United Worlds Starship Polaris

The urge to run space opera game in the vein of the original Star Trek has bitten me again. I’m aiming for something you might call Forbidden Planet: The Series. Or Starship Polaris, if you’ve been following United Worlds’ indie sci-fi project. Big ships, responsibility to your crew, and adventure around every corner.

This time, I’m looking at Cortex+, Cam Banks and Margaret Weis Productions’ excellent family of cinematic and television-styled roleplaying games.

Specifically, I’m looking at Action Roleplaying, the engine behind Leverage. Action Roleplaying provides a key element for this genre: characters with distinct specialties who are, nonetheless, capable in a wide variety of fields.

The Hacker’s Guide (released to KS backers) is an invaluable resource here, providing lots of tools for customizing the various families of Cortex+ games.

Let’s look at the decisions we have to make.

Traits

The core of humanistic space opera are Values. I’m picking Ambition, Compassion, Curiousity, and Duty. (One might find alien crews with different Values, but these make a good core.) These will get customized Value statements for each character, as in Smallville and its broader version Dramatic Roleplaying.

Then we need action traits. The first category are Attributes. I’m stressing mental and social traits: Bravado, Ingenuity, Fellowship, and Perception.

Second, we need the areas our crew are trained in. I’m using the various departments of starship operations: Medicine, Science, Security, and Operations. With a range of attached Specialties, these can cover the needs of a crew far from home and all alone in the night.

Finally, there are Distinctions — those traits that can cut both ways.

Character Creation

Character creation is done using a lifepath — a vastly simplified version of Cortex’s Pathways system. I’ll publish that in more detail later. Essentially, you pick an Origin and move through three stages of your career, creating an action-ready crewmember.

Here’s a sample lifepath chart, with most of the instructions.

Next: Tuning the Action and Conflict systems

The camera pans across a row of coffins draped in American flags. A scrap of metal-plating lies at the end of the field. It reads “Monitor 0-X.”

GRUFF MILITARY VOICE: “We’re gathered here today to pay tribute to the crew of the Monitor. Lost in our first contact with as-yet-unidentified extra-terrestrial forces. One hundred and one souls…”

Fade to black.

Fade in on a fighter plane streaking across a blue sky.

MALE COMMS VOICE: “Destiny, this is Cloudbase One. Please report.”

FEMALE COMMS VOICE (DESTINY): “Cloudbase One, there’s something up here. Over.”

MALE COMMS VOICE: “We’re not reading anything, Destiny. Please clarify.”

POV, Destiny’s cockpit. We see something decelerating through Earth’s atmosphere, red hot.

MALE COMMS VOICE: “Destiny, please clarify.”

The huge, black shape is cooling. It’s a space-ready battleship.

We hear that BWOMP noise from all the other trailers.

DESTINY: “My God…”

It turns, and gunports open on the side.

BWOMP.

DESTINY: “It’s Monitor!”

The guns open fire. Screen and audio dissolve in a burst of static.

Cut to grainy, jumpy footage of a firefight. British soldiers are getting cut down left and right. As each one falls, his duplicate appears on the other side.

We see one officer, in a red uniform, dart across the battlefield, firing at the doppelgangers. He pulls two of his men behind some convenient sandbags…

…and is shot in the back. The camera zooms slowly out as a dark stain spreads across his uniform.

Our view is obscured by dust, and we fade to…

… a grizzled colonel in a white uniform facing a conference table full of shadowy figures. He’s the voice from the beginning of the trailer.

COLONEL: “There’s no other possibility. Everything they destroy…”

Cut to a plane exploding under a hail of missile fire.

COLONEL: “…everyone they kill…”

Cut to the face of the man in the red uniform. Pale, dead, in the mud.

COLONEL: “…falls under their complete control.”

Cut to the battlefield from earlier, the doppelganger British soldiers marching across it. There’s just a hint of static waver, making them look like ghosts.

COLONEL: “Except for him.”

Cut back to the face of the man in the red uniform. His eyes snap open. For a moment, there’s a weird blue glow in them.

Music increases by a bunch of beats per minute.

TITLE: “THIS SUMMER”

The man in the red uniform, now cleaned up walking forward and shooting at a group of doppelgangers. One of them throws a grenade. Slow motion as it explodes, ripping the man apart…

TITLE: “FATE WILL MAKE A MAN”

…then slow motion as his body _rewinds_, coming back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

TITLE: “INDESTRUCTIBLE”

Back to the conference table, an older gentleman speaks up.

OLDER GENTLEMAN: “But can we trust him?”

Music continues to increase tempo.

Cut back to the man in the red uniform, bashing heads and kicking out knees on a group of doppelgangers.

Close up on the Colonel.

COLONEL: “If we can’t…”

Destiny’s plane again, flying over what appears to be Martian terrain. We see a closeup on her hitting a button, and the man, now in a red spacesuit, tumbles out of the plane, falling, until his parachute opens.

Back to the Colonel.

COLONEL: “…we might as well join them.”

We see the man, still in his spacesuit, now surrounded by a maze of gears and hovering metal plates, roughly orbiting him. A synthetic voice speaks to him.

VOICE: “Do you even know who you are?”

Close on the man’s helmet, reflecting back the gears and plates.

MAN: “Service number J-58196.”

He takes off a his helmet, with a hiss of escaping air.

We see his face. Handsome. Healed. Eyes an unnatural glowing blue.

MAN: “Captain Scarlet.”

TITLE: “CAPTAIN SCARLET”

TITLE: “06-03-2013”

That laughter is a trait of the better sort of heroes. Fritz Leiber wrote of Fafhrd and the Mouser:

There is something in the inmost core of you… [s]omething that lets you laugh in a way that only the Elder Gods ever laughed. Something that makes you see a kind of jest in horror and disillusionment and death.

Howard described Conan as:

…black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth.

More famously, Raphael Sabatini wrote:

He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad.

I have a suspicion Leiber was referencing Sabatini. In part, it’s the friction between romance and cynicism.

But I wonder if that laughter is something that could go into the mechanics. The jovial at the morbid, the gigantic mirths that follow the gigantic melancholies. The echoing laughter of the Elder Gods.

What would you call that trait?

I haven’t gotten Fantasy Heartbreaker back off the ground yet, but I’ve been pretty busy with gaming stuff. I’ve taken another day job in video games, and I’ve been hard at work on tabletop stuff, mainly for White Wolf/Onyx Path.

The next big Vampire book is Blood and Smoke: The Strix Chronicle. This is a massive book combining a new setting with a top-to-bottom overhaul of the Requiem rules. The rules are being playtested openly. Here are the dev blogs I’ve posted:

• Year in Review
• Auspex
• Animalism/Dominate
• Majesty
• Protean

Diehard GameFAN has also named Blood Sorcery their 2012 sourcebook of the year. We’re in good company, alongside Shadows of Esteren and Cthulhu By Gaslight, among others.

I can honestly say without hesitation that Blood Sorcery is the best Vampire: The Requiem book I’ve read in a very long time (perhaps even since the inception of the line) and it really gives Storytellers and players alike some truly terrific ideas to play with. Theban and Cruac players rejoice, as White Wolf has given you the best sourcebook of 2012.

–Diehard GameFAN

Thanks, DGF!

Cavaliers of Mars is coming along, and we’re looking at a really interesting online project as part of that. More news soon, hopefully.

Hope your new year’s looking as promising as mine!

All kinds of people are geeks. And geeks geek out about all kinds of geekery.

Women can be geeks. Many are. How they look or how they dress is irrelevant to their identity of being a geek. Being a geek isn’t something that comes with a card. You don’t stick a hot copper wire in a petri dish of blood to determine if a person really one, like in The Thing. Being a geek is pretty much saying you’re one.

You don’t have geek ratings, or scores. Geekery is not contained to a percentage.

Geekery is not contained to being dude or lady.

Folks of any color, creed or religion can be geeks.

Your sexual preference has no bearing on being a geek.

He goes on a bit further. This is an affirming message, and I’m glad to see it being broadcast by someone like Chuck, who’s awesome and has a significant audience.

What have I been up to?

I took a job with ZeniMax and moved to Baltimore. Great team, great project… but my partner couldn’t make the move, so I’m headed back to Georgia. Between that and some other personal life stuff, I’m pretty happy.

We announced the Onyx Path and the new White Wolf schedule. That’s a huge deal for me. There aren’t many things more important to me professionally than Vampire, and all of the effort involved in getting it together was worth it. We’ve also got Cavaliers of Mars on deck for release in 2013.

We started open development on Sexmurder, the most exciting Requiem project since The Danse Macabre. My team’s been trucking along, doing a lot of great work that you’ll see over the next few months.

We released the quick start for Cavaliers of Mars, to a lot of downloads and positive attention. That project’s still on its way, and I’ll be back to it just as soon as I’ve got the next Vampire book and the new Demon out to writers.

I got a Requiem tattoo.

I’ve barely updated the blog at all. I’m going to make an effort to address that in the future. I couldn’t talk much about what I was up to at ZeniMax, and I frankly didn’t have much free time.

So, busy year. Good year. Time to get back to work.

Blood Sorcery: Sacraments & Blasphemies

Blood Sorcery: Sacraments & Blasphemies for Vampire: The Requiem is out now. You get an improv ritual system for Theban Sorcery and Cruac inspired by Mage and Witchfinder, plus a new class of sacrifice-based charms called Threnodies that let you add a little bit of black magic to any character. We round that out with some cool new antagonists, like the Sons of Phobos and the Empty Liars.

I’ve written more about this over at the White Wolf blogs.

Cavaliers of Mars, art by Chris Huth

At Gen Con, White Wolf creative director Richard Thomas has announced his new venture, Onyx Path Publishing. Onyx Path has a really cool lineup of roleplaying games, including:

• Cavaliers of Mars, my game of swashbuckling Martian adventure.
• Both Worlds of Darkness and Exalted, under license from CCP.
• Trinity and Scion, which Onyx Path now owns.

The Onyx Path web site will go live soon.

I’ve been waiting a long time for this news to go public. I literally jumped for joy.

…Demon.

• Writing rules for the Cavaliers of Mars core book.
• Getting Ben “Bailywolf” Baugh up to speed for his work on Cavaliers.
• Just this weekend, tinkering with rules for a Mass Effect-ish space opera game.