Evil of the Stars is a sci-fi horror game about an isolated expedition that discovers something with the potential to destroy humanity as we know it. Kinda like The Thing, Event Horizon, the Alien movies, or even Prince of Darkness.

It's related to an older game of mine called Black Seas of Infinity, which you can read about in the Eschaton sub-forum on this very site (currently in the swamp). Recently, I finished enough of the bits and pieces that this game needs so I decided to finish a rough first draft. It's not complete, but whatever. I finished the stuff that I wanted to finish. I think.

Anyway, you are welcome to look at it.  THIS IS LINK RIGHT HERE

Hey Vincent!

I don't use PMs like everyday or anything, but I do use them and I'd like to continue using them, but after 2 and a half years, mine is almost full! And it feels weird to just delete my conversations.

So, can we get a higher message limit? If at all possible?

kthxbye

I was just musing, and I thought perhaps the Officer should have this move as an option as well:

Saving Up to be Jewish: When you rummage around for something extra after you've run out of gear, you still have something left. Roll+tactics. On a 10+, you have just the thing saved, with all that is necessary to make it work. On a 7-9, it's not much, but it's 1-gear extra. On a miss, you did have something tucked away, but now it's broken.

It's not specifically WWII, obviously, and there might be another similar move that I didn't see, but I thought it was a good one.

Johnstone's Eschaton Design Essays #1

The Fiction-First Ethos and Abstract Mechanics

So one of the things I've done in Black Seas of Infinity is make extensive use of advantage and disadvantage (aka 'vantages). Joe Mcdaldno used this concept in Monsterhearts, and it's a lot like aspects in Fate games, or situational modifiers in most any old rpg. The idea is this: if there's a thing in the fiction that helps you or gives you an advantage, you get a +1 to your roll. If there's a thing in the fiction that hinders you or puts you at a disadvantage, you get a -1 to your roll.

This promotes a fiction-first agenda in several ways. First, you get modifiers to your roll based on the fiction and only the fiction. There's no +1forward, no strings, and no other abstract mechanical objects that modify the roll. You also only get a modifier if the specific 'vantage is actually relevant. You need to decide whether a particular skill or training, for example, has relevance to a specific action before you can apply a bonus, so you're always thinking about the fiction and providing more detail.

Second, it promotes reincorporation. Anything you make up after you know you're rolling the dice doesn't count as a 'vantage, only the situation and the elements that have been described up to the point where you describe your character making a move. You need to look back at things that have already been introduced, and consider how they affect the current situation.

Third, the way 'vantages are limited also reinforces the setting. Instead of using a Fate point economy to create the pacing sense of a narrative, or just allowing players to cite elements ad nauseum, I've borrowed the concept of scopes from the VSCA guys (Diaspora), where there's distinct categories of things that can influence a roll, and you can't double-up on advantages or disadvantages in any one category. In Black Seas I use three categories: circumstantial, personal, and technological. That means you can't get more extreme than a +3 bonus or -3 penalty to a roll, and to get that you need a 'vantage in each category. Having two personal advantages, like two skills for example, isn't any better than having one—you still get a +1 bonus. Set up this way, all three categories have equal weight, so that technological advantage is just as important as personal skill. This reinforces the transhumanist science fiction theme that is central to Black Seas of Infinity, and also keeps the time spent searching for die roll bonuses to a minimum.

How this affects resolution:

Using 'vantages this way is supposed to result in instances of mechanical resolution that only consider the fiction, and not earlier instances of mechanics (or at least not without the concrete fictional elements that are attached to them). Diagrammed out it might look like this:
fiction --> mechanical resolution --> fiction.

In Apocalypse World, a roll or a mechanical element that generates a result of, say, +1forward can influence the next resolution roll without ever entering the fiction between them in a concrete sense. It might mean your character feels awesome because he just got laid, and we might even recognize this as players, but the rules don't require any concrete in-fiction statement or description to get that +1. In Black Seas they do.

Granted, there are still stats. When you go to the dice for resolution, you still look down at your character sheet to see how many dice you roll. Currently, there's nothing mandating that number be reflected in the fiction, and I'm not sure there ever will be. Hypothetically, an AW hack could just have you roll 2d6 for every move, and apply modifiers based only on traits you have on your character sheet, equipment you're using, and circumstantial conditions. But stats also communicate genre, divide up areas of expertise and allow for character niches, and allow for levels of effectiveness that bypass the whole process of combing through lists of details looking for ones that apply.

How this affects relationships:

Strings, another mechanic from Monsterhearts, represent a more fluid economy of emotional investment than Apocalypse World's Hx stats, or the bonds in Dungeon World. In a Monsterhearts game, having a string on someone means having a certain amount of power over their emotions and affections. One of the major components of play in this game is the gaining, spending, and losing of strings, which represents the emotional volatility of the teenage protagonists. They're abstract quantifications of emotional power, however. Unlike bonds, they don't come with mandatory and definite fiction. We might describe the moment when the Witch gains a string on the Werewolf by turning her on, but the Witch's player might not remember or reference this when that particular string is spent to manipulate the Werewolf later. And yet we all know, in at least some vague sense, that the Werewolf's heartstrings are taking a beating, just because that string was spent. This is a case of using abstract mechanics to describe the fiction. The same sort of thing happens in D&D: when you take 5 points of damage, we're not usually concerned with any resulting wound—we know you got hurt, but the details are irrelevant. As long as you've still got hit points left, we move on (or maybe you check to see if you're bloodied, if we're playing 4e).

This is more or less exactly what I'm trying to avoid in Black Seas. Or as much as it is possible to do that without ruining the other reasons I have for writing the game. That means quantifications of relationships need to be rooted in concrete pieces of fiction, just like 'vantages are. And so they essentially become advantages, used once and expended (crossed out) like strings are, but each one is a phrase indicating the nature of the relationship, just like bonds. Because each one needs to be written down and actually considered as a piece of fiction, they won't see as much action as strings in Monsterhearts do, but then again, there's also scopes to put a cap on how many 'vantages can apply to a single roll.

To be honest, I'm not sure yet how well this actually works. In World of Algol, I've been using bonds, which you can use as leverage to manipulate other players' characters, or as a limited resource to help or hinder. When you use one to add or subtract from a roll, you mark it, and can't use it until you unmark it, and the rest, in between sessions. You can lose a bond by missing a manipulate roll, betraying someone's loyalty, or wagering it to give someone xp if they do what you want. It's a much more permanent resource than what I'm using for Black Seas, and it's also harder to get them. But then, that's World of Algol—it's supposed to be difficult. And much more of a long-term game than Black Seas of Infinity.

How this affects harm:

In practice, I've found harm in Apocalypse World gets described the same way as strings do (or hit points for that matter): that is, not as a piece of fiction, but as an abstract amalgamation of injuries we're not really concerned with describing. We talk about “x-harm,” but not about the actual injuries. One of the ideas Orlando had for his post-eschaton game was that there are no harm ratings, and that wounds exist solely in the fiction. We have a move for assaulting someone, we have a move for attempting dangerous things that could get you hurt, and we have a move for recovery. What more do you need, right? Within this framework, dealing with wounds doesn't require hit points of any kind: “She shoves the knife deep in your side. Your hands get weak. You hit the ground and you're bleeding like a stuck pig. What do you do?” Then you decide how to deal with this situation, and maybe the MC's judgement determines the outcome, or, if there's a move involved, the dice decide.

One problem with that situation arises out of the fact that it's entirely up to the MC to determine the consequences of injuries and to determine when a character dies. Without any rules allowing the MC to disclaim decision-making, it can be tempting for him to pull punches and be soft-hearted, even in situations where playing tough and dangerous would clearly enhance the fun and not detract from it.

This may not present a problem for some groups, the same way it wasn't a problem when Orlando and I played Ghost/Echo. But having run a fairly grim D&D campaign for several years now, I've noticed that tendency to pull punches increases as guidelines for difficulty levels become less definite and as characters stick around longer. This is why I've chosen to include the injury and stress tracks in Black Seas of Infinity—so the MC can disclaim decision-making and play the opposition in a manner that produces dangerous and tense tactical combats.

The difference between the pre-eschaton and the post-eschaton:

All this isn't to suggest, however, that things should be the same on both sides of the eschaon's victory. The major dilemma of the pre-eschaton game is the price of averting the end of the world, and how characters balance that with their own lives. The ultimate price here is death, of one kind or another, and the ultimate consequence is the end of humanity as we know it.

But in the post-eschaton, the end of humanity as we know it is already inevitable, and we're playing characters as they transition from one point (human) to another (post-human). With this transition, the over-arching goal—prevent the eschaton—becomes impossible and thus irrelevant, and all we have are personal goals. In this case, the ultimate price and the ultimate consequence converge into one: being changed in a way beyond your own control. Either you become the post-human being that you want to become, or you don't. In this case, having the rules determine when death happens really serves no function. It's the MC's job to present obstacles to the players, to give them hard choices, and to push forward the eschaton's agenda. And this is all a matter for the fiction to decide, not the machanics. In the post-eschaton world, neither death nor the tactical maneuvering of resources in the war between humanity and the eschaton mean anything. In the post-eschaton, change is inevitable, and it's up to you to decide what each change means to your character. That's what matters most and what makes it different from the time before.

Yeah, so I posted a version of this playbook like 2 years ago, and there were two revised versions in my Heralds of Hell booklet, but it wasn't until just the other day that I realized how to make it an actually decent playbook.

There's still one playbook in Heralds of Hell that kinda sucks, so I don't really want to revise the whole thing. So fuck it, I just put this one in it's own file (like the Horseman) and now I don't have to think about it anymore: The Last Child.

So, Paul asked me about my process of taking my really basic AW hack, called World of Algol, and crossing what Vincent is calling "the Iridium Plateau" in order to make it a full-blown game, like Monsterhearts or Dungeon World. I have been working on this very slowly, because school keeps me pretty busy.

For the first version of World of Algol, I wrote some new playbooks, added a second harm track called contamination, and wrote up a list of spells so I could use Vancian-style D&D magic. Then I wrote an adventure and ran it more or less the same way I run B/X D&D, but with the basic moves from AW.

It was fun! The only really serious problem I found was the disparity between character advancement that AW supports and what Planet Algol assumes. Everything else was good... but I could also see how to make it better.

So here is a quick list of my considerations for taking World of Algol the setting hack and turning it into world of Algol the stand-alone game.

The first two considerations are the most important:

1. What is my goal here?

You'll notice I don't have a sub-forum here in the hack section. This is not laziness, this is intentional. I have friends who like to design games in public, but it's not really my thing. And for this one, my intended audience consists of one person: me. I'm making this so I can run Planet Algol with it; no more, no less. And so I tailor my process to that goal.

I do want to make something that looks as professional as possible, and I like sharing my work and hearing about what other people do with it, but other peoples' opinions on what this game should or shouldn't be are not actually helpful to me. So, until I finish something, I mostly keep it to myself, and once it's done, then I decide what I want to do with it. "Done" is a variable concept of course. The first draft of World of Algol was done and so I decided to share a pdf of it on the internet, for example.

2. How much do I really want to change?

I thought about this one for a while, and even tried out some radically different rules variations. Ultimately, the basic resolution (2d6+stat) of AW is also inherent to D&D, and I decided to stick with that. This way, my finished game's moves will be able to cross-pollinate with both D&D stuff as well as other AW hacks. The workspace rules are also very nice, so in terms of the basic mechanical resolutions, I'm not straying far from the tree.


But here is a short list of things where I DO need to diverge from Aw:

3. Basic moves and stats.
What you use for stats and what the basic moves are, even if players don't always pay attention to them, is a key aspect of a game's genre. There are two considerations here: what's best for the setting, and what works with my sensibilities.

So for example, I need different stats to deal with technology and psychic/magical powers. so I rename the stats for flavour and add a tech stat, and that's probably good enough.

However, I also need a search move, because that's something D&D characters do a lot and Planet Algol adventurers are no different. So I add a search move that's basically like open your brain.

Those are two examples of things the setting demands. I also want things like: fighters should be tougher than wizards, and while the setting is pretty deadly, there's also an element of rough-and-tumble pulp action heroism there, so I have a recover move, for when you pick yourself up off the ground and get back into the fight, instead of, say, variable hit points.

But I'm also annoyed that some moves are really easy to use without adding much to the fiction, like reading people and situations. So I re-worked reading a sitch:

When you assess your situation, roll+wise. On a hit, you can ask the GM questions. Whenever you act on one of the MC's answers, take +1. On a 10+, ask 3 from the list. On a 7-9, ask 1:
* What should I be on the lookout for / paying attention to?
* What's my enemy's true position?
* Where's my best escape route / way in / way past?
* Who has the advantage / is in control here?
* Who is the biggest threat / most vulnerable to me?
If acting on one of the GM's answers requires you to make a roll, you get +1. You can only assess the same situation once.

So now you have to actually assess your situation, in character, before you can roll. Go ahead and do your impression of a noir detective: "I knew she was trouble the minute she walked into my office..." This version isn't particular to Planet Algol or anything, I just like it, is all.
(Feel free to steal this one from me if you like it too, but remember: being able to assess someone else's situation is a special move.)

4. Playbooks.
The stats and basic moves establish a baseline for what everybody in the game does, and then the playbooks tell you how characters are different. I don't have too much to say about this, it's just like writing up a custom playbook. You figure out what the archetypes of characters you want and decide what the range of options they should have is and then just write them up. As long as you know what game you're writing, this is just work, nothing more.

In World of Algol you can have two players choose the same class/playbook, so each one needs more options than what's available to, say, the Chopper and the Hardholder.

5. Violence.
In my experience a lot of the time people tend to treat harm in AW as hit points. You get shot in the face and take 2-harm, but the real consequence here is that you mark down 2-harm on your sheet, not that now you have to deal with being shot in the face. I think harm should be a bridge between mechanics and fiction. If you break your leg in the fiction, you check the harm list and mark that much harm. But, because there is a recover move, even if you can un-mark that harm, your leg is still broken until it heals in the fiction. The harm listing for weapons is when you use them with a move, and it says to deal harm, you deal that much harm, and the GM will look at the list of injuries at that level of harm and say what the injury is. When you mark X amount of harm on your sheet, you drop dead. If you die in the fiction, you die mechanically too.

I don't really mind hit points per se, we use them in D&D, but I'd prefer to go with a more fiction-first design here. Joe did a neat thing by adding conditions to Monsterhearts. That ensures you have to write down your injuries, so I'll be using some version of that idea.

6. Bonds
Hx is a neat idea, and so is bonds. What I need for these rules to do in my game is two things: support adventuring-party play while leaving room for betrayal (unlike in Dungeon World), and supporting retainers. And by retainers, yes, I mean meatshields.

The Hx questions in AW are often easy to forget about, which is why I like bonds. I like resolving bonds, too, but I want to retain some tension between resolving a bond for xp and keeping it for the bonus to helping rolls, so I need mechanisms for creating bonds other than just writing a new one when you manage to resolve one. I'm still not sure exactly how bonds with PCs and NPCs will differ yet.

7. Experience
This is probably where I break most from AW. I want xp to be really stingy and focused on long-term play. Rolling dice, playing your character, and having fun are their own rewards, if you want to advance on Planet Algol you need to actually accomplish things. No highlighted stats, no alignment moves, and if there are player-determined goals via bonds, these only allow for a very slow rate of advancement. If you want a quicker rate, you need to accomplish things the game says are important.

However, I'm also looking at writing three different modes of play for this game, with the main differences being in what the GM creates for each mode, and how the players are rewarded. So in Exploration mode, for example, the GM prepares an unfamiliar environment for the players to explore, and the players are rewarded for recovering valuables. But of you want to play Story Now style, you can play Survival mode, which is more like AW.

But a lot of the details are still pretty nebulous and I won't get much work done on them during the next couple months.

So! Those are my issues. If you have been following other peoples' hacks, some things might be familiar, others maybe less so. Everybody has a different process, and even when some things seem like they should be similar, they often aren't. This game takes a lot from D&D, for example, but it's not the same D&D that informs Dungeon World.

Anyway, I hope that was interesting to somebody.

Here's an idea I had regarding resetting Hx numbers. People who aren't satisfied with the current explanation for this rule might find it interesting (or not, I dunno).

When you reset Hx to +1...

When your Hx with a character goes to +4 and you reset it to +1, have that character's player tell you a secret about their character.

When you tell a secret about your character, tell the other player something their character did not already know, either some weakness or habit, or some psychology they manage to puzzle out. This should be something more than trivial; if it can be used against your character in some way, if it's something the MC didn't know, or if it paints your character in a radically different light all of a sudden, all the better.

If you're using Hx (or bonds or the equivalent) with NPCs, and you reset from +4 to +1, the MC will tell you a secret about that character.

An old friend of mine is using Kickstarter to fund a documentary about the impending collapse of civilization and what people are doing to avoid this. It's not gaming-related or anything, but might be of interest to people here, either as inspiration for an Apocalypse World game, or because you care about these issues in real life, too.

It's called Fall and Winter, directed by Matt Anderson. Check it out:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/manderson/fall-and-winter-a-documentary-film