All Hail King Torg!

The afore mentioned King Torg (All Hail King Torg!)

So I finally got to play Kobolds Ate My Baby! tonight, and lo it was awesome.  I actually GM'd for the first time in quite awhile, and had a blast.  Every kobold bit it at least once, many in spectacular explosions of chicken feed.  Ark even suffered the most foul death of all - the Death By Monty Python Skit!  A Black Knight riding a fierce rabbit rode through and spanked Schmecky Encephalitis to death after he quoted Monty Python.  Clucky, the chicken/masked vigilante protector of the village struck twice, and there was much barking from all around the table.

Seriously, if you haven't played this game, find a copy and pick it up.  I don't think we stopped laughing all night!

FtA: World Building

It's not enough for me to just design rivals for the PCs, I need to work on building a world for all of these people and societies to inhabit.  Cities, forests, mysterious places that will launch adventures, all of this.  I think I'm going to take the approach of detailing a specific city, or area and examining it exhaustively.  I live in Texas, and lets face it - between the heat and the wildfires it's practically post apocalyptic already.  So I'm thinking the Hill Country, down by San Antonio and Austin.  After a world-shattering event, populations will migrate south, so it makes for a good place that would probably be a central, or at least major, part of the new world.

I envision a world of intelligent armadillos, vicious roving gangs of chinchillas, and cactus people.  Crumbling cities provide shelter in the daytime for the humans, while giant worms tunnel through the earth, occasionally surging to the surface to swallow travelers whole.  Water is the precious commodity, and cities form from nothing when a spring is found, and melt away just as quickly when it dries up.  All the while, something watches with cold, electronic eyes from the ruins of Fort Hood.

Speaking of chinchillas, watch this, you won't regret it:

I may have to find a way to make Chinchilli Day an official part of From the Ashes.

FtA: Antagonists vs. Rivals

Rereading some of my earlier posts regarding some of the other beings inhabiting the world of From the Ashes, it struck me that I wasn't setting up antagonists, but rather rivals.  Each of the groups that I have introduced have their own vision for rebuilding the world, and I think that it is important to play that aspect up.  Their purpose in the game is not to antagonize the PCs, at least not in the same way that a party of orcs do.  Rather, they have a competing system of values which they see as the means to the end which is a new, better, stronger, Six Million Dollar Civilization.  The Prophets want to cleanse the earth and prepare the way for True Man's return, the Racists want to reclaim the world for themselves and make things "the way they used to be", the ants want to create an orderly, regimented society.  Even the Plague, in its sad broken way, wants to make things better the best way it knows how.

I think there is value in setting up the game this way - not as creatures to be knocked over so you can plunder their loot, but rivals with hopes and dreams and aspirations of their own, at least collectively.  I'm going to retag those posts now.

FtA: TechnoZombies!

Zoroa and Metiph rolled around in the grassy clearing, giggling as they kissed passionately.  Distracted as they were, they didn't notice the small animal until it was only a few feet away.

Pulling away from Metiph's embrace, Zoroa exclaimed, "Oh, look!  It's a squirrel!"

She reached out her hand, but without warning, the creature leapt forward, biting her on the arm.  With a yelp, she jumped up, and the two of them stomped on it until it stopped twitching. 

Its body was filled with pieces of metal.

Looking up at Zoroa, Metiph backed away, a look of horror in his eyes.  He ran back to the village as fast as he could, and never looked back..  When the hunting party found what was left of Zoroa shambling through the woods several hours later, they beat her with clubs, and buried the remains.

What would a postapocalyptic game be without zombies?  Putting my own spin on them, though, the upshot is that before the Apocalypse, scientists were working with nanobots that would augment humanity, replacing diseased or damaged body parts.  It worked - sort of.  They could teach the nanobots to replicate the form of the body, but not the functions.  So a replaced liver would just be a liver shaped piece of metal.  The project was considered a failure, but a failure with promise, so the nanobots were put away for future study. 

In the years following the End Times, the laboratory where the nanobots were housed suffered structural damage, and the nanobots were released into the wild.  Their time in isolation had warped their programming, turning them into an agressive, self replicating virus.  For hundreds of years since the Plague, as it has come to be known, has bedeviled the recovering world. 

The nanobots are transmitted via fluid exchange, and drive the host to infect others.  Slowly, the creature's organs are transmuted into nonfunctional pieces of metal, until the host loses the ability to function, and collapses.  Without life functions, the nanobots perish themselves, but while the creature is mobile, it is infectious.

There is no cure, and the infected are put down without mercy.  Entire towns have been lost to the Plague, so no chances are taken.

FtA: Character Generation

I was thinking about Character Generation, and I think that I'm going to go down a different path than the games I've played have.  With most games, you choose your abilities, and based on those scores you get a series of derived stats.  Then you pick the skills for your character, which in many cases are assigned scores associated with the ability scores.

I'm thinking of going the other way around.  While there is a certain amount of inherent capability with regards to some of our attributes, alot of it comes down to what you do.  You may be naturally intelligent, but if you spend your life focused on physical pursuits, it won't progress beyond that.  If you spend your life eating cheetos and drinking coke then your natural physical strength will be wasted.

So I'm thinking of a point buy system, but buying skill points, which are divided into their related attribute.  I'll establish a baseline score for each genotype, and then either the average or the aggregate of your skill scores will modify your attributes.  Similarly, as you use those skills, they will increase your ability scores.

Just like in real life, the more you lift weights, the stronger you'll be.

This seems like a novel gaming concept to me, but I'm interested to know if there are any other games that have adopted this approach to attributes?

FtA: Mutations

So I'm in the process of building the list of mutations.  Besides the obvious ones, any requests, suggestions, etc?

Let me have em!

An Apocalyptic Appendix N

I mentioned yesterday that Starriors were one of the main reasons I've gotten into post apocalyptic fiction and gaming.  So I've decided to do a periodic retrospective on different post apocalyptic media that has influenced the creation of From the Ashes, and my fascination with the topic overall.  I'll start with a couple movies.

The Road Warrior -  Mad Max was good, but the Road Warrior blew the doors off the post apocalyptic movie genre.  It's a tossup who's the better villain, the Humungus or Wez, but the setting is perfect, the casting is brilliant, and Mel Gibson was firing on all cylinders.  I can't believe that anyone is reading this blog that hasn't seen this movie, but on the off chance you haven't, get thee to Netflix.

The World, the Flesh and the Devil - Harry Belafonte digs his way out of a collapsed mineshaft to find that the world has blown itself to smithereens.  He quickly finds out that although the world has moved on, old hatreds and stereotypes are alive and well as he finds a white woman, and then a white man.  Rivalry builds over the affections of the woman with an undercurrent of racial tension, leading to a climactic hunt through the abandoned city.  The ending is a bit hokey, but it ties in with some of the themes of From the Ashes.

A Boy and His Dog - I'm a huge fan of Harlan Ellison, and I'm glad this got made into a movie back in 1974, because it's not the sort of movie that can be made anymore.  As much as I love the twisted ending (with the exception of the last line tacked onto the movie) it would be box office poison these days.  The setting is pitch perfect, though, and Don Johnson shows why he got the role on Miami Vice.  A boy and his telepathic dog travel the wastelands looking for women in a twisted, post apocalyptic coming of age tale.  You owe it to yourself to watch it, if you haven't already.

Damnation Alley - Deeply flawed, but there's a nugget of awesome buried in there.  The giant cockroaches and scorpions, the radioactive skies, and the Landmaster.  Holy crap, the Landmaster.  Let me win the lottery, and that's the first thing I'll buy.  Based VERY loosely on a Roger Zelazney story, starring George Peppard (Hannibal from the A-Team), and a young Jackie Earle Haley, if you can stand some embarrasingly bad special effects in places, this is a gem.

The Omega Man - Besides Vincent Price's The Last Man on Earth, this is the best film version of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend.  Charlton Heston stars in all his bare-chested glory, chewing through the scenery every chance he gets.  It's wonderfully 70s kitsch, but manages to fit some nuance in between the manly posturing and the overblown dialogue.  This one is more fun than anything, and definitley worth your time on a Saturday night.

 The Dark Hour (La Hora Fria) - A recently made Spanish film (2006), this rivals Alex Proyas' Dark City for great mind bending twists.  I won't say anything else about it.  If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and find it.