Imaginary Friends: A New Kickstarter from Blackwyrm Games

maginary Friends is an adventure for the Hero System/ Champions 6th Edition and Savage Worlds in which invisible playmates come to life with deadly consequences. As much a long-term campaign supplement as an adventure, it features a set of strategies and events using the characters and depicting forces at work, rather than a completely linear narrative.

You’ll meet an entertaining array of sinister and unique characters who will engage roleplayers in tests of combat and the mind unlike anything you’ve seen before! I know you’ve probably heard that before once or twice, but I really mean it. Every playtest of this adventure has been fantastic, be it rules light or rules heavy.

We hope you’ll be pleased and surprised at what you find inside the pages of Imaginary Friends. It’s a very different sort of gaming experience.

What’s inside:

A full supervillain team. (It wouldn’t be nearly as cool an adventure if there wasn’t a full supervillain team in it)

Villains opposing other villains!

A vast array of map locations that are easily reusable in any modern setting!

The groundwork for an easy to expand evil secret organization!

A sinister master mind!

A lesser master mind!

An agent-level mastermind!

Absolutely no mimes (or Master Mimes) whatsoever!

If you help us reach our goal, we may be able to get you stretch goals such as cardboard heroes of the characters or larger maps!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/blackwyrm/imaginary-friends

Making Good Use of Space

Well, what the heck is this about? Why would I sit here and wax poetic about making good use of space? Well, it’s because honestly, a lot of GM’s don’t, and I’m going to be pretty serious about this.

On maps, people ignore basic stuff. When I publish an adventure, I make sure there are bathrooms, entrances, exits, and the like. I devote an excessive amount of time and space to these basic things. I know it sounds dumb, but far too often, people don’t really pay attention to these things.

In a fantasy game, make sure your castle has the requisite number of entrances and exits, including a couple of secret ones.

In a modern game, make sure that your maps obey fire safety codes. These things sound nuts, but they add an additional layer of realism without really costing you anything.

There are a number of reasons for this:

1) Villains need to escape to further the story. Nothing is worse than having to have a guy teleport away from your good guys just because he forgot to put in a back door. A lot of players hate villains who teleport away more than they hate eating foods they don’t like. A little detail like this will allow the players to say “Curses, he got away,” but does it in a way that’s far more mundane.

2) Entrance as well as exit. If someone can go out through the in door, they can go in through the out door.

3) Common Sense. This protects you from snarky players. If all of this is already built in, it’s not on you if your players ignore it, it’s on them, and they’ll be like…dang, I didn’t think of that.

Next time, we’ll talk about making use of terrain. That should be fun too.

Master Villains and How To Make One

What makes a good master villain? Well, there are a lot of things that make a good master villain. However, building a master villain for a game is a lot different from building a master villain for an actual comic book or fantasy story. But we’ll talk about that, too. There are always additional factors that one should be thinking about. We’re going to talk about these factors now.

1) Motivation: Why does the master villain want to do what he does? A master villain who wants to take over the world is going to have a truly grand motivation, whereas a master villain who wants to maintain control of his criminal organization is going to have a completely different one. Design the personality of your master villain carefully, or you may find that as your game/story suddenly goes off the rails as a situation which at first seems fairly simple has become impossible to get through. Plan ahead. Some people are proactive rather than reactive. If you can’t find a single reason why a villain would spare a character’s life, then that character should likely die. Sometimes, the motivation will hook into the final list point sometimes, it won’t.

2) Method: How does the master villain do what he does? Enough thought often doesn’t go into this. Many is the plan that has been shortcut by players/heroes by the simple expedient of reaching for a power cord and unplugging the infandibulator of the week. Some plans take a really long time to come to fruition. Some plans take only a few days. Be careful when describing the time frame of the plan of the bad guy. Sometimes if there aren’t enough delays that the villain puts in the path of the hero, the ending can be brief, anti-climactic, or worse, stupid. In some genres, you’ll actually want to do this. (Noir, Urban Fantasy, or Post-Apocalyptic Stories) In a superhero game, this really is not that useful.

3) Minions: What are the minions/allies that the master villain has at her disposal? Enough thought often doesn’t go into this either. Minions should be as entertaining to face as the master villain, especially since they’ll fight the minions a whole lot more than they’ll fight the master villain. Some minions should be more fearsome than others. One of my master villains has a lackey named Vorpality. When she shows up, the whole game changes, because everyone knows that if she beats you badly enough, your head will come off at the end of the fight. Keep things clever. Don’t have the bad guy use the same minions all the time. Vorpality loses her impact if she shows up every time the PC’s face off against the bad guy, unless you are the most powerful bunch of guys in the world. Minions should make sense, too.

4) Anti-Motive: WHAT? What the heck is he talking about? I have coined this term to talk about something that no one really talks about when designing bad guys, and all boils down to these two questions:

A) What is the thing that keeps the master villain from taking over the world from his living room? While battling the villain in his hidden lair is a time honored classic, who says the heroes are going to be there when he takes over the world from it? One of my villains (Vorpality’s boss) has to prove that superheroes are culturally and sociologically useless, ensuring that there’s going to be a big fight at the end of the story. If you’re building up to a huge battle, and everyone’s all pumped for it, you can’t let the adrenaline lapse. But more importantly, it justifies the characters presence in the story, especially if the villain would already have won by some other means except for the fact that the villain can’t just snap his fingers and win. This can be just about anything, from the above psychological desire to his love for one specific person who he can’t hurt, to the fact that his abilities only work every so often.

B) What if the villain doesn’t make mistakes? The classic assumption that villains are GOING to be stupid and make mistakes may work great, but it only goes so far. See above for characters being proactive as to why this can be a problem. Now combine this with part A above, and you’ll see why this is so important. Villains don’t necessarily have to have a classic “achilles heel” to be cool, but if your villain is smart, or ridiculously smart, he will have to be played and/or written according to his intelligence level. The smarter the bad guy, the more you as a writer or game designer are going to have to ask question A above.

Thanks for reading, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Halloweenies…and how to scare them!

Well, for most gamers, usually October is when people dress up in the geekiest costumes possible and have geeky halloween parties.

However, for some of us, Halloween is a day best served up with a side of dice rolling and a good scary game, like Call of Cthulhu, Chill, or Vampire the Masquerade. Well, I have good news. Any game can be a scary game if you know how to use the mechanics right. I’m going to take some examples out of various genres, and we’ll give budding gamemasters some hints on ‘running creepy.’

1) Don’t be afraid to use the classic tools of the trade. You can make any adventure scary with just a few descriptive additions. Have a door creak, and the wind slam a window shut. Add a gratuitious noise that turns out to be a chipmunk. After a few chipmunks, owls, and other creatures, then hit them with the bad guy when their guard is down.

2) Don’t be afraid to have scary bad guys do things that make no sense at first. If they’re hunting Serial Killer guy, a guy who ties up women and carves them up is boring and done to death. But the guy who collects his victims fingerprints and makes graffiti art out of them in spray paint will make them have a “What the BLEEP?” moment. Everything you can do to freeze-frame the confusion of the players will make the scary scenario more enjoyable for everyone.

3)The innocuously placed, yet mostly irrelevant object is another classic. Don’t be afraid to use random ornaments for atmosphere. A bloody glove! Better yet, have the blood be from some creature that isn’t even remotely close to the place where the scenario is located!

At this point, it should be obvious that one of the keys to running a successful creepy/scary story is keeping the players off balance. Don’t be afraid to have that creepy old gardener show up at a key moment while they’re chasing the bad guy through one of his many-pre-planned escape routes.

4) The seemingly inexplicable: How does the scary bad guy DO that? It is important to stories like this, at least when running most roleplaying games, that you keep this information as secret from the players as possible. Knowledge is half the battle, and finding that knowledge should be difficult, but not impossible. Finding the secret lab where the monster was created, identifying the one thing that can end the monster’s reign of terror, uncovering the taxman’s scheme to defraud your dog, all this stuff can be pretty scary.

As soon as this is explained, the adventure becomes much less scary. It’s important that the heroes have enough information to fix the problem. It’s not important for them to have granular understanding of why.

5) Real Mysticism vs. Scooby Doo Mysticism: Every Scooby-Doo episode ends with the same thing. “I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for those lousy kids, and that !@#$!!!! dog!” Both of these can be equally scary PROVIDED THAT, AS GM, you play fair with the players. There should be a reasonable expectation that most scary stories will have mystic scary bad guys, especially in superhero or fantasy games. Why use a fake werewolf in a game where werewolves are real? What reason would someone have to create a fake vampire threat?

That in and of itself can make a great adventure, especially if the villain has real motivation to create the threat, such as no vampires are currently active, but the time of their rising is near, so people are being killed in a traditional vampiric manner to create fear and raise awareness. Woe be to the hero who thinks he’s dealt with the threat only to discover that REAL Vampires show up a few months later, much to the chagrin of those who thought the problem was solved.

6) The twist: A good twist can help a scary story out a lot. Maybe that serial killer isn’t as one dimensional as the heroes first thought. Maybe he’s just a proxy, and the real killer is just a manipulator who uses the killer as his tool. Maybe the werewolf is really controlled by an evil business executive who has something that allows him to do so.

One of the most frightening and terrifying things about good horror stories is this: Men are the worst monsters. They will do things that no actual “Monster” would willingly do, and they do things that make people sit up and say “I can’t believe a human being did that!”

This is why Scooby Doo works, why it will always work, and why people will believe that it can always work. It is because the human mind contains the potential for both great good, but also incredible evil. And that’s why the scariest stories and roleplaying adventures sometimes have no monsters at all.

Just people.

Fight for the Right to be Mighty!

So, let’s talk about experience points. Experience points are how characters in most games gain stuff and become more powerful. In level based games, characters gain experience points, level up, and become mightier. You have to fight a lot. But in general, characters advance at the same rate.

However…in non-level based systems, this can be something of a quandary. Many of these systems are based on points, and points can be manipulated, numbers crunched, and characters effectively min-maxed.

In long-running games, this can be something of a problem. Should your new character really be as powerful as a guy who’s been around for years? If he is, why is he this way, and what are the consequences of being this way? Usually, the GM will have to do a lot of work to explain this. And he should. Otherwise, things like this tend to smack of unfairness and make people walk away from the gaming table. I’ve been on the player side of this a lot, where I felt that the other player should have to earn the right to be that awesome.

And I’m right. Because other people feel that way too, in the same situation. But if it’s the same situation, I had an epiphany. This really isn’t about gaming at all.

What this is really about has nothing to do with the power level of characters, the things that go on in the game, or any of that other stuff that involves mechanics, numbers, or dice.

What this is about is respect. Respect for your fellow human beings. Respect for your GM, who created the world that you play in. Respect for your fellow players and your fellow man, all of whom deserve equal time. And when your friend is playing a ridiculously mighty character and your character appears to be about six tenths of his, you don’t just feel angry, you also feel betrayed. Even if you don’t realize that’s what you’re feeling, a part of that is always there.

This is where being a good person comes in. Talk to the player before you talk to the GM, if possible. Say “Listen, I feel this isn’t fair. This is what you do, and this is where everyone else is, or where I am.” If that doesn’t work, then go to your GM. See if you can work something out with him or her.

We need to be good people more often, and be less selfish. Not just in our character choices, but in the way we design them.

How we roll (And Jump, and leap, and run)

Today, we’re going to talk about movement. What? Why do we need to talk about movement in games? Most game systems have movement systems built in, right? And we declare our actions and take them, right?

Well, that’s part of the problem to which I am going to offer a solution. As gamemasters, and as players, we don’t often take the time to visualize our combat zones enough.

Most people want their characters to be able to do the same kinds of things they do in the movies, and that’s all well, and good, and awesome, except that sometimes the limits of what the system will let us do don’t allow us to do those things.

But they do. And this is where the rub comes in. Often, the problem comes in where we simply don’t read the rules for movement and combat closely enough. Many modern games focus so much on the character generation side, that we forget that there are rules and a combat system that may allow us to get what we want by changing the way that we move, inserting skill rolls into the way we move, or changing our mode of movement altogether. Rather than visualize a single action, try to imagine your character’s actions as a fluid whole, the way he or she moves, thinks, fights, and engages situations.

On the surface, this sounds nuts, right? Well, I’ve learned that faced with a battlemap and a detailed set of combat rules, many players and GMs stop thinking about this completely. I love complex tactical battlemaps with difficult terrain and all that other stuff. Combats like this can be fun. BUT…

Sometimes, doing this every time inhibits creativity rather than inspires it. This is all well and good most of the time, but there are two things that may help this out a bit.

1) Every so often, run a combat mapless. There really isn’t a reason for this other than allowing people to visualize what their characters are doing. Actions have to be better described, and the GM will have to get a better idea of what distances are like in his head.

2) Listen to how players are describing their actions. If you think their descriptions are confusing, help them out a bit. Don’t be afraid to ask them if this is really what they mean. They may not mean what you heard.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Hopefully, these styles will eventually merge. Then you’ll get the descriptions you want and the battlemaps players think they need.

This may not always be the way to go, but remember that visualizing how your character moves is the first step to a smoother combat.

April Fool That I Am…

This post is dreadfully late, as perhaps it should be, as a modified form of April Fool’s Joke. April Fool, the Blog is late, what a surprise!

Well, needless to say, it’s April, so I’m going to talk about funny adventures. Some people LOVE funny adventures. Some people HATE them. This can be made even more painful by the fact that people don’t always have the same sense of humor.

So, let’s talk about clowns, circuses, pies in the face, slapstick humor and the geist of comedy.

Funny adventures are different from other adventures for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the problem of getting people to laugh. Laughter may heal a number of things, but sometimes, people don’t laugh at things you think are funny, or you don’t laugh at things your players think are hilarious.

These are the things you need to do to have a successful humorous adventure:

1) Look at all your players. Will any of them have no fun with this adventure? If that’s the case, sometimes you can end around it while the player sits there sullenly. But some players don’t enjoy light-hearted adventures at all. This can be a big problem, especially if the other players do. Talk about this with the player if you can. Explain this adventure might not be for him or her. (Yes, girls can be as emo and creepy as guys, and have no sense of humor. Don’t believe it can’t happen.) Often, this might mean that your next adventure isn’t just dark, it’s going to be extremely dark, and have unpleasant consequences as a trade-off. Sometimes, characters will NEED a trade-off after a particularly dark adventure, too. For some people, though, this doesn’t happen.

2) Make sure that the plot doesn’t have unintentional serious consequences. Nothing’s more frustrating to the players than discovering that The Evil Doctor Clown’s master plan to cover the city in pea soup advanced The Hand of Entropy’s evil scheme to cover the world in darkness. They may be laughing now, but… This CAN work as long as your players are good natured and don’t mind the knife in the kidneys when the truth comes out, as long as the Hand of Entropy had some sort of finger in Doctor Clown’s banana cream pie.

3) Make sure that the adventure doesn’t step on any senses of humor in the group. If people hate Bollywood, don’t have them fight Pandit Mukharam, Master Maharishi.

4) Don’t excessively humiliate the PC’s without expecting the villain to get humiliated in return. These adventures aren’t meant to have serious opposition. If they do, something has gone grossly wrong.

5) Don’t be afraid to have your villain’s motivation be stupid, or useless, or easily solved by a common piece of technology the villain is unaware of. I once ran an adventure in an online setting where the villain’s main motivation was to escape from the human who was abusing him, and all he wanted was a malted! The adventure involved magic wands that shot fish at people! It was silly. People liked it. They laughed. They gave the chaos god a malted. It was a good time.

That’s more or less the basics of humorous adventures. But whatever you do with your humorous adventure, don’t forget to laugh.

Fortune Telling and the roleplaying geist

Rumor has it that Julius Caesar was killed after being warned by a fortune teller to “beware the ides of March.”

Fortune Telling is important in role playing games. It’s a source of plot hooks, adventures, trouble, and great stories. Some people have issues with stories about prophecies and destiny, because if everything doesn’t fall out exactly the way it’s destined to be, then the fortune teller is lousy or someone dropped the ball. In order to keep fortune tellers interesting, you have to keep them different. They can’t all be creepy little old ladies in gypsy garb who have a crystal ball and say mysterious stuff.

Here are a few ways to spice up your prophecies.

1) The heroes know the fortune teller exists, unfortunately, the fortune teller exists in a remote or weird location, forcing the heroes to go get the fortune teller and acquire the necessary information. Variants of this include the kidnapped fortune teller, the fortune teller as romantic interest (I’ll read your fortune if you take me on a date), and the fortune teller as villain (My prophecy says you die, ha ha ha).

2) Competing fortune tellers with different styles. This can be a constant source of irritation if the fortune tellers are well-meaning, or an entire adventure/series of adventures if one or both fortune tellers are evil. This can be a colossal mess, as the heroes constantly hear phrases like “I knew this would happen. Might I perhaps pay you another two thousand gold pieces to counter the latest scheme of Radizoc the Half-Blind?” Either one can get the heroes killed, but hey, that’s the adventuring life.

3) The prophecy the fortune teller issues can’t be fulfilled unless the heroes do something antithetical to their very nature. (In a superhero game, a hero retires unexpectedly in order to produce a result, in a fantasy game, a heroic champion of good murders a baby in cold blood.) While it’s easy to have an NPC do this and get the ball rolling on your prophecy, consider other means by which a prophecy can function.

4) The fortune teller is dreadfully wrong. All the time. Or the fortune teller neglects key details which lead to arguments. “Why didn’t you tell me about the Bridge of Spikes and Swords patrolled by giant snapping turtles?”/”Would you have gone if I told you about the Bridge of Spikes and Swords patrolled by giant snapping turtles?”/”No.”/”Well, you see then? I was right?” A maniacal cackle (And possibly a beating) ensue.

5) The fortune teller is right most of the time, but when they’re wrong, it’s a humdinger. “I can’t believe my oracle sphere had a dead fly on it. You should be six hundred miles to the southwest.”/”!@#$$$!!!!!”

6) The fortune teller comes in a form that doesn’t fit the standard variety. The fortune teller is a book that tells the PC’s what to do and where to go, or the fortune teller is a small blind child that the heroes have to carry everywhere and protect. The fortune teller is a monkey, and the interpreter of the monkey reads his flung poo. Dare to be different. Well, maybe not with the last one. That’s kind of gross.

Love and the Single Superhero

Well, it’s February and Valentines Day approaches, so let’s get the show on the road with some talk about super-powered romance.

What’s possible? Well, this is a situation that has often bedevilled many gamemasters. In some cases, where the super powered characters are relatively normal as far as their physical being, sometimes that isn’t always the case.

What if a player decides his character wants to romance someone who wasn’t meant to be romanced? This is always a tricky situation, and it’s possible that the road to hell is paved with good intentions here. A hero could very easily lose his life or his secret identity to the highest bidder, etc, if the player isn’t particularly careful.

The key to keeping the game fun is going to depend on the player. If the player tends to dash headlong into situations, he or she may benefit from the three cautionary gamemaster rules. “Are you sure?”, “Are you really sure?”, and “Are you really, really sure?” Now, in most romantic situations, this means the GM sounds just like your dad, for a lot of us, and the player won’t listen at all, but nonetheless, your gamemastering obligation is fulfilled.

However, this is not the greatest danger that faces the superhero. The greatest romantic danger facing the superhero is a lack of suitable mates. I say this because, for the most part, the one thing that comics actually got right over the last twenty years is that with notable exceptions, superheroes have a really tough time dating and/or marrying someone who understands their lifestyle and intentions. (Barring One More Day, where Spidey threw the love of his life under the bus.)

In general, superheroes, like other groups of individuals, tend to date people who are most like themselves. Every so often you will get a hero who dates a normal (Superman, for instance), but this is fraught with dangers and a great deal of trouble. “Help, Help, Superman! Help!” Many heroes like the idea of constantly rescuing their girlfriends, but just as many think it gets old quick. For those who don’t, it’s a great idea to threaten their dependents, that’s what being a superhero is all about, If you can’t rescue your girlfriend from Doctor Squidd, then she will be in the clutches of his evil tentacles forever!

For the most part, superheroes in the comic books today have a tendency to date other superbeings. This is covered under two general parts.

1) Attracted to a superhero: Well, this isn’t too bad, except for the fact that their enemies are now your enemies and their problems are now your problems. This only goes so far, however. Example (From a really awesome Dave Cockrum graphic novel called “The Futurians.”) Avatar and Sunswift have been in love for 3000 years. However, Sunswift lives in the sun and is constantly on fire. As far as tragic romances go, this one pretty much takes the cake.

In a well-run game, this can get complicated. In the comics, Nightwing only has to fight the Gordanians when he’s dating Starfire. But really, that’s where the problems start. Just because Nightwing STOPS dating Starfire doesn’t mean the Gordanians have stopped watching him, plotting against him, and trying to beat him up. In a superhero game, characters can’t have writers fiat. They should choose their superpowered mate as wisely as a non-superpowered one.

2) Attracted to a supervillain: This road, oddly, is far less of a way to dusty death in the comics than it should be. For one thing, most supervillains are EVIL. As much as we all love redemption stories and believe in the healing power of love, if a villain gets his enlarged cranium from his rapidly increasing brain tumor (Thus expanding his mental powers), he may not be the best person for Intellectua to date. That alien princess who is promised to Warlord Zarkronn still should, if Zarkronn is the same species, be far more attracted to Zarkronn than the PC. A good number of these stories should end in tragedy, a fatality, or the epiphany that this romance was doomed before it ever got started. A good team of superheroes will attempt to talk the hero out of dating this powerful menace. Redemption is not an illusion often enough. Plus, it can always go the other way. “Why don’t you see my side, Captain Justice? You could rule the world with me! But you spurn me in the name of these naive fools who do not understand my greatness! Last night was great, but there is no way I’m letting you interfere with my plans. Now I’ll place you in this deathtrap, and if you die, I’ll cry, but that’s the price to pay for ruling the Earth!”

Romance should always be a complication in superhero games, be it the problems of fighting the supervillain and standing up your girlfriend, or dating Xorana, the Princess of the Underworld! Enjoy all of it. It’s what it’s there for.

Super Medicine: Part Two, or Help Me, Doctor, I Don’t Feel So Good…

Super weaknesses like Kryptonite aren’t just for the superhero. They can be used in places other than combat to encourage roleplaying and add new life to your superhero game. When a character has a super weakness, the first thing that a gamemaster needs to realize is that for a superbeing, this is a condition that is no different from heart arrythmia or diabetes. While the cure for the so-called disease may be impossible or nigh-unattainable, a trip to the doctor may net the hero more information about himself than he previously thought possible.

1) The Doctor NPC. This can be a useful tool for the GM if the hero regularly sees a doctor. If the hero has super powers and a secret identity, he might wish to avoid regular medical checkups. If he has a separate doctor for his super identity, his doctor may know more about him than he does. This can lead to the doctor becoming a supervillain, the doctor’s records being stolen by the characters enemies, etc. But the longer the hero avoids the doctor, the more this might concern his fellow supers.

2) The PC Doctor: This can be useful too, especially if the characters DON’T know each other’s identities. Properly roleplayed, this could generate a lot of laughs around a table.

3) The Injured Hero: When the characters take one of these super-weakness characters to a physician, one should be sure to inform the physician of the super weakness of the character. A long time ago, in a distant game that I never played, my friend’s character was brutally crippled by a lethal supervillain attack. Unable to determine the cause of his affliction, they went to a nearby superteam for help. The hero was vulnerable to anti-matter, and the NPC doctor, designed before the character was ever built….?

Anti-Mistress. That’s right. Needless to say, the character died on the operating table. And no one knew why.

Doctors are a part of the superhero gameworld. When a hero is injured, sometimes it is necessary to bring him to a doctor who’s never seen his like before. “Well, let me open him up with this industrial laser!” This may ilicit struggles with the doctor over what the best way to deal with the super-affliction, be it weakness or an engineered super-disease.

When a character develops a new illness, somehow related to his powers, that trip to the doctor can be more than just a reason for points on a character sheet or some sort of weakness. It can also be the gateway to a fascinating world of roleplaying…