminal states. The Adventurers are between one state (urban) and another (wilderness), so they are neither here nor there themselves. In this part of the world, they are likely to encounter places and circumstances which are "in between," so these are perfect points at which to place encounters. Liminal Places Places of transition are meeting places for all manner of beings, both mundane and otherworldly. Crossroads - So many cultures mark crossroads as places where the supernatural and the mundane meet. The Adventurers may meet witches conducting their workings here; and at some crossroads, it is said that if you wait until midnight, you may encounter a Dark Lord, or even Death. And sometimes, you may even catch them in a good mood and be able to strike a deal with them ... Bends - Bends and curves in the road, whether horizontal or vertical, are notorious for accidents or encounters with other kinds of otherworldly beings, more interested in abduction than in making deals. Strange lights in the sky are common, as are the occasional arrivals rather than departures ... Borders - Pre-modern worlds generally do not have miles of barbed wire and checkpoints in the roads. Sometimes, the only indication that one has crossed over from one county to the next, or from one country to the next, is a half-buried, moss-covered marker placed there by mutual onsent between long-forgotten nations centuries ago. Gates - Stiles, gates and similar portals can either mark the transition between one part of the land, or one realm, and the next. A natural enclosed arch formed by two trees either side of a road, where the crowns of both trees connect high above, can serve as a natural portal to some otherworld, whether it be a realm of spirits or the Fae Realm. Cliffs - Depending on whether the cliff is approached from the top or the bottom, cliffs mark a form of edge. Cliffs and quarries may have fissures, caves, or other portals leading to Underworlds, even Hells. Shorelines - Lake shores, river banks, and seashores mark the limits of land and water. Encounters here can be with amphibious animals, birds, shapeshifting creatures such as selkies or Longane, water elementals, earth elementals, and even air elementals. Liminal Times Just as there are places which exist between one realm and another, so too are there times which intersect. The Adventurers may encounter these in those quiet moments between one state and the next. Dusk and Dawn - It is generally only modern timekeepers which mark midnight as the start of a new day. Before our societies became mechanised and governed by a craving for punctuality, people measured the day beginning with the dawn or, depending on the culture, sunset. Seasons - The solstices and equinoxes mark the points where the sun is at its highest (Litha) or at its lowest (Yule), and the points where the day and night are the same length (Ostara and Mabon). These are times marked by ritual and ceremony. Similarly, there are traditional times where the new seasons are marked - Imbolc, the beginning of Spring; Beltane, the beginning of Summer; Lughnasadh, the start of Autumn; and Samhain, the commencement of Winter. Eclipses - Both solar and lunar eclipses are times of great import. The Sun seems to disappear from the daytime sky, and night briefly rules the waking world, or the Full Moon vanishes, replaced by a red circle like a baleful eye peering down upon a terrified world. The Quarters - Both the Waxing and Waning Quarters, the Half Moons, are moments of transition, too; temporal portals to take stock. Harvests - In general, rural societies mark three harvests: the harvest of grain, at Lughnasadh; the fruit and vegetable harvest marked by Mabon; and lastly the meat harvest, celebrated at Samhain, where the livestock which will not make it through the coming winter is brought in for its final rest and processing into food, leather and so on. Samhain also marks the point where the loved ones who have passed during the year, and years past, can roam the world one last time, and be celebrated and mourned before they depart for the next world in the morning. Liminal People The people you may encounter in urban areas may also be in some liminal state or other. Fugitives, Outlaws and Parolees - All are involved in some form of criminal activity. Fugitives are fleeing judgment, and are between clear guilt and innocence. Outlaws are marked, and have no home or status; they do not belong. Parolees are between a state of conviction and innocence, where they are in a state of transition between being marked criminals and bring truly free. Dreamers - At night, under the stars, the Adventurers themselves can become liminal characters, as their minds hover on the verge of sleep, or on the verge of dream. In certain circumstances, they may hover between the living realms and the realms of Dream, Spirit, Fae, or Death. Dare they open the portals to those realms in their minds? Stateless People - Any number of people could be encountered on the road, who have no state for themselves. They may be refugees fleeing a war, persecution, or some natural disaster; or they may be immigrants, coming to civilisation to make their way in the world or make a name for themselves. Nomadic People - Distinct from the Stateless are those people whose entire culture is mobile and nomadic. From migratory peoples following the herds they are tending to people from Nomadic tribal cultures, these are a people distinct to themselves, bringing with them experiences of places, lands, times, and peoples from beyond the lived experiences of the locals. Shifters - Some people cannot live in the town and flee into the night to protect their loved ones. Caught between human and beast, these poor souls are a danger to themselves and the people around them when the time is right and the Moon is full. Ghosts and Revenants - Also caught between realms, wandering phantoms see life and death from both sides. From phantom travellers who hitch rides in carriages, only to vanish at dawn, to revenants who claw their way out of shallow graves, bent on avenging their deaths upon their killers, these ghosts, wraiths and shamblers are not to be trifled with. On A Knife Edge The situations encountered by the Adventurers in rural areas can be mundane, quaint, parochial, bucolic, or wild, hallucinogenic, dreamy, even terrifying or horrifying. But if you, as Gamesmaster, treat these encounters as liminal situations, and see the transition points, you can make rural encounters both emotive and memorable - certainly, powerful.

So you and the Players are moving fast. They're on their way to investigate some ruin, or explore some place, and on the road they meet ... someone. Something. Only, the moment you announce the encounter, the Players decide to sidestep the whole thing or to hide until it passes. How do you involve the Adventurers in the encounter without shoehorning them in or railroading them? Bring in elements, such as hooks and shoves, which draw them in or shove them in the direction you want them to go. Roping In The Adventurers The point of presenting an event on the road is to give the Adventurers something to do on the way to, or sometimes from, an adventure. Random encounters which simply present a bunch of monsters for the Adventurers to fight is simply not good enough. Modern gaming requires that encounters should have a point, which is of relevance to the adventure, or to the Adventurers. Note: This article is not about creating tables describing who or what the Adventurers encounter, whether it be a pack of 1d4 kobolds or a bunch of bandits. This is about why the Adventurers should get involved with these beings. Hooks A hook is something which draws in the Adventurers and involves them in the action. The point of a hook is to engage the Adventurers and give them some sort of reward for participating in the scene - which could be an allegory for the Adventurers' real adventure, or foreshadowing, or simply a chance for them to restock on supplies and find out some kind of relevant information. Shoves A shove, on the other hand, gives the Adventurers something to avoid doing, or sends them off in a direction of the Games Master's choosing - which could either be a brief diversion, or the real point of the adventure. The Adventurers must do something to avoid something bad happening - for instance, to avoid being spotted by a band of marauders, or to avoid being struck down by lightning during a heavy storm. Constructing Tables for Encounters Who Is Involved Roll separately on each column on the following table, or choose. Hooks and Shoves The key to any hook or shove is motivation. Something is behind the encounter, which either draws the Adventurers in to become involved, or which drives them to seek a different direction, approach, or even a whole different adventure. Roll on the table below, or just choose. Example: The Adventurers encounter a minor character in the current adventure. They are trading with a third party. The motivation table indicates secrets. Whose secrets are being traded? Canny Adventurers would want to know, particularly if the third party was a Rival of theirs who might use the information traded to beat them to the punch. Example: The Adventurers encounter an Ally, perhaps one they haven't seen for several adventures. The roll indicates that they are trying to rescue a stuck comrade. The Adventurers pitch in to help - but the comrade is one of their Enemies! Worse, the Enemy has vital information about the place they are travelling to! The Twist Table The Twist Table is used to determine whether or not a particular encounter is as it seems. Games Master, only use this table if you want things to be truly random, or if you can't make up your mind whether or not to throw in the unexpected into what might seem to be an ordinary encounter. Note that this is the only time that an encounter could lead to a combat scene. Note how different dice rolled can alter the probability of a given outcome. It is so much harder for something unexpected to occur if you roll on a 1d100, for instance, than on a d4. So choose the die you want to roll, and roll it, and see what result occurs on the Twist Table below. Or just choose the result. Something unexpected The Adventurers are engrossed in some activity, perhaps helping out, when something happens to disrupt the scene and change it completely. Examples: A volcano erupts, threatening to spill a vast pyroclastic cloud upon everyone's heads; an earthquake shakes the ground; the bad weather worsens, and hailstones the size of peaches begin to fall; or a rock falls from the sky and impacts a short distance from the encounter, knocking everybody off their feet from the force of the impact. Even just something as simple as the weather turning is enough to send the adventure spinning off in a completely different direction, as they might be forced to take shelter with a sworn Enemy against a harsh blizzard which would kill them if they tried to venture through it. Nothing is as it seems The Adventurers discover something which turns the encounter on its head. Perhaps they are helping refugees who turn out to be from an enemy nation or worshipping an evil deity. Perhaps they are not refugees at all, but something else. Or maybe it is a trap, and armed bandits are lying in wait nearby, hoping someone would take the bait. Everything is as it seems No surprises. This turns out to be a "what you see is what you get" scene. Variety Always keep referring to tables like these for variety. No two encounters should ever be exactly the same. even if the encounter table indicated "1d4 priests" or "2d6 soldiers" each time. With experience, you could start creating your own, designed for different environments, different settings, and even different circumstances in the same places. Keep them varied. Keep them memorable. Keep the Players guessing.

An integral part of enjoying any roleplaying game is encountering other beings. Since the Adventurers will all be together, every single encounter will be with a non-player character. This entire blog post is dedicated to the Games Master. There are no secrets to be kept from the Players - but if you want to learn the Games Master's art, you can listen in and learn. The Art of The Encounter Encounters are what Games Masters do. And like everything else, it is an art form which Games Masters need to learn to get good at. Mere repetition is not enough. You can get just as bored by yet another orc raiding party, whether they are equipped with orcish falchions or spears, nets or flails. If all you know of encounters is their numbers, their stats, their weapons, and battle till their Hit Points reach zero, then you are missing out on what is possibly one of the most spectacular Games Master arts. Old Skool Encounters Initially, encounter tables were random lists of wandering monsters. They turn up, the characters slaughter them, the adventure moves on to the next encounter. However, hack'n'slash is not really the default in roleplaying games any more. Games Masters can now create far richer kinds of encounters - ones which are part of the story, or part of the characters' growth and development, or which somehow showcase the setting. Here are some considerations for the encounters you can set up. Who Most encounters are going to be with people, rather than combat with some random mindless, slavering monsters. Once the characters are out on the road, they will be meeting other people - other adventurers, their own Rivals or Allies, patrols, pilgrims ... there is a variety of these different kinds of parties. The nature of these groups typically determines the likeliest thing they are going to do when the characters heave into view of them. What This is generally asking what these wanderers want - their motive. And whether or not it involves the characers in any way. A band of pilgrims might want to stop at the characters' campfire and share food and talk about their pilgrimage, and a hunting party might show off their catches. Traders might sell or exchange, or provide information about the road they have just come down, and so on. It depends on what they want - whether it is to just go home, or to warn the characters of a hazard. Or indeed to ambush the characters, leading to a combat. Yes, there is always that possibility - but it is not the only outcome any more. Sometimes, what refers to animal encounters. Traveller excelled at animal encounters, presenting a broad list of animal encounter types such as Pouncers (such as big cats, which strike at their targets with a leap), Trackers (such as wolves, which pursue their prey by scent) or Gatherers (omnivores like humans, who forage for food). The kinds of animals encountered can determine what kind of encounter it will be, whether it is fending off hungry wolves or sitting on top of a rocky outcrop to wait out the vast herd of migratory aurochs which is cutting across the road. Where The location fo the encounter is important, as in the local terrain. Are the characters encountering a hazard such as an encroaching landslide? If they are, what is the terrain behind them like? Are the directions of movement restricted? In the case of a landslide, they might only be able to go forwards or backwards, and the option to go forwards might only be time sensitive until the rocks or the avalanche cuts off the way ahead. When What time the encounter takes place is hugely important. A party which encounters wanderers coming up to their campfire in the middle of the night is bound to be a lot more wary than two groups of wanderers running into one another in the road at midday. How How an encounter happens can be as simple a matter as how much warning the characters have to prepare for it. A stealthy predatory animal stalking the characters will try to ambush them and take them by surprise. In contrast, a band of pilgrims might give away their position half an hour before they turn up, announcing their presence with loud hymnals and music as they approach. Why This is probably the most important question. Why these people, here, now? Why have they targeted the characters? Why is this more significant than a "ships passing in the night" encounter where the adventurers just breeze past the beings encountered on the road, without interaction? Some example reasons follow below. Abduction - the beings encountered abduct travellers and take them elsewhere for some unknown purpose Ambush - the beings have set up a roadblock or ambush for some reason, which might not necessarily mean robbery. Challenge - a puzzle, riddle, or test: the characters are being tested for worthiness by an agent of the person they are seeking, or perhaps an Avatar of a deity testing the party member who believes in that deity and follows their religion. Connections - the encountered beings are known to the characters, either as Allies, Contacts, Rivals, Enemies, family, and so on. Event - something unexpected and interesting happens along the way. Guardian - a sentinel is placed in the characters' way, not to test them but to halt their progress. Hazard - some environmental hazard, whether it is terrain, wildlife, or weather. Hunt - the beings encountered are after someone or something that is not the characters. They are either on an actual hunt (tracking some beast for its flesh or pelt), or they are a posse sent after a miscreant. Labourers - the encountered beings are workers from a local settlement, on their way to or from work. Location - the characters stumble upon a notable location or terrain feature. Lost - the beings have become separaed from their unit. They could be young Nomads, or a child from a nearby settlement. See Rescue. Nomads - the beings are a wandering, self-sufficient group of people, and they are following their traditional route. Patrol - the encountered beings are patrolling the periphery of a nearby settlement. They have the right to challenge strangers, acting as they are in defence of the settlement. Pilgrimage - the beings are on some sort of quest or pilgrimage, either to some destination to confirm their faith, or on a journey to test their faith. Rescue - the beings are tracking someone who has gone missing: a search or rescue party. The missing person should be nearby. Road Gang - the beings are prisoners being escorted by guards, or on site labour maintaining the road under supervision of the guards. Runaways - the beings are running from someone or something - or they are running to someone or something. Settlement - the characters stumble across a settlement of some beings. They are just people, trying to live their lives; or they could be hostile in some way. Shadow - the beings could be being shadowed by an elusive being or group of beings, who are following the characters for some unknown purpose. Trade - the beings could be traders en route to a market. They can share food, exchange gossip and information, and so on. They could also be robbers, who might choose the characters as their next victims. We have not come to the end of the discussion of encounters. There will be more next time, including suggestions for tables you can use in a game.

Don't gloss over Survival skill. Part of every wilderness travel phase of an adventure should be to test the Adventurers' mettle. Scenes of travel through an uncivilised environment should be about gauging the protagonists' reactions to crises, and their creativity and ingenuity in coming up with solutions to problems brought about by the environment. This article looks at the fine art of making it from start to finish, without your Adventurers getting dead at any point along the way. Hiking versus Surviving There is a gulf of difference between a "wilderness survival" scenario and a "hike scenario" where the adventure takes place at the end of the hike (or perhaps the middle - you do have to go back home, don't you?) The following steps are taken from real world wilderness survival situations, adapted to a roleplaying situation. This does involve simplifying decisions made to die rolls and their results, and skill checks, and fatigue. However, this is a necessary step to including survival challenges in a roleplaying game - specifically, Mythras. Surviving - First Steps Communicate: Adventurers could just up sticks and head off to the Great Unknown. Chances are, those are the Adventurers who enter the annals of legend for disappearing, never to be heard of again. In game terms, this means Oratory. The team leader's greatest responsibility is to ensure that everybody gets out of the wilderness alive. That means boosting morale, fostering a sense of optimism, and ensuring that survival is a shared burden where the most capable do their best to help the least, and hopefully to teach them to catch up so the burden can be lessened. Oratory may be applied, furthermore, to calm the team. When you are thrust into a survival situation, the last thing on your mind should be to panic. The first action of every team member is to become calm, or to remain calm. The team leader should perform an Oratory check to allow the team members, if necessary, to make an immediate Easy Willpower check. If the Oratory fails or fumbles, it is a Standard check because even if the team leader botches the pep talk, their intent to calm the gang and get their heads on straight is still clear. And other team members whose heads are on straight can augment all of the rest of the team members with their Oratory and/or Influence skills. Assess Situation: The Combat Action Assess Situation is the most vital first proactive step to survival. The team needs to focus on assessing their situation immediately. This includes assessment of the terrain for shelter; assesment of possible sources of fuel for the fire; assessment of the team's provisions, medical supplies, tools and equipment; assessment of possible local sources of food, herbal medicines, and clean water; and finally, orientation - an attempt to establish where they are and what direction to travel to the nearest civilisation, wherever that may be. Inventory: The next step is to inventory what everybody has on their person. Food, water, medicines, bedrolls, tents, tools, other kits. If someone brought along a wood axe and a saw, they can cut branches off to make shelter structures and erect makeshift tents. Wax can proof clothes and tarpaulins against the rain, and so on. The team leader should receive everybody's inventories. Plan: Once assessments are made, the team leader can work with the team to create a plan for survival. These include:- Terrain: The best place to set up camp. Survival, Perception, and Locale are the key skills here - Survival to assess the prevailing winds and temperatures, Perception to take stock of possible hazards such as setting up camp too close to a cliff, or underneath a cliff which could be prone to landslides; and Locale, to establish any natural hazards in the area such as ants' nests, beehives, poisonous plants, nettles, thistles, or thorny / spiny plants, not to mention native fauna which could be problematical such as bears, wolves, honey badgers, wolverines, warthogs, and so on. Shelter: Knowing how to set up windbreaks against the prevailing winds, either using the team's resources or assembling them from natural materials. Survival, Engineering, and Locale are the key skills. These skills are now used proactively rather than passively, to build the structures rather than to assess and plan. By this stage, the team should be certain about what to do, and ready to help the inexperienced. Fire: The next stage is to gather that fuel and build that fire. The charatcers' firelighting kits could be as basic as a leather bag with a bit of flint and a mass of down and human hair. Human hair is a highly effective form of kindling. Survival skill includes methods used to light fires and to keep them going, not to mention extinguishing them safely. Water: Adventurers can only go three days without water. Survival and Locale are the key skills here: if they are surrounded by plant life, there must be water somewhere (Locale), so they need to find it and extract it in a usable form (Survival). That fire is important here, because you'll need it to boil that water. Survival skill also includes techniques to create other water-collecting tools such as solar stills, and so on. Food: The Adventurers will need a rationing plan for the food they have with them. The team leader can designate one of the team as being the team's larder and carry all of their food supplies, or distribute the rations to ensure that those who brought the least food with them be given as much of a chance to survive as the one who brought along a feast. Then there is Nature's larder: and the team's greatest asset here is the Adventurer with the highest Locale and Track skills, not to mention Survival to set game traps. Save the alcohol for treating injuries and disinfecting wounds. Setting Up Watches: The team leader can set up watches; who can sleep, who can keep watch. Half the team sleeps from about sunset, relieving the other half which beds down at midnight. Everyone gets up at sunrise to rekindle the fire and see what they can do to get a good breakfast going. Pressing Ahead The first steps are to establish a camp and form a plan of action. The next step is to execute that action. Orientation: Local landmarks need to be surveyed, and the cardinal directions established. Navigation is the key skill here - even if the team has an accurate map, it is useless unless somebody knows what direction north is, which means navigating by the stars. Locale can provide some aid during the day - some plants, such as compass plants, flourish more on the south side, where the sunlight is strongest; and certain species of termites build their nests as odd ridgelike structures in parallel rows along a north-south direction, for heat regulation of their nests: the ridges are fins, capturing the maximum warmth of the sun in the morning and evening, and providing a minimal surface ares to the sun at midday to prevent the nest from overheating. As Games Master, you can place such compass plants and animals within your setting to give Adventurers something to look for. Signalling: If the Adventurers are stranded, rather than trekking (making their way somewhere, or returning home from a place), they may need some means of signalling others to show that they are alive and seeking help. Survival helps here; fires can be made smoky with damp grass to provide smoke signals, and shiny metal can be used to reflect light as far as the horizon, which can be used to signal people at a distance. Survival skill can also provide other methods to signal rescuers or to lay down a trail for them to follow. Movement: Look for a road or a trail. Not an animal trail, but something laid down by people. Once you are on a road, you will know that it leads somewhere - even if that somewhere is an abandoned place, it can provide shelter and a direction from which to go (back down the road). Keeping Up Spirits: It is essential to keep the team's spirits positive. Sing while marching. Stop along the way to forage, if the opportunity arises. Send a scout ahead, but not too far, to see what's around the bend. Keep encouraging the less experienced. Show them basic survival techniques such as firelighting and knot tying. Games Masters, you would do well to look for books on survival and scouting. They know their stuff. Do Your Best, and all that. Oratory is possibly the best survival skill of all in this situation, because it keeps the team together, gives them something to do to stave off despair, and most of all it trains the team members to stop thinking of themselves as individuals but rather part of a team. Reassess: Never stop assessing the situation. The most essential part of surviving is adaptation. And adaptation requires current knowledge. Survival requires that the team always knows where they are, where they are going, and what new hazards present themselves. Example: Rain on the distant horizon may not mean much, but if the characters are in a dry gulch they may need to get to high ground, because the gulch is there for a reason - it is a channel for flash floods. Perception or Lore (geology) can look for the signs that the gulch is prone to frequent flash floods (water-rounded rocks, erosion marks on the sides of the gulch, signs of recent activity as far back as the last rainy season, and so on). Journal: In-game, an Adventurer can keep busy by keeping a journal going, if they have Literacy skill. This will help the team leader to keep track of where they have been and where they are, and to plan for where they are going. It is also good for morale. If the Player (and/or Games Master) can draw or sketch their imaginations, this too can be added to the record, as well as serving as aide memoire and inspiration for later game sessions. Augmentation: Every team member should augment another's efforts at least once during this scenario. No team member should ever go it alone, or be left alone. Group Luck Points: If all else fails, there are always Luck Points. In this case, never use Luck Points to "reverse the die roll," changing a 62 into a 26 or something. That's just weak/ You're holding back on the true potential of Luck Points. Luck Points should always be spent on allowing the team members to automatically avoid hazards and get out with their skins intact. All of them. Together. Back Home The aim of wilderness survival is to get back home, safe and sound. Assuming they have managed to do so, the last stage of every survival adventure is to learn. Games Masters, it would be entirely appropriate to ensure that, at the very least, everybody gets a free Experience Roll to place on any of the following skills: Endurance, Locale, Navigation, Oratory, Perception, Track, or Survival. It's okay to ive them all an automatic Experience Roll in Survival anyway. They will have earned it, particularly if they helped others on the trail. The team's Players must be allowed to look back on this experience. A survival experience should never be taken lightly, or forgotten easily. If the team Players can see the beneficial effects of collaboration, cooperation and sharing - in the form of augmentation of one another's skill checks, for example - then this can be as much a learning experience in forging a group's identity to the Players as to their Adventurers. Wilderness scenes need not be a boring string of random monster encounters fought to the death on the way to the dungeon. That is an obsolete mode of gaming, whose legacy lives on in the form of video games. You are playing Mythras. You can do so much more with this game than try to run it like D&D.

Apologies for the last minute notice. Tonight's blog will be delayed somewhat. I got called away to an important online conference. I'm going to put the scheduled release back till Monday, about 23:00.

The locations where encounters occur are as important as the encounters themselves. Wilderness encounters present memorable moments for the Adventurers, as much as the sites of the adventures themselves. Hans Christian Andersen's fable The Snow Queen was as much about the tests facing the hero, Gerda, as it was about the main action - the rescue of her beloved, Kay, from the clutches of the cold Snow Queen of the children's fable. Gerda's wilderness encounters were all obstacles and temptations facing her in her path, aimed at deterring her from her rescue mission. Wilderness travel can be a far more interesting challenge for the Players and Games Master than a set of random combat encounters. Encounters can be about perils, strangeness, dramas, and journeys of discovery - including self-discovery. Most of all, they can be about tests of courage, of stamina, of cool, and of resolve. Wilderness Types Anywhere can be the site of an encounter. Cities, the road out to one of the outlying towns or villages, and the lands beyond. Beyond the tiny settlements, the outlying villas and holdings, past the coppicers and straggling hunters, the true wilderness begins at the point where the signs of human activity such as cultivation run out, and the truly untamed land begins. There are many kinds of lands where encounters can occur. Rural: The outlying cultivated spaces. The breadbasket of the city. River: The surging waters of the young river near its source, the slow flowing majesty of the mature river, and the marshy, quicksand-strewn littoral realms of deltas, swamps, bogs and fens. Plains: Wide open, empty spaces, flood plains and open steppes, tundras and savannahs. Hills and Mountains: The only difference is height. Elevated realms overlooking the flat lands below, and the valleys in between. Woodlands, Deep Forests, Jungles: Fertile lands where life flourishes, and where the oldest inhabitants were already full-grown before the first humans ever set foot in the area. Extreme Environments: Deserts, frozen wastes. The coldest and the hottest locations in the world, testing the living equally harshly. Seas and Oceans: The primal emptiness and unfathomable depths. Encounters Much of the events of travel tend to be encounters - which do not automatically mean slavering monsters and wild beasts looking for a fight to the death. Encounters can be about meeting people - lost wanderers, pilgrims, traders, nomads, patrols, and so on. Encounters with people can be as much about sharing the camp fire and food, swapping stories, singing songs and music, and forging friendships and alliances. Encounters can become recurring encounters. Travellers once met on the road can turn up under other circumstances. Lasting friendships, or conversely simmering enmity, can lead to dramas and complications later on down the line in the Adventurers' campaign. Hazards The land itself can bedevil the Adventurers' footsteps. Exposure, starvation, thirst, extremes of heat and cold, diseases, and terrain hazards can threaten the Adventurers, or at least can slow them down long enough to overcome the challenges faced by the terrain or the elements. Tests The road to the destination might not be entirely smooth. The Adventurers can face many diversions along the way. They can be abducted (rather than attacked in a battle to the death ... have you ever thought that maybe not all battles should be lethal in these games?) and hauled off to some miserable situation such as imprisonment, pressganging into service, servitude and so on. The story would revolve around their escape, and retrieval of their most precious tackle and gear, in order to return to their adventure. Another kind of test is temptation. In the course of their journeys, the Adventurers can be met with temptations. They can meet the most beautiful people they have ever seen and be tempted to settle there rather than continue their journeys - this is a popular theme in Odyssey-style stories, where the Adventurers have been stranded on some distant shore and must find their way home. The land of the Lotus Eaters is a place where every need and desire is satiated, both subtle and gross, all but one: the need to get home. Types of Journey The Quest: The Adventurers must quest to some distant place to obtain some desired thing. On the way, they meet challenges and temptations, but steel their nerve and fight the evil being at the end of the journey, whose ownership of The Thing is unjust. The quest is about returning the Thing back to where it belongs. Sounds familiar. The Pilgrimage: The Adventurers are travelling on a long journey to some place of holiness. They are either trying to be cured, healed, or forgiven of some sin which burdens them. On the way, they and their fellow pilgrims exchange stories, and thereby learn that the journey to Faith is as much a part of the salvation as the final blessing at the end. The Initiation: The plot of The Hero's and Heroine's Journeys. The protagonist sets forth on a journey, knowing that the journey itself is transformational. On the way, they discover manifestations of their faults and flaws and, by overcoming them, develop or acquire a Great Gift by which they can heal the people once they get home. The Hunt: A great crime has been committed. The Culprit has fled the community. The protagonists must follow, track down the miscreant, and bring them back to face justice. The Rescue: Someone cherished by the community, or the protagonists, has gone missing in the wilderness. The characters must go forth to find them, ascertain their health or their fate, and bring them - or their body - back. If they were murdered, the story becomes a Hunt, as they track down the killer. The Search: Not quite like the Quest story, this involves a long trek into the wilderness, encountering many of its wonders and hazards as the land shows off its beauty and its danger, until the protagonists - tested and tempted by the land itself - reach the site where a vital treasure can be found, such as a healing herb, a rare mineral, or a magical healing pool. The Exploration: The basic hexcrawl story, where each new hex brings along a new and uinknown danger, treasure, wonder, or temptation. The Adventurers are travelling across terrain which is unknown to them, and everything is about the next surprise around the next corner. The Odyssey: The protagonists are stranded a long way from home, and they must find their way back. Forging The Blade Wandering encounters as presented are just meaningless random combats. They whet no appetites, they consume the Adventurers' resources, and they could even lead to injury and death of the party members before they even reach their goal, the actual adventure. A Games Master can take the opportunity to turn the wilderness wandering adventure into something else: a chance to forge the blade. By pitting the Adventurers against challenges designed to be solved by playing each character to their greatest strengths and forcing them to work together, the Games Master can take the wilderness adventure and turn it into an opportunity to turn a disparate bunch of Adventurers into a unified fighting unit blessed with a single purpose.

Taking another hiatus for one week, to catch up on working commitments. I'll be back next week, with a look at various encounter environments.

Personal note: Before writing this blog, I thought I'd try and Google the word "horror" to see if I could come up with a suitable graphic for this post. The search engine just gave me a bunch of faces, close up, staring full screen at the viewer, leering, gurning, screaming, gaping open-mouthed like simpletons faced with their first conjuring trick. That's not scary. That's just marketing people capitalising on the Uncanny Valley, and presenting the world with a bunch of actors in heavy makeup to make their faces look disfigured - because the fear of disabled people and ugliness is the last refuge of plain old bigotry left in the world. Creating Scary Stories So this is about creating gaming scenarios intended to terrify the Players. Note - not the Adventurers. It is as hard to create a horror scenario as it is to create a mystery. How can you create a terrifying scenario to a party of Adventurers who go in to the haunted house fully armoured top to toe, and carrying huge, unwieldy, devastating weapons of war? When the Players' first impulse is to yell "I roll initiative and ready my weapons" when they meet a zombie in a room; when their reaction to confronting a shifting werewolf is to dig through their bags for silver weapons because the Players know that silver is deadly to them; how can you get through a jaded, blasé mindset and scare them? Safety Tools Safety tools are probably more important in the horror genre than in any other genre of gaming. The themes of horror roleplaying include topics which cause discomfort, and while players might know exactly what they are getting into, still some events and topics might crop up which could cause distress to individuals. A player might agree to play in a story where spiders feature strongly because they have no fear of spiders - but they may draw the line at the depiction of fire, for instance. Or they might have no problem with investigating a haunted house and have no fear of ghosts, but vampires could terrify them. Safety tools include safety cards - the "O" card for "okay" (it's the player acting in character, for instance, rather than being terrified for real), the "pause" card to allow the player to take a breather, and the "X" card to signal that the player doesn't want to explore the scene any further. Gestures such as "cut" (hands in an X across the chest, palms down) and "brake" (hands in front of chest, palms out) serve the same function as the "pause" and "X" cards. Games Masters can exercise options such as veils, which draw a veil over the scene and close it down so the characters can move on, and script changes which can rewind a scene to an earlier point or even go to a previous scene. And with that now said, let's look deep into the nature of fear. The Nature Of Fear People watch horror movies and read horror stories to feel an enjoyable frisson of fear. Humans must be the only species that indulges in risky activities in this way. Human couples often watch horror movies together because it deepens emotional bonds. Around the gaming table, Players enjoy horror scenarios for the same reason - the sharing of the emotions of fear increases team camaraderie. Fear is an emotional reaction to the perception of a threat. Fear only arises where there is a threat, either real or implied. In a horror game, the threat can come from the predations of a monster or monsters. Fear comes in four main flavours. Unease - Your gut instinct is telling you that something is wrong. You can't see anything wrong, and everything feels normal, but all the same ... Dread - Your gut instinct is correct. Something is wrong. You know when something feels normal, and things are definitely not normal, though you don't know the cause. Terror - You know something is wrong, and you know what it is - but you've not encountered it yet. Horror - You encounter the cause of whatever is wrong. Genres and Subgenres Horror categories include:- - body horror, where the character is facing a terrible fate as they physically transform into something monstrous IThe Fly); - monster horror, where the characters are the prey of some terrifying monster (vampire / werewolf / demon / zombies); - psychological horror, where the protagonists begin to doubt their own sanity, or have to face their own fears (Vertigo, Marnie); - gothic horror, where the protagonists are plunged into a macabre world of dark symbolism (Masque of The Red Death, The Fall of The House of Usher); - cosmic horror, where the protagonists confront the realisation that the world of normality and sanity is a fragile shell over an infinite abyss of darkness (The Shadow Out Of Time); - and folk horror, where the protagonists face fear and terror in some isolated part of the world (The Wicker Man, Candyman). Intrusion Of The Other In every element of horror, the protagonists must face the intrusion of The Other - the antagonistic element whose presence in the story is intended to threaten the protagonist, and thereby generate fear. As the Games Master, you are the person in charge of this Other, whether it be a vampire, a mutant giant crocodile inhabiting a lake, a village full of ritualistic cannibals, a global zombie outbreak, or an alien invasion. In a game of cosmic horror, you get to play Cthulhu. Let that sink in. How do you generate these feelings of horror, terror, dread, and unease among the Players? Start With Normality Always begin with the everyday; the routine; the ordinary. The protagonists are on their way to a remote village to start new lives, or they are heading for some old mansion to spend the night there before claiming an inheritance. Life should revolve around such petty pursuits as looking for work, or going to a party, or a similar event. Inciting Incident Something out of place happens not long into the adventure. Dead birds fall from the sky; a local comes up to the protagonists and says "This place is not for you. Get out now, while you still can!"; the pub that the characters wander into suddenly falls silent, and the landlord and every single patron stop what they're doing and stare at them. Build Things Up Slowly In order to build things up slowly, you need to set the scene and show the protagonists what the normal environment looks like. Then, once they get used to it, not long after the inciting incident, add layers of unease and dread. This is done in three ways. Additions - Something new and unfamiliar appears. Strange writing on the wall; an odd shadow; strange lights in the sky at night. Deletions - Something the protagonists take for granted disappear. A friendly face vanishes; the sounds of barking dogs at night cease, and there is no sign of any dogs around. Changes - Something looks, sounds, or feels different: more menacing. The wind's nightly howl sounds almost bestial; the trees around the village seem to be closer, somehow. Keep adding and layering these changes, until the protagonists look around and wonder where they are. Suspense Mystery is a situation which has taken place in the past. Suspense is anticipation of a future event. The protagonists should be aware that something is happening; something is coming, some event or the arrival of the presence with which they must struggle. As much as all the weirdness is building up slowly, the protagonists must become aware that these additions, deletions, and edits are building up towards something horrendous - and they can neither escape it, nor can they turn away or find a safe place to hide. Surprises Long before the confrontation, you can shock and terrify the protagonists with surprises and moments of terror. A demon manifests as strange clouds of light and hideous odours, advancing along a road towards the character in the dead of night; or the evil occultist sends vile dreams into the sleeping protagonists' minds. Nobody Is Safe The antagonist, the Horror, now takes away non-player characters who have become close to the protagonists. For example, a friendly priest and police officer who'd expressed sympathy for the protagonists and an interest in joining them in the hunt suddenly go quiet - only to turn up where the protagonists least expect them, dead, to show the protagonists that they are now on their own. With permission from individual Players, worked out in advance before the game begins, the Horror can even take away one or more of the protagonists to show the rest that it means business. Give Them Hope Fear is unsustainable. There have to be moments of respite to allow the Players time to breathe and rally around, before reintroducing the fear. Give the protagonists some element which can drive away the dark forces of the antagonist. A shelter; an amulet; a weapon. Whatever that element is, it drives away the antagonist for a little while, allowing the protagonists to settle down and feel a momentary sense of relief. Then Take It Away Don't let them enjoy that momentary sense of relief for too long. Jumpscares are your best weapon. Remember that jumpscare moments are supposed to be unexpected. The best time to scare the protagonists is to combine the jumpscare moment with the sense that Nobody Is Safe, above. Have the protagonist take away a non-player character in mid-sentence. Punctuate the moment by randomly dropping a heavy book on the table, for example. Then, when the collaborating Player starts to say something, slam that book down again. Just because you and the Player have agreed that the antagonist can take their character away, it doesn't mean that the Player should not be scared too. You can both agree to have their character killed off by the end of Scene 3, but nothing says you have to honour that - you can take them off the table midway through Scene 2, for example. When To Escalate From Terror To Horror Terror and horror are peak emotions. Neither is sustainable. In the 2000 AD strip The Out, protagonist Cyd Finlea is a human exploring distant space; virtually the only human. The worlds she visits are full of strangeness and wonders, but there is also a dread force known as The Tankinar, which is a kind of technological disease which springs up now and then, every few millennia. Sadly for Cyd, she gets to meet them twice in her lifetime. The first time around, she is ground up into mincemeat, but advanced alien science gives her new life in a clone body. But the second encounter is a textbook exercise in horror. Cyd hears that the Tankinar are on the loose again, and boards a ship heading for some alien world, only to find that the Tankinar have beaten her to it. With their last avenue of escape (a spaceship) destroyed, Cyd and the stranded aliens are chased down by hyperfast Tankinar, or cut down by the planet's natural predators, before Cyd finds herself alone on a barren planet, watching the last city in flames. Consumed by terror, Cyd finds herself believing that there is nothing worse to come ... until she hears the lightest of sounds, like a gentle footstep, right behind her. And that's when she comes face to face with the Tankinar. ALL of the Tankinar. But they do not kill her. In a truly masterful twist, Cyd Finlea experiences the greatest horror of all: the realisation that her body itself has already been contaminated by a seed of the Tankinar ... which becomes active, consuming her from within and transforming her into one of them, body and soul. The best time to introduce the horror is at the moment of peak terror. This requires mastery of suspense and timing, and as Games Master you must wait until the Players' attention is as fully focused as possible on the game before dropping the hammer of horror on them. Yes. I went there. The Final Girl Is A Myth In many hororr movies of the slasher genre, there is usually some sole survivor - typically a blonde cheerleader or similar. The concept of the Final Girl comes from these slasher movies. As Games Master, you are not beholden to keep any of the protagonists alive to see the end of the scenario. This isn't a matter of giving the characters the consequences of critical successes or fumbles at the wrong moment. Protagonists who do risky things such as leaping between buildings can be allowed to succeed in their Athletics rolls, even if everything indicates that by rights, they should be plummeting to their deaths. Their fate to die at the hands of the antagonist should as clear as crystal to the Players. the only way they are going to exit is at the hands of the bad guys, and even if the Players deliberately sit their protagonists down in the middle of a blazing house fire in an attempt to let the flames taken them, it won't be the fire that does them in - it will be the antagonist, pouncing on them from behind when the they least expect it. One Last Twist Many horror stories leave one final revelation to drive the protagonists to insanity (lo and behold, they too are becoming Deep Ones), or straight into the arms of the monster they thought they had killed. The best twist is always withheld until the last possible minute of the session, when the survivors think that they got away from the horrors, and they are back home, supposedly safe and sound, returning slowly to their lives of normality and sanity. Until their dread enemy appears in a crowd for a fleeting moment, or takes over a monitor at work, or the Players hear a tune which had played during the scenario ("We've Only Just Begun" by The Carpenters still evokes shudders among diehard horror fans who ever watched In The Mouth of Madness, to the point where they can't even stand hearing it being played as an advertising jingle) ... or they visit a friend's grave, only to have a hand thrust up out of the dirt and grab theirs in an unbreakable grip ... or they board a taxi, and the driver leans over to look at the passengers - and it's their antagonist!

Mystery novels are among the most popular genre of literature. TV dramas, police procedural series, and true crime documentaries follow the exploits of investigators as they track down the criminals behind shocking and fiendish murders. Yet how do you run a mystery in a Mythras game? Running Mysteries Mysteries in tabletop roleplaying games involve asking questions, observing scenes for clues, deduction, and finally identifying a culprit to bring them to some form of justice. Presenting a mystery to a gaming group which is used to a more simplistic hack'n'slash, arcade style of adventure, however, can be difficult. Some players might jump at the chance to play a sleuth, even an amateur one, while others might sit back, utterly bored that their Barbarian with his grand massive two-handed battleaxe has no enemies to behead. Some games, such as GUMSHOE, focus entirely on investigations. In contrast, the Mythras Core Rulebook has less than a page to discuss the matter. Page 282 of the Core Rulebook has this to say. Some scenarios rely more on research, mystery, intrigue, and detective work than on the use of the weapons. It also adds:- The most vital aspect of well designed scenarios is that they have alternate means of reaching their conclusion. A scenario, especially one centred upon investigation, should never come to a juddering halt if a crucial clue is not discovered. It is important to the flow of the game to let the Adventurers acquire evidence during the course of a mystery investigation, to forestall the bane of all investigative scenarios - boredom. Start With The Crime When preparing the mystery, always begin with the crime which draws in the Adventurers. Most likely, it's a murder, but there are many different kinds of crimes:- Apparent Accident - An accident which is not what it seems. A body has fallen from the top of a tall tower. Did they jump? Were they pushed? Apparent Suicide - The body looks as if they ended their own life. Or did they? Robbery - Mysterious masked thugs beat up an Adventurer, or a friend, and make off with something they were carrying. What was so important about that item they were carrying? Why was the criminal desperate to take it? Or was it a random attack? Theft - The prototype, magic item, or MacGuffin has been taken right from under the Adventurers' nose! Where is it now? Who took it, and why? Also, how can they get it back? Abduction - Someone has been taken - spirited away. Can they find and rescue this person before the crime becomes murder and the mission one of recovery? Blackmail / Extortion - Some unknown person is threatening dire consequences for someone if their demands are not met. What terrible evidence do they hold? What secret are they threatening to expose? Assault - Nothing has been stolen. The miscreant just wanted to beat up the victim, either as a deterrent or warning, or simply because the victim was in their way. Make Someone The Characters Have Met A Victim Don't just have the Adventurers roped into investigating a crime committed to Lord Edgecase, someone unknown to them. Make Lord Edgecase someone they know - either as an Ally, Enemy, Rival, or Contact, or as a friend of the family, or some other connection common to all of the Adventurers' backgrounds. Perhaps they all bumped into the victim at some point in their lives - either as a ruthless foe, or a close family friend, or a kindly stranger, or even someone who robbed them five years ago. Your investigators could prick up their ears and pay attention if they recognise the name as a recurring figure in their game: particularly if they are confronted with that person's murder. What's At Stake What is usually at stake with an investigation? The Adventurers might not have any kind of stake in working out whodunit. It won't matter to them if Rando A killed Rando B, if they knew neither of the Randos. Rope Them In - The Adventurers are deputised and assigned the job of investigating. At stake is their reputation for closing cases and catching bad guys. Thicker Than Water - The Adventurers are pushed into investigating by a visiting dignitary, or the head of their family, or the boss of the department they work for. The victim was one of their own. Reputation - The Adventurers have been taunted by the perpetrator. Or a Rival has taken on the case, and the race is on to prove whose mettle is stronger. Wrong Place, Wrong Time - The Adventurers stumble upon the crime in progress, or its immediate aftermath. They turn out to be "Johnny-on-the-Spot," and as the first responders, it is now their case. Prepping the Suspects Assuming you want the Adventurers to achieve victory through sleuthing rather than a swift arrow to the fleeing miscreant's back, you will need to keep the identity of the suspect hidden until they are revealed through the Adventurers' keen powers of observation. The best way to hide a suspect is among a host of other suspects. That means creating a list of possible prime suspects, and possible ordinary suspects, not to mention one or two red herrings. This is important, because the Adventurers' job will be to reduce that suspect list to just one - the actual perpetrator (or group of perpetrators). Means The means is the how - the method of killing. Stabbing, strangulation, poison, a shove off a cliff, blunt force trauma to the back of the head. Major hint: Don't make the answer magic, or psionics, or the spirits, or Cthulhu. Even if you are running a fantasy milieu where a sorcerer villain is known to use a damaging spell such as Smother, or some spell to summon an elemental or deadly spirit, make it clear that the bad guy in this case used ordinary, mundane methods to kill - sword, dagger, bullet, poisoned chalice, garotte, fire, and so on. This is murder, not fantasy combat or arcade game slaughter. The purpose of this scenario is to find the tangible, real clues left at the scene which point the finger of guilt to the perpetrator. Motive Just as important to the scenario is motive. This answers the question of why the perpetrator committed the crime in the first place. Think of a motivation. Greed, jealousy, hatred, rage - these are four compelling reasons to drive someone to crime. Ignorance, bigotry, fear, and vengeance are four more. Vanity is one of the worst, because few things are worse than a monster who acts out of the mistaken belief that God is on his side and everything he does is right by his God. The vain will never confess, because they will justify their misdeeds as righteous. The only way to stop such criminals is to catch them in the lie and let them commit a fatal error such as blurting out something incriminating. Don't Go for The Insanity Plea Don't go for "possession" or some form of insanity as the motivation. Harnworld has a kind of spirit entity called the Umbathri, which are said to drive people to distraction from just looking at them. Don't use "The Devil made me do it" or "I was mind controlled by a witch's spell" as motivation to kill. Don't use mental illness, not even sociopathy. Oh, and please do not use "I have multiple personality disorder and it was my evil alter ego, The Beast, wot done it" as your motive either. Dissociative Identity Disorder is a real thing, and while some people's alters can be scary, the scary personas are only scary to the sufferers. They're as likely to take up knitting as try to murder people. And for the record, "schizophrenia" is not a motivation either. In fact, get into the DSM-5 before even coming close to understanding insanity. The insane commit fewer crimes to others than sane people driven by cognitive malice. Don't go down the road of trying to make the bad guy nuts. Opportunity This is the what, where and when. The opportunity is the key element. Who does not have an alibi for the time the crime was committed? Who was absent from the room when it occurred? Who was present, and trying to stay hidden? Who was doing what when the lights went out, or the big distraction occurred out at the back? Do the Adventurers realise that it was a distraction to start with, or do the clues reveal this fact in the course of the investigation? Who staged the scene? Who is framing the innocent patsy? If you have the means, and you know everybody's motive, the opportunity is the big chance for the Adventurers to lock down which suspect out of the whole list is the perpetrator, because they are the only ones who could not be accounted for at all once all the evidence collecting is done. Tangled Webs The trail does not have to run smoothly from the victim straight to the perpetrator. Nor does it have to be so cut-and-dried as having the apparent perpetrator trying to leave a house, clutching a bloody murder weapon in their hand or holding the magic MacGuffin which was supposedly snatched away from under everybody's noses. People Lie - People lie all the time. Sometimes, they lie because they hate the cops, or the Adventurers if they are the closest thing to a legal authority in the area. Sometimes, they lie because they are covering for someone whom they suspect to be the criminal, or because they just love being obtuse, or because they know exactly who the criminal is and they want to extort cash or favours from the perps some time down the road. People Conceal - As much as they lie to cover up the crimes of others, or out of spite against the law and those who investigate crime, people also like to hide the evidence, or even throw it away or destroy it. Sometimes, the passer-by who sees a body on the ground will steal the dead person's stuff first, and later alert the authorities. Trails Get Washed Away - The best Track skill can be made less than useless by rain, snow, or time. Trace evidence, tell-tale blood stains, and dead bodies all get worn down by time and predation, to the point where one can only identify someone by their skull, teeth, or items found near the body. Prepping Clues In order to lead the Adventurers to the villains, patsies, and red herrings involved in the case, you will need to prepare clues for them to follow, and to gather as evidence to build their case. Failed Checks The biggest bugbear is that the Adventurers roll a cataclysmic fumble on a Perception check, and completely miss the dagger protruding from Lord Edgecase's back. What do you do if each and every single Perception and Insight check the Players ever make is a fumble? Multiple Clues - Have multiple clues lying around to tell the Adventurers the same thing. If they miss the Post-It note bearing the time and place of a rendezvous at the scene of the crime, then let them find the same note in an email dumped from the victim's phone, or written on a body's skin. Wherever they find that clue, it automatically vanishes from all other places you might leave it - if a phone number is written on the back of a dead girl's hand, you can safely disappear the "just in case" entry in her undiscovered diary. Significance - The result of the Perception or Insight check determines how much significance the evidence has. If the Adventurers make a critical Perception check and discover a theatre ticket, you can decide that this is a clue that cracks the case wide open, because it puts the suspect in the theatre at the time of the murder, clearing them entirely of blame, unless they sneaked out the back ... Conversely, if the check was a fumble, they might come away with a clue, but absolutely no idea as to its significance in the investigation. Is it crucial? Incriminating? Exculpatory? A red herring? As Games Master, you don't have to decide right away if it even means anything, until the Adventurers start to piece the clues together. Plain Sight - Any clues which are in plain sight can be discovered by the Adventurers. No checks are necessary to discover a murder weapon sticking out of Lord Edgecase's back, or the letter he wrote on his desk, or the smoking gun on the floor, or whatever is on top of the rubbish in the bin. If it's in plain sight, automatically give the clues to the Adventurers. Worry about their significance later. Piecing Clues Together - Insight checks might give the Adventurers a chance to work out the motive, and even the opportunity. Perception checks are essential for working out the means, as well as discovering hidden or concealed evidence, secret passages, hidden money, weapon, or drug stashes, and so on. And the Adventurers might be as clueless as mediaeval peasants or as clued-in as modern day CSIs with access to the latest laboratory equipment. But in the end, there is no check or Luck Point expenditure which can replace the Players' brain power. The job of deducing who the criminal is can only truly be done by the Players, thinking things through. The clues are hints, but it's up to the Players to see who the hints are pointing to. Confronting The Perpetrator The last part of any investigation involves confronting the perpetrator. Sometimes, this can be done simply by inviting all the suspects to turn up so the Adventurers can reveal who they think the perp is. The one who fails to turn up is the one the cops go and chase down. Case closed. Well, not quite that simple ... There are a number of different kinds of endgame confrontation scenes to consider. The Sherlock Holmes Ending - Where the Adventurer explains what all the physical clues mean to the startled police officer - the burnt match, the scratches on the door frame, the blood stain on the carpet, the words OH CRA- written in blood on the wall. The Poirot Ending - Where the Adventurers bring all the suspects together in a room and go through them all, until they expose the killer or criminal. The Scooby-Doo Ending - Where the killer's mask is pulled off, and they discover that the bad guy is, in fact, Walter Kovacs aka Rorschach. The Jessica Fletcher Ending - Where the Adventurer stages a scene which draws in the killer, by presenting them with an impossible situation which they can only resolve by coming to a scene which turns out to be a trap. The Law & Order Ending - The one where they barge into a meeting, or exhibition, and slap the cuffs on the suspect, hauling him or her out of the room to the stares of astonished onlookers. The Goren Ending - The ending preferred by Detective Goren from Law & Order: Criminal Intent, where they work out the bad guy's psychology and work at it until they break and confess, or slip and reveal something incriminating which damns them. The Columbo Ending - "And just one more thing, sir." The Taggart Ending - Where the Adventurers work out who the bad guy is, but so too have the local constabulary, and they turn up in a huge blue wave to apprehend the suspect halfway across town. Or you could have the Adventurers come at the final confrontation in a manner to which they have become accustomed - barging into a room, guns drawn and blazing. However they come to their grim conclusions, don't skimp on the closing confrontation. They would have gotten away with it, too, were it not for those meddling Adventurers.

Mythras Core Rulebook has a resource on page 111 for Games Masters - Rabble, and Underlings. These are a great tool to fill a crowd scene with a "cast of thousands." What Are Rabble And Underlings? Neither Rabble nor Underlings need much character generation. The Mythras Core Rulebook has the following to say about Rabble:- Rabble are foes who intimidate by their numbers but in actual fact have little prowess or willingness to remain in combat once blood is shed. They can take many forms from vicious beggars who set upon drunken characters when they stumble home from the tavern along dark alleyways; or the mindless adherents of a dark cult – eager yet incompetent. And this is what the Core Rulebook has to say about Underlings. Underlings are competent foes usually sent en-masse to harass Adventurers: thuggish bodyguards irregular troops in the opening stages of a battle, for example. Despite not being tracked as full characters, underlings can prove deadly if they catch their targets unprepared. Both are useful tools to pack a combat scene and to give the Adventurers something to hit. However, they are useful to Games Masters in plenty of other ways. Quick and Dirty Allies and Contacts An Ally (page 22, Mythras) is:- a friend, colleague or relation who shares the same cause as the character and will offer help and guidance when called upon. Depending on their personality the Ally may want a favour in return or might provide aid for free. Contacts (also page 22) are:- people of potential influence the character knows. A Contact is an acquaintance who can help, not one who will. There is nothing that says that the Games Master has to generate a full character profile for each and every Ally and Contact. They only need to flesh out enough to provide the service the Ally or Contact can offer to the frtiendly Adventurer - a Skill which the Adventurer does not have (such as Bureaucracy or a specific Lore), a resource such as a mob or a faction artefact, inside information about a faction, or assistance (such as opening the back door of a workplace of a guild which the Adventurers wish to infiltrate). Contacts need more persuading, and more upfront incentives, than Allies. A Contact may not necessarily believe in the Adventurers' cause, or be motivated to assist. They can, however, possibly be bought, bribed, influenced with incentives, plied with strong drink or expensive food, or taken out on dates if necessary to get them to help. Whatever the means of influence, however significant the efforts to get them to offer aid, Contacts can be treated the same as Allies - give them just enough stats to get the job done that your Adventurers hire them for. Instant Ship's Crew Suppose your Adventurers need to board a pirate ship filled with armed, dangerous, lowlife scum. Here you are. Have at them. Stat up their Move, Action Points, Hit Points, Initiative, and a Combat Style with a percentage. See below. Instant Backup / Rowdies Rabble and Underlings can be hazardous to Adventurers, except in one circumstamce - when they are on your side. There is a great delight in being able to call a mob to your aid, and have them suddenly appear as a great wall of people over the crest of a hill behind you. Acolytes and Congregants A ready source of Magic Points for Tap spells, Enslave, or to draw upon donated Devotional Magic Points (Mythras, page 180). Theists, in particular, can call upon a suitably large congregation for their Devotional Magic Points to power a Theist Miracle such as Behold, Propitiation, Consecrate and so on. Only a few Magic Points are needed, and each congregant need only donate one Devotional Magic Point; the rest probably go to feed the deity. Service Personnel This is probably where Rabble and Underlings come into their own - whenever the Adventurers need to speak with a bureaucrat, buy something from a shop, or generally pay for someone's services on a regular basis to the extent that they get to know the service provider's name, generate these minor recurring support characters as Rabble or Underlings. Household Staff For Adventurers who lack the subtle skills needed to run a household, anything from Mechanics and Engineering to Bureaucracy and Commerce, household staff are just the thing. Give each staff member a name, a smattering of personal details, and a decent level in a relevant skill or two (such as Craft (Cooking), Bureaucracy, Commerce and so on), and that is generally all you need. Troupe of Entertainers Whether you need a noisy, gaudy distraction out front while your gang sneaks in the back, or you need to infiltrate a stronghold under the guise of a wandering troupe of entertainers, nobody can pack the crowds in quite like a well-trained troupe of singers, street acrobats, street magicians, mummers or a band, with or without singers. Creating Rabble and Underlings Rabble and Underlings are average in every regard, unless you ve got a recurring Underling whom you might want to upgrade to a full-on recurring non-player character later on in the campaign. Used for combat, Rabble and Underlings have average Initiative and Magic Points, as well as a standard Move of 6 and the usual 3 Action Points. Rabble tend not to wear armour. Underlings can wear armour, and it's typically 1 or 2 AP if they are wearing armour at all. Their Hit Points are also about average, based on CON 11 and SIZ 13. As a rule of thumb, give Rabble 5 Hit Points and underlings 6. The last thing you need is to give them at least one relevant skill. For violent thugs sent to harass the Adventurers in a back alley encounter, give them a relevant Combat Style such as Thug. As for the skill rating, it is either 30% for incompetent rabble, 60% for competent rabble, 60% for incompetent underlings, and 90% for competent underlings. Rabble cannot use Special Effects. Underlings can. For the sake of completion, they have Evade, Endurance, Unarmed, and Willpower at the same percentage as their Combat Style. Care and Maintenance Both Rabble and Underlings aren't cheap. The "Goods and Services" section of Fioracitta, The Heart of Power provides a table for service costs and service providers. Use those costs as a basis for how much money you think the Adventurers should part with. Charge the going rate in SP for a relevant skill of 60%; halve the price for a relevant skill of 30%, and inflate the base cost by 1.5 for Masters with a relevant skill of 90%. Round up, every time. Promotion As Games Master, you can gradually move the Rabble or Underling non-player character closer to becoming a full-blown Non-Player Character or even replacement Adventurer over the course of the campaign. Keep careful track of all their relevant skills, and add no more than one new element (such as a skill) between adventures. For instance, a Loremaster might have a lot of Lores at 60%, and even more Lores at 30%, but you can add Teach at 90% at one point, and introduce this in a scene where the Adventurers stumble across their Loremaster teaching a very large class, or Swim if the Adventurers stumble across the Loremaster going for a dip in Lake Lascha, far from her usual stacks of dusty tomes. Journaling Making the Rabble and Underling characters recurring, particularly Allies and Contacts, gives you a chance to turn your Adventurers from cardboard heroes into full-fledged personalities, with likes and dislikes, and give them people in their lives and down times they can relate to between adventures. They can also provide a useful tool to allow you, as Games Master, to inject a little common sense into a situation. If the Adventurers are going to attempt something stupid, their tagalong rabble member can tell them when there's an alternative available (with an easier grade of skill and less chance of dying of a fumble). Journaling is the most efficient tool for keeping track of your Rabble and Underlings. Note down all the details for each person, and bring your journal with you to each game. Leave space on each page to add details as they crop up such as revealed skills, relatives, and so on. You need never forget an important secondary character's name again. Minor Players, Major Uses By using Rabble and Underlings, the Games Master can supply a host of throwaway characters for the Adventurers to interact with. You can produce them in a hurry without needing to spend an hour in character generation per person. These background characters can be presented as people, with their wants and needs, and they can be just as significant to the Adventurers as the full-fledged enemies they have to face in the course of their adventures.

Scenes are the building blocks of adventures. Scenes are exercises in set design, casting, and props. The act of assembling scenes together allows the Games Master to create something for the Players to enjoy at the gaming table. This week, we look at scenes, and how to use (and reuse) them creatively to provide endless variety in your gaming sessions. Sources I'll be referring to Plot Points Publishing's book, Encounter Theory, and also to Mutant Chiron Games' Republic. There are links to these titles at the bottom of the post. The Purpose of Scenes The point of scenes is to stage events which move the adventure forwards. Encounter Theory points out that scenes serve two basic purposes: the characters interact with the setting in some way (e.g. the environment, an object, a door), or they interact with a being in some way (any type of non-player character). Any other type of scene where the characters are interacting with neither the setting nor other beings in any way (such as a narrative scene where the Games Master is just describing something going on, and the characters are spectating), is a literally useless waste of time, and it can be dropped without it affecting the course of the adventure in any form. As Encounter Theory puts it, Everything is an interaction with the setting, or an interaction with another character ... the encounter, the unit of game during which these interactions occur, should be the centre of the adventure-designer's design. Where Design Meets Play Encounters are where design meets play. Every encounter - every scene - presents an opportunity for the Adventurers to do something meaningful, either to advance their own stories or to advance the plot of the current adventure. Four Principles Encounter Theory presents four Principles of Encounter Design: "Face The Player And Free The Player," "Present Problems, Not Solutions," "Use The Dungeon As Adventure Structure", and "Give Playable, Specific, Sensory, and Short Description". Face The Player And Free The Player The Players are the audience for this medium. Scenes should have something for the Players to give their Adventurers to do. Whether it be negotiating with a stranger to persuade them to enter an alliance or provide truthful intel; solving a puzzle lock; avoiding a trap; fighting a dagger-wielding foe; or summoning an allied spirit; each scene is about offering the Players something to satisfy them. You must only put something into the adventure that the Adventurers can discover, bump into, fight, and so on. If the scene is anything like Yaskoydray's legendary Eternal Monologue scene from the Classic Traveller scenario Secret of The Ancients, where the First Ancient turns up and monologues at the Travellers ... you should replace the scene with something else, such as the Travellers discovering something like stone slabs which allow the Travellers the chance to discover the story for themselves. Present Problems, Not Solutions Conflicts in a scene, whether they are with the setting or with encountered beings, should give the Adventurers situations which they can solve, using the skills and other resources they have to hand. Let the Players come up with their solutions, and run with them. An example: On their way through a forest road on horseback, escorting a wagon pulled by a mule, the Adventurers encounter a gang of thieves, who've felled a tree across the road. They defeat the rabble easily, but how to move the tree? It's up to the Players to realise that they all have Brawn skill, and they also have a very strong mule ... Oh ... the problems should be soluble. Do not create a Tomb of Horrors, or Kobayashi Maru. Your goal, as Games Master, is to enable the Players by enabling the Adventurers. It used to be the custom for Games Masters, or rather Dungeon Masters, to be fiendish, and present the Players with problems designed to be impossible to solve. That is not the custom now. Your job is to give the Players a great, and memorable, game, not cheat them with a total party kill out of nowhere, or bore them to tears with a twenty minute Yaskoydray monologue. Use The Dungeon As Adventure Structure I have a personal dislike of the word dungeon to describe the background of a setting. There are so many different kinds of sets you can use - tombs, crypts, halls, loggias, tunnels, T-junctions, stairways, bridges, piazzas, streets, parks, shorelines, rooftops, wood-bordered gardens, library reading rooms, laboratories with a stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling ... However, this principle is sound. The things and beings available in the scene should be there for the Adventurers to enjoy interacting with. How they interact is not entirely up to the Games Master. They could be meeting by moonlight, in a semi-secluded, partially-enclosed, corner of the garden bounded by a clematis-strewn trellis curving overhead, and an open space with a bench ... but what the Adventurers do when the Non-Player Character shows up is up to the Players, as long as it is fun. The purpose of the scene is to interact with the Adventurers, and have them interact with the scene / set / props / beings. A scene which just has three non-player characters talking with one another is probably best cut out and replaced with something where the focus is on the Adventurers instead. Give Playable, Specific, Sensory, and Short Description Keep your descriptions to the point. Also, keep the descriptions limited to the things, backgrounds, props, and beings with which the Adventurers can interact. If they can't chat with the guards, or try the door to see if it locked, or draw over the sleeping guard's face with a Sharpie, probably leave those out. This goes for anything which requires there to be a prop, or a specific skill, or a particular spell or magic item, or advanced tool. If you need it to solve the problem, or if it's going to cause a problem in the adventure, introduce it somewhere else or make sure to include it in the scene's description. Chekov's Gun is a thing for a reason. Theatre Terms A good way to think of how to describe the elements of scenes is to use the terms of the theatre - sets, props, and actors. Sets The sets are the places where the action happens, whether the action is a negotiation, or introducing a new element or being, or a straightforward combat. The nature of the set is important: a steel-walled enclosed room filling with water is going to involve a lot more problem solving and maybe checks of Brawn, Endurance, Swim, Engineering, Perception, or Mechanisms (and maybe even Luck Points spent) and not so much Customs or Seduction checks. And a scene set in an oak-panelled gentlemen's club, full of very old, very rich men sitting in upholstered armchairs is much more likely to involve quiet negotiations (Influence checks, not Oratory or, Gods forbid, Sing). Props The props are important tools and resources which the Adventurers can bring into play. A book of magic spells must have the correct spell for the Adventurers to chant out loud; a door lock must be opened with an actual key, or failing that an Adventurer's lockpick set. If an adventure involved possessing, say, a magic wand, then the Adventurer wielding that magic wand must get to use it at some time during the adventure - and it must work: say, a Wand of Flesh to Stone with a little carving of Medusa's head at the tip should work perfectly against the monstrous foe at the end of the adventure, even if it does expend all its remaining charges and break up into dust after one last discharge. The point being, the tool is there to facilitate the Adventurer's action. Actors These are the beings (people, non-human people, animals, AI, androids, holograms, spirits) with whom the Adventurers must interact. If there is a guard, she must challenge the Adventurer, to allow the Adventurer to use their Influence, or Insight, or Acting / Disguise, or magic, or Seduction checks. Again, bring in actors to allow the Adventurers someone to interact with in some way. Do not bring in actors with whom the Adventurers cannot interact; and don't leave out actors which must specifically be there for the Adventurers to interact with, such as, oh, using Influence on the guard (and possibly a hefty bribe) to get her to unlock the exit to allow the Adventurers through. In order to open the door, either the team's lockpick must have their lockpicking kit, or the guard with the key must be there. Putting Scenes Together What structure do you use for your scenes? This is a matter of personal taste. Games Masters have struggled with this since the first adventure modules sprang into being. Unlike writing or music, game scenes don't have to follow a linear path. As long as they do follow some sort of pattern, the Players can make decisions of what their Adventurers do, and create branch points at random linking one another in some weird pattern. Linear The simplest form of connective tissue - a scenario which goes from Scene 1 to Scenes 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ... Never satisfying, because it just leads the Adventurers down the line from one box to the next, by the nose. Also known as railroading. Stochastic Also known as Drunkard's Walk and sandbox, essentially the Players decide what their Adventurers do, and the Games Master makes up stuff on the spot to keep the momentum going. Matryoshka Named after the Russian nested dolls. Resolving the problem in the outer scenario unlocks the portal to the next tunnel, which unlocks the next, and so on. Each new level unlocks a new surprise, a new secret, a new depth to the story. Like unlocking levels of trance recursively, you just go deeper and deeper. Improv Theatre We've covered improv before. Here, improv is about the Games Master keeping a whole "prop room" and/or "set room" in the background, basically a collection of items and places in a journal, and inserting them with some moderately-tweaked attributes here and there into play. The Adventurers open the double doors of the crypt, possibly smelling fresh air through the keyhole, and find themselves in an open air garden, with a set which looks familiar (corner of the garden, trellis climbing overhead, partial enclosure) but which has been tweaked (no bench in the middle, no clematis) and which contains a prop - a scroll case containing a scroll and a little note, "Cast this spell next time you meet the Duke - he is not who he appears"). Kinds Of Scenes Scenes, or encounters, are meant to break down the scenario into manageable chunks. Those chunks are there so your Players can run their Adventurers through the game, sampling and enjoying the delights of their game. Each scene has a point to it, whether it is introducing a new thing, or something the Adventurers do. Modularity is your friend. Reuse and recycle everything. Planning Start with a planning scene. Let the players make plans and pick a direction for the story. If a story stalls, planning scenes can allow the Players to take stock and regroup. Social These kinds of scenes allow the Adventurers to interact with NPCs meaningfully, so the characters can advance their agenda. Investigation Knowledge is power. By learning whatever the can about about their opponents, and developing their understanding of the current issues, the players can make changes in the direction the story takes. Investigation scenes are for learning new things, and exposing secrets. Action The Adventurers are up against some sort of immediate conflict, and there is little time to debate when there is something physical to be done, whether it be moving a corpse or trying to turn your opponent into one. Antagonist Reaction Whoever is opposing the Adventurers' agenda strikes here, requiring the Adventurers to respond to the challenge. Leverage This is an action taken by the Adventurers to get power or influence over something, which then enables you to get what you’re really after. Consequences What political ability a character uses determines how they get their way, but it can also have unintended consequences. Resolution In these scenes at the end, everything comes together. Closing Thought Scene design and structuring is very much like designing and writing a play. You describe sets, props, and actors. And like a theatrical play, all the words in the world are meaningless unless you get together to make the sets, props, and costumes, and to allow the players to read at least some of the script. Unlike the theatre, however, the audience and the actors are one and the same. It's like a script - the readthrough is nowhere near as satisfying as the finished performance. And for the Players, that means getting their hands dirty, via their Adventurers putting their lives on the line to make a difference to the world the Players are playing in - which is the world you are running for them. But if you keep thinking of each encounter, each scene, in terms of the Adventurers doing something in each one, either with whatever they encounter in the scene or with the scene itself, then you'll be able to provide the Players with keenly-remembered, well-structured adventures and stories, even if you are literally throwing the scenarios together on the spot. Links Encounter Theory can be found here. Republic can be found here.

Just to let you all know, the next few posts on this blog will be:- Making A Scene (2022-01-22, 10pm UTC) Rabble and Underlings - An Underrated Resource (2022-01-29, 10pm UTC) Mysteries (TBA) Creating Scary Horror Scenarios (TBA)

Welcome to my blog. Next week's post will be titled Making A Scene.

I regret that, due to a working commitment this week, the next entry in this blog will be delayed one week, until January 22nd. Apologies for any inconvenience.