Making Demon: the Descent more like a Cold War

History is written by the victors, as the mortals say.

The Aesir and the Jötunn. The Seelie and the Unseelie. The Gods and the Titans. The Fall of Lucifer. Ripples of shadows of the truth, passed down in half-guessed whispers to mortal ears and told and retold, until nothing remains but the fruits of human imagination, and the memory of Schism.

Spirits are everywhere, behind and between the world seen by mortal eyes. They enact the will of their beating heart, the God-Machine. They build metaphysical infrastructure, channel incomprehensible power, protect, people; whatever the God-Machine decrees. Sometimes humans sense them, and call them guardian angels. If only they knew.

You are no angel.

Being Mean About Rangers, part 3: Homebrewing

Constructing a Ranger

So having spent all this time arguing that the ranger doesn't need or deserve to be a class of its own, and indeed that insisting on it is probably deleterious to the game as a whole... what if I had to make a ranger class?

What, if anything, do I think can stand out as unique selling points for the ranger?

These must be:

• Sufficiently generic that they don't lock the ranger down into one character concept
• Sufficiently flexible that they are regularly relevant in most campaigns; which is to say, you will actually get to use these features during the game session
• Sufficiently related that they seem to form a coherent whole
• Sufficiently visible that they manifest in the narrative. Phrased much less pretentiously, I mean they should be something you actually notice happening, because unless you actually notice it in play, it doesn't feel like a real part of the story.

Being Mean About Rangers, part 2: Spelling Tests and Typecasting

Last time, as you may recall, I was pretty comprehensively dismissive of the 5e ranger's claims to be a class, based on what I argued to be a rag-tag collection of attributes and some shonky fluff-crunch joints. In particularly, I feel most of its non-combat abilities are overly dependent on the campaign, and the DM's preferred style, for relevance.

Mechanics

What about the mechanical end? Rogues and barbarians are to a non-trivial extent defined by a specific class mechanic (sneak attack and rage respectively). Of course, these are strongly tied into their fluff.

Unfortunately I feel like the ranger is, in a sense, self-sabotaging.

Being Mean About Rangers, part 1: Decline and Fail

So I've been thinking about the Ranger a lot, because it's one component of my multiclass character. I ran into problems at 4th level when I realised taking several more levels of ranger would not meaningfully affect the feel of my character. I'm not going to delve into that because it's as inside baseball as you can get. But I do want to talk about rangers.

Discussing things with Dan, the conclusion I came to was that the ranger is a bit of a problem.

The ranger has a core mechanic which actively discourages you from using a large proportion of its other capabilities. It has an unusual proportion of features dedicated to the "exploration pillar" in a way which makes its relevance uniquely vulnerable to the campaign and the whims of the DM. It lacks a strong and coherent archetype to explain what the class is all about. And in place of a strong defining thematic mechanic that supports a range of concepts, it has a hodgepodge of abilities that encourage playing a specific character.

...dammit. This is going to be controversial.

Hi, I'm Shimmin Beg, and I don't think the Ranger needs to be a class.

Playing with 5e sorcerers

So I just wrote a (probably ill-advised) thing about changes to the warlock class aimed at making it less dependent on one trick. I've muttered before about some concerns I have with the sorcerer class, and I thought, why not look at that too?

First off, a quick disclaimer: I've only played a multiclass sorcerer, and I'm not in a position to comment usefully on balance. I'm not aiming to address any perceived class balance issues. As with the warlock, what I'm interested in here is flavour: how to make the sorcerer feel more distinctively sorcerery by riffing on its high notes.

Extrapolating from Lasers and Feelings

So I'm feeling on a bit of a Lasers and Feelings kick at the moment. Mostly, I suspect, just because it's a new thing I've come across so I'm naturally inclined to prod it and see what's going on.

The basic setup is framed around a small set of assumptions:

• Players are happy to play in broad strokes rather than model in detail (more conflict than task resolution)
• Any challenge that requires a roll can be allocated reasonably well to either Lasers or Feelings; anything that can't either doesn't need a roll or needs a completely random roll.
• Characters can be satisfactorily distinguished with two overlapping small sets of tropes: Style (attitude) and Role (profession), plus the Number that determines whether they're emotional or practical.
• You don't need to mechanically model what happens to characters; this is determined by the needs of the story

It occurred to me today (belatedly perhaps) that actually, the Lasers/Feelings thing can be modelled another way. Under the basic description, you have one Number from 2-5 and you roll under for Lasers, over for Feelings. You can also model this as two separate stats, both of which you roll over: you have 7 points to distribute between the two and they must range from 2-5.

This opened up the possibility of a slightly greater set of dimensions for other genres. The obvious one is to say you have four stats, and the array 2,3,4,5 to allocate to them.

Looking at this, the immediate thought that crossed my mind was that you could use it for a light D&D-style game. Or anything else, of course.

Action-Adventure

For sword-and-sorcery, blaster-and-hoverboard, and possibly for slightly more epic genres as well, the split that comes to mind is Might, Speed, Cunning and Wisdom.

Might represents physical prowess, both what you can take and what you can dish out. It's used for toughing out hardship, feats of strength, and for crude physical combat. Speed represents your ability to move and think quickly. It's used for reacting to sudden events, dodging hazards, balancing, interrupting, and making the first move. Cunning represents mental and physical guile. It's used for coming up with plans, performing magic tricks, picking locks and pockets, feinting, beguiling, bluster, acting and lying plausibly. Wisdom represents knowledge and understanding. It's used for understanding others, recalling facts, studying, assessing, reaching agreement, logic and foresight.

If it helps, a distinction between Cunning and Wisdom is that Cunning primarily relates to what you're doing, while Wisdom primarily relates to other people or things.

Injuries and stuff

If you want some kind of injury mechanic (not necessarily needed, if we assume this is a genre game where it's assumed everyone survives but narrative injuries exist) then I'd give everyone the same set of available injuries, then have them use their abilities to avoid injury.

For example, let's say we have a list of injuries ranked 1-6: Scratch, Limp, Wounded Arm, Dizzy, Weak, Unconscious. You can only have each injury type once; the group decides their effects as seem appropriate to the context. Hazards pose a Danger of 1-6 (enemies with stats pose Danger equal to rolled successes). You can roll an appropriate stat to reduce the Danger to zero and avoid injury, otherwise you incur the appropriate injury (2 for Limp, say). If you already have that injury, you take the next one up instead.

So Iron-Fisted Lia already has a Wounded Arm. She's attacked by a troll posing Danger 3, and tries to shrug off the blow with her shield using Might, but rolls no successes. She'd take the 3rd tier injury, Wounded Arm, but she already has one so she becomes Dizzy instead. Exactly what that means in this context is up to the group.

The distinction is that characters intended to be resilient would be better able to avoid injury - they have high Might to absorb damage or Speed to evade it. This would sort of replicate the way wizards are usually squishy while soldiers are tough.

Faux-Class

In this context, D&D-style class would be represented by Roles. You can use the stat arrays to represent them as you choose:

• A hardy dwarven warrior might be Might 2, Speed 4, Cunning 5, Wisdom 3. They're very strong and tough, sensible and knowledgeable, not especially fast, and have no knack for trickery.
• A mystical elf might prefer Might 5, Speed 3, Cunning 4, Wisdom 2. They're very knowledgeable, have quick reflexes, a certain amount of deviousness, but are physically weak.
• An orcish thief might be Might 3, Speed 4, Cunning 2, Wisdom 5. They're very cunning, strong and tough, reasonably fast but not particularly intellectual. They use their wits and physical power to solve problems, rather than the speed another thief might rely on.
• A Star Patrol Marine might be Might 2, Speed 4, Cunning 3, Wisdom 5. They're very tough, good at creative thinking, reasonably fast, but not especially knowledgeable.
• A Star Patrol Ranger might be Might 5, Speed 3, Cunning 2, Wisdom 4. They're used to lone working, and rely on wits and speed to survive and deal with problems; you can't fight everyone out on the frontier.
• A Star Patrol Investigator might be Might 5, Speed 4, Cunning 3, Wisdom 2. They work either with a team of agents or undercover, using their vast knowledge and intelligence to find out what's going on and work out how to fix it.

Conspiracy

For games of espionage, corporate conspiracy and kung-fu, the split that comes to mind is Face, Tech and Violence. If you wanted you could stick a Willpower in there too.

Face represents your skill at social interactions and presentation. Tech represents your ability to deal with machinery, communications, security and code. Violence represents exactly that. Willpower is optionally used to represent your courage, pain threshold and determination in the face of hardship.

• A persuasive, cold-blooded con artist with a Desert Eagle would be Face 2, Willpower 3, Tech 5, Violence 4.
• A black ops assassin would be Face 5, Willpower 3, Tech 4, Violence 2.
• A leet hacker with no taste for fighting would be Face 4, Willpower 3, Tech 2, Violence 5.
• A steely-eyed leader and all-rounder would be Face 3, Willpower 2, Tech 5, Violence 4.
• A practically-minded burglar might be Face 5, Willpower 4, Tech 3, Violence 2.
• A suave, merciless infiltrator who doesn't expect to be caught might be Face 2, Willpower 5, Tech 4, Violence 3.

Warlocks, revisited

Quite a long time ago, I talked about tweaking D&D 5e warlocks to reduce the system issues with eldritch blast and grant them more flexibility as a class. I also mentioned that I'd prefer to make broader changes.

I am nothing if not inclined to suddenly drop things I've been working on in favour of immediate whims reliable, so I'm going to revisit this topic now.

Lasers and Detectives and Being-Like

So a few weeks ago, I visited some friends and mentioned to them the deeply intriguing game Lasers and Feelings, which I'd come across on a podcast.

I actually won't link to the podcast, because although the game seemed fun, I found the podcast cringe-inducingly California-amdram-storygamerish and had to stop listening fairly soon, and it seems mean to link someone with that kind of recommendation.

In fact, weirdly, I've now tried listening to three different Actual Plays of Lasers and Feelings and couldn't stick with any of them. I don't remember the issue with the second; the third group were so fixated on the "Sexy" keyword that it got tiresome to listen to within a few minutes. I'm sure it's just a personal taste thing, they sounded like they were having a great time. I think it's partly that for me, a lot of amusement comes from playing silly tropes with a straight face, whereas a game where everyone is Sexy and people run around referring to that in-character and the actual plot features the Captain announcing that due to a terrible space-plague he has become *dun-dun-dah* Un-Sexy! ...is just too in-your face.

Anyway, I found the game enormous fun, as my alien doctor ran around trying to meet sexy humans and solve medical problems through sheer emotion. We had a fun pirate-themed plot and eventually crushed their plans to reverse time because, even though this would have vastly improved (and indeed, saved) the lives of thousands of people, it's always bad to change history in space opera because Morals You Guys.

The lightweight ruleset really appealed to me, and I started wondering what other genres might be amenable to this treatment. This led me to try and rough out a detective-themed game, which I'm going to call Monographs and Intuition.

The division is much like the one in Lasers and Feelings itself - Monographs represents academic knowledge, reasoning and induction based on evidence, whereas Intuition represents solving problems by understanding or manipulating emotions, as well as sheer inspiration. Recognising a tattoo, tracing origin of tobacco-ash or following the money would be Monographs; spotting a flash of guilt, encouraging someone to open up to you, or realising how social tensions might cause a spiral of murderous jealousy, would be Intuition. Let's assume that low is Intuition, and high is Monographs; you want to roll over Intuition, and under Monographs.

Then you'd just grab some archetypes. Something like this maybe?

Style

Learned, Inscrutable, Two-Fisted, Mild-Mannered, Eccentric, Hard-Boiled

Role

Police Officer, Private Eye, Dilettante, Bystander, Foreigner, Whippersnapper

So maybe Sherlock would be a Learned Dilettante with a 5 (Monographs). Miss Marple would be a Mild-Mannered Bystander on perhaps a 3. Poirot would be an Inscrutable Foreigner, on a 2-3. Sam Spade is a Hard-Boiled Private Eye on a 3-4. Why Didn't They Ask Evans? features two Whippersnappers, probably one Inscrutable and one Mild-Mannered from what I remember, with a 3 because honestly they're a bit rubbish at following clues but not that great at understanding people either.

But would it be a detective game?

One of the issues here is, how detectivish would this feel? As someone pointed out to me, this is basically the premise of The X-Files, but the playstyle might not be what's expected, particularly from players used to other investigative games like Call of Cthulhu. Those revolve around exploring scenarios that have been carefully designed by the GM with chains of evidence for the players to puzzle out using their characters' attributes; Lasers & Feelings is a very lightweight game with a ton of player agency and assumed most of the game is improvised.

As my much-lamented Los Diablos game was supposed to demonstrate, I don't think this is necessarily a problem. Investigative games traditionally rely on lots of pre-planning, but I don't particularly see why you can't have one that's mostly improvised around a core. The player agency is a completely different point, but again, I'm not sure it's a problem. What it's going to depend on is what the group considers to be "like a detective", and there are two axes here: the story and the game.

I don't think there will be any particular discrepancy between an improvised detective story and a pre-planned one. In fact, it's entirely possible that an improv game will end up more like a detective novel than one based on a prewritten clue chain. A series of weird rolls can lead to people missing or misinterpreting clues, or learning things the GM never expected; and of course they can simply go off on one and end up doing something utterly bizarre. In an improv game, the massive tangent can be incorporated into the plot; if the players think it's relevant, they can make it so. People working together to improvise a game that feels like a detective story around a loose plot should be at least as effective at doing so, as a group trying to create a detective story by confronting game-mechanical challenges that reveal or conceal parts of the plot.

The more important question is, what feels like "a detective game" to the players? And that's going to vary. I'm not sure whether it would actually need to be investigative or not.

A L&F-style game would basically involve improvising clues to fit around a rough plot. The players and DM would make up clues that seemed to make sense at the time. That sounds to me quite a lot like the Agatha Christie-esque style of stories, where most people are suspects most of the time and the crucial bit of evidence isn't always more convincing than the rest, hence Evil Voice.

That is mostly character-based mystery, though, which is a bit different from the likes of Sherlock Holmes or Sam Spade. It makes sense that you can sort of riff around in them, because that's basically what the authors do. But what if we want Sherlock? A lot of people do.

I like most of the original stories, but I must admit that like basically everything else involving Stephen Moffat, I have no time for the TV series.

I'm actually not sure whether Holmes stories are particularly investigative, though. At least, the experience of the reader is not one of carefully piecing together the puzzles and forming a logical understanding of the plot, which some other authors (like Agatha Christie) permit. In most of the stories, Holmes is constantly in possession of information that's kept from the reader, which means not only do we not know what conclusions he has drawn, but we are literally incapable of solving the mystery. So the audience isn't part of a slow process of logical investigation at all, they just encounter a series of baffling clues which Holmes eventually whips into a story by adding bits to form a coherent whole.

The question is, does is matter whether those connective bits that are added are a) devised by the GM and may or may not be found by the players; or b) stuff the players make up when they succeed at a roll? I think not.

Player mindsets

What we're running into here is the issue that people can have very different instincts and opinions about what it means to be Like X, whether that's Like A Detective Story or Like Sherlock Holmes, or even Like The Red-Headed League. I've talked about this before in terms of the Musketeers.

Player A says "this Sherlock Holmes game feels nothing like a Holmes story! I have to use my real world skills to put a bunch of in-character clues together, and I might get it wrong! To properly feel like Holmes I'd need a game where whatever deductions my character made were correct, then we'd get an outcome that really came close to being an improvised Holmesian narrative".

Player B says "this Sherlock Holmes game feels nothing like a Holmes story! I just have to roll my deduction skill, and then anything my character asserts becomes true in the game! To properly fell like Holmes, I'd need to be putting together real clues to a properly designed mystery, using real logic and deduction."

Broadly speaking, the schism here is whether you understand Like Sherlock Holmes to mean "this game guarantees that you will be able to do what Holmes does" or "this game challenges you to try to do what Holmes does".

Player A feels like Holmes by saying and doing things that look like what Holmes does and, like Holmes, having these be true parts of the story. Trying to second-guess the GM's attempt to build a mystery that is "exactly challenging enough" is basically a distraction from evoking that Holmesian atmosphere. It's sort of like being Sherlock Holmes in a play. You could say that the aesthetic trappings of Holmes are what provide that feeling.

Player B feels like Holmes by taking part in a mystery they know to have a solution, and patiently piecing together the clues. Being able to simply invent truths undermines that whole experience by trivialising it; there's little satisfaction in solving a mystery if you can simply declare victory, it's like playing a game with people you know are letting you win. The feeling of Being Holmes comes from doing in real life something that resembles what Holmes does in the stories, even though the reliance on player skill will naturally result in signficant differences from the inferences a genius detective can draw.

Both players want to feel like a great detective, but one player gets that from abstract mechanics that guarantee a great-detective-style outcome, and the other gets it from concrete systems that give them the chance to get closer to doing what great detectives do.

You can't please all of the people, etc.

On reflection, I suspect that the same thing probably applies to the other genres. I personally found Lasers and Feelings very satisfying, but other people might well find that they want to feel like they're really exploring strange new worlds, fending off Klingons and solving space-problems, and that being able to roll a 3+ on a die to succeed at stuff by handwavium doesn't feel like that. Those people might want a carefully-crafted pregen world to explore - and indeed I would probably also enjoy that, in fact that sounds exactly like something I'd enjoy.

I reckon that broadly speaking, you could probably apply the Lasers and Feelings template to just about any genre where the protagonists have the capacity to solve problems themselves, rather than being mostly passive. You just need to identify an axis that will provide a binary split you're mostly happy with. Regency Romance? Fours-in-Hand and Invitations. High Fantasy? Lores and Nobility, which balances knowledge of ancient times and subtle powers against selflessness and discipline. Swords-and-Sorcery? Well, eschewing the obvious, how about Thews and Deviltry, for an axis built on the balance between physical might and fearless cunning? Shounen manga about an exasperating teenager perpetually oblivious of the attentions of various (player character) women who protect him from supernatural peril? Study and Tsundere. Grimdark adventure in the Imperium of Man? That sounds like Zeal and Discipline for our Astartes game, Guile and Guts for our hive-gang adventures, Hubris and Acumen for our Rogue Traders, and perhaps Lockpicks and Cynicism for our cult-hunting Inquisitors.

Some of those might not work at all because I just made them all up. The point is, I suspect it's possible - providing the resulting playstyle is something that evokes the genre in an interesting way for you.

I should maybe also note what I carefully didn't do. I don't think any of the throwaway ideas above splits characters along a single axis, which is to say, two poles of the same idea. You want to be sure you're suggesting two different sets of problems the character is good at interacting with, which helps define the character while also avoiding restricting their approach to those problems.

I suppose a couple of those ideas sound a bit like that, but that's not my intention. Zeal and Discipline offers Zealous characters who solve problems by sheer enthusiasm (be those problems cowardly allies, overwhelming odds or the refusal of doors to open) as opposed to Disciplined characters who use analysis and practice. They can deal with many of the same problems, but their methods and the courses of action they actively pursue will differ.

Similarly, Guts and Guile is supposed to be about whether a character tends to take direct action and rely on resilience, or more indirect courses and rely on cunning.

But I mean, it's thirty seconds of work, you get what you pay for here.

The second thing is that you don't want stuff everyone does to be baked into the axes. It would be a relatively bad idea to have a Swords-and-Sorcery game divided into Battle and Sexytimes because, even though those are two cornerstones of the genre, they are completely different skillsets and can't really be applied to equivalent situations. All protagonists should be capable of both fighting enemies and seducing... okay, often also enemies. The point is, if you had a Battle character and a Sexytimes character then one would do all the fighting and one would do all the seducing, and it's really hard for either one to interact well with part of the core of the genre. In fact, there's a secondary problem, which is that having dice rolls for this stuff at all may be a bad idea. If you want people to fight and seduce in a really rules-light game, then assuming that everyone can do those things and the axes are about how they do them is probably better.

We ran into this a bit during Lasers and Feelings. I felt vaguely like I should be stealing an ID card to help infiltrate the pirate base, but there's no "stealing stuff" or "black ops" skill, so I assumed it would come off Lasers because it's practical, right? As was pointed out, there's no particular reason it couldn't come off Feelings if I used interpersonal skills to obtain a badge.

Demon: the Bodging

I'm in a really White Wolfy mood right now.* I could really play some White Wolfy game. Admittedly I might get frustrated with it within a few hours when it turns out not actually to be what's advertised, but I hold out hope.

That was... a couple of months ago, when I started writing this. Same old, same old...

Anyway, my exhaustive (ahem) researches for Visitant involved rereading Demon: the Fallen and being reminded how promising it first sounded. Isn't there some way to get a faux-Judeo-Christian game about demons that are actually vaguely tied into real-life Judeo-Christian demon tropes (including, obviously, all the pop culture stuff that it's spawned) out of this?

What do your elf eyes see?

I just stumbled across a new blog, Nerd-O-Mancer of Dork, and it seems intriguing so I'm looking through the archives. It's a broadly old-school gaming blog, is probably the simplest shorthand to describe it. One post I found is about some issues with the way darkvision (and its variants) work. Here's the key quote:

Darkvision takes away the suspense of being in a dark creepy location far underground and moreover destroy the suspense for the human players who have to struggle with torches and lanterns.

I do think there's a lot of truth in that. One thing I've noticed is that there's a strong tendency for people to pick non-human characters, particularly amongst my friends with less gaming experience.* A part of demihumans can be mostly unaffected by darkness, which seems like a non-trivial loss. It removes a useful tool for creating atmosphere, adding mysteries, shaping combat encounters, and just plain differentiating one slice of the adventure from another. If there's no apparent difference between being in a dark cavern and an open plain, that seems sad to me.

That's probably because these players aren't that familiar with the rules, and in many cases not that interested in them; they want to make a cool character and have fun adventures, and I absolutely endorse this. Most of the other races are significantly cooler (in various ways) than humans, because we're already all humans, and humans don't get any groovy abilities because, um, we don't have them.** Where humans tend to be particularly good is usually in making particular character concepts, because they're flexible and tend to get extra skills, feats, multiclassing potential or what have you. My experience so far is that newer players are less likely to approach things that way.

** Actually, humans have loads of cool abilities, but we don't notice them much, and then we assume that any vaguely humanoid creature would have all the same abilities we do, plus other ones, because they're just flat-out better. Colour Vision? Resist Lactic Acid? High density of sweat glands to disperse heat? And that's without getting into any cognitive stuff that other races might well be worse at.

Because I like playing with mechanics, I suggested taking Dawnrazor's idea further and devising some rules for how those various *visions actually work. With science, like. Here, I expand on those ideas a bit more than I wanted to as a first comment on someone else's blog.

Decide amongst yourself which kind of *vision a creature actually has. I'd tend to recommend that subterranean dwarves have infravision, for example, while elves might have ultravision for all that starlit dancing.

A guide to demihuman vision

Vision

Vision: it's the best! Normal vision in dim-to-bright light is the best model for most of your needs, guaranteed. Sensing shape, colour, movement, fine detail, texture and more, we recommend it for all but the stealthiest of situations.

Low-Light Vision

It’s like vision, only you need less light.

Darkvision

Darkvision is definitionally working without light. You’re seeing some other way. And it’s not a magical ability. It's apparently not sonar, because that's blindsight usually. I’m going to suggest treating this as ‘shape vision’, and assuming it works on some very specific wavelength that's essentially omnipresent. That’s mostly for contrast with the other types below.

Darkvision lets you see shapes and movement, and that’s it. No colour at all for you, and very little detail. You can find the walls of the dungeon and the furniture, but you can’t read this parchment, or even tell whether there's writing on it. It's good for moving around safely, and lets you defend yourself, though you can’t always tell who’s the bandit and who’s your ally without all that facial detail and colour information.

Infravision

So I'm ruling that it’s actual infrared you’re seeing here, so what this fundamentally gets you is heat. When there’s no normal light to overwhelm it, you can make out sources of heat and cold, but very little else.

This lets you see many creatures quite easily, though not most undead or constructs. You can make out surroundings to a limited extent because different substances react differently to heat – a wooden table and a stone wall will look a little different. Very hot objects seem so bright that it’s difficult to see anything else nearby. A major benefit is you have a chance to see creatures that are lightly hidden, say behind a cloth or leaves. Heat sources leave traces - you may be able to track the heatprints left (very recently) by a creature, and if a room was warm recently it'll still seem light to you.

Ultravision

Suggested by commenter Umbriel on Nerd-O-Mancer of Dork.

This requires a source of ultraviolet light, typically faint starlight or moonlight. The character can see most objects dimly in shades of grey, while many plants and animals (especially insects) have rich ultraviolet patterning. Some mineral substances, including many poisons, are visible to ultraviolet. Some creatures, particularly magical or unnatural entities, may glow with ultraviolet light, making them visible and acting as a dim light source. Undersea or subterranean creatures may have evolved similar capabilities to allow vision, attract mates or find prey.

---

This was all primarily intended just to make things richer and a bit more interesting. It should also mean that demihumans don't leave humans completely in the dust when it comes to exploring in the dark, which is a large part of most games. Under the standard rules, there are quite strong arguments for never using light sources: if you can see perfectly well with minimal or no light, carrying a lantern primarily serves to attract attention and make you visible to enemies. In many ways a human can just be a hindrance to a party of adventurers who could otherwise run around in the dark.

I’d also tend to rule that it generally takes a few seconds at least for eyes to switch between *visions, in the same way we have to adjust to dark rooms and bright sunny days. So when the lantern goes out, the elf and dwarf aren’t just completely unaffected – they get to spend a round blinking and cursing too.

Using these or similar rules would tend to open up some new kinds of puzzles or confusion for players trying to work out how to interpret colourless shapes or heat signals.

Don't forget, this would apply to enemies too. Players and characters could take advantage of the properties of each monster's vision to distract, confuse or thwart them. New options is generally good.

Of course, it does add complexity, and that's not necessarily what you want. A major advantage of simple darkvision or infravision is that they just let you see in the dark and move on with your life.

Jaegerausflug

So me and a friend are both great fans of Girl Genius by the Foglios, and last time I visited we were talking about this, and in particular enthusing about Jaegermonsters. Somehow, this ended up with me promising to write and run a game of Jaegers when I next visit.

Part of the reason I felt this was remotely feasible was that old friend-or-foe-undetermined, FATE. I remain troubled by how to actually run it, but pulpy action-adventure is what FATE is made for. I suppose I could have written a game from scratch, but let's be honest: I'm currently writing/wrote but haven't done anything with the following games:

• Monitors (awaiting feedback)
• Feckless Wastrels (awaiting playtesting)
• Into Ploughshares
• Friendly Neighbourhood Necromancers
• Alpha Dregs
• Jacobeans vs. Aliens (awaiting period research)
• Beneath Dark Skies
• In the Darkness Find Them (awaiting playtesting)
• Vessel
• Heartbreaker High (not previously mentioned on this blog)
• A Band of Bunglers (awaiting playtesting)
• Morris
• De Jure (awaiting playtesting)
• The Call of Cthulhu thing where you're all mutants
• Almost certainly some others I've forgotten about

So I felt reskinning an existing game was an acceptable shortcut. And FATE is eminently reskinnable compared to most other games I know. And I've been wanting to try it out again.

Visitant: cover and compromise

Cover and Compromise

It’s tough being an alien resident on Earth. From the moment you arrive, it’s vital to create and maintain a solid cover identity as a human. This cover allows you to go about your agenda undetected; many kinds of research, manipulation and predation wouldn’t be possible if your targets knew you weren’t human. More urgently, cover keeps you safe. A low-cover visitant is vulnerable to observation, investigation and public suspicion. A visitant whose cover is blown is a wanted fugitive, whether the pursuers know exactly who they’re dealing with or simply think them a dangerous spy.

Cover is about being totally mundane. You don’t want suspicion of any kind. The more information is spread about you acting unusually, the weaker your cover becomes. Suspicion doesn’t necessarily need to be attached to you personally; reporters investigating alleged alien activity in your village is a problem too. Gossip about your unusual habits, police questioning about involvement in strage events, YouTube videos of a strange creature prowling around the park, they’re all dangerous to you.

World of Sci-ness: initial ideas for a World of Darkness sci-fi hack

So, White Wolf games. It seems like they can mostly be summed up quite generically:

1. You are a(n) [entity]...
2. ...embodying a particular archetype of [entity]...
3. ...living amongst humans in a gothic, urban version of our world...
4. ...as part of a secret subculture of [entities]...
   1. ...divided into bickering factions...
   2. ...with its own unique laws and secrets...
   ...who...
   1. ...explores the nature of humanity and [entity]hood...
   2. ...tussles with moral and philosophical quandaries...
   3. ...and goes around doing missions for people because they kind of want you to I guess.

You know what they don't have yet? Aliens. Let's make aliens.

Vessel: the Demon: the Fallen ripoff verbing

So, I said this:

It does strike me that Demon might serve as an interesting template for variations on the same theme, of spirits in mortal bodies. You could semi-easily do something more generic by assuming a kind of animist setting, and allowing characters to host animal, plant, rock, river, sky and so on spirits. This would immediately tackle the issue that most of the demonic powers aren't very demonic. Some of the others could be discarded, or turned into generic Lores accessible to anyone - although personally I'd want to drop or pare-and-merge some of them for being either incoherent or rubbish. Again, that seems like it would fit well with the idea of Generic Supernatural Power that spirits might be able to bestow on top of their specific spheres of power.

Money, meet mouth.