Some Close, Some Really Off

(Tempted to ‘Edit’ My Original Doc, But Who Would I Be Lying To? Just Me.)

Sometime after the Cobra Kai Season 6 trailer hit, I decided to write down my predictions for the final fates of the main characters. Now that it’s long past when Season 6 ended, I shall, with my usual alacrity, review them and see what I got right, what I got wrong, and my thoughts on why I was wrong.

One caveat: In reviewing my original documents, I noticed spelling errors and typos. I have corrected those. I didn’t do anything to tighten up or improve the text beyond that. What you see is what I wrote, modulus the above.

My original intro was:

OK, before it airs and proves me wrong, here’s some mostly-serious predictions. These are based on dramatic/narrative structure, including my best guesses on which tropes the writers will subvert and which they will lean into. They are NOT based on frame-by-frame analysis of a blurry 3-second video filmed through a fence surrounding the studio, as 99% of YouTube videos are.

Prediction 1:  Sekai Taikai Winner

I’ve Been Told You Need Pictures Even If They Don’t Really Add Anything, So Here Is one

My original prediction:

Miguel wins the Sekai Tekai: Why? It’s ultimately his story, from S1E1. While there’s a lot of other characters with arcs, development, and importance, Miguel’s story is the spine of the franchise. He also needs a clean tournament win: He fought dirty in the first All-Valley in the show, and was injured during the second one. Hawk fought in the Sekai Taikai qualifiers. It’s his time to get a clean, pure win — very possibly against Robby, as neither of their two major non-tournament fights were definitive.

Result: Correct, mostly. Granted, this one was as hard as predicting Trump will lie. Unless the entire series was a deconstructionist rug-pull, there was really no way it could not end with Miguel as the champion. It’s important to remember, though, that the appeal of most fiction isn’t in wondering if the hero will win or lose in the final chapter; it’s in seeing how they get there. What obstacles will they face? How will they overcome them? The journey is the point.

(This is something AI techbros seem to not grasp about literature, or any form of storytelling. Having an AI tell you “Beep boop beep, Hamlet dies, beep beep” doesn’t mean you’ve “read Hamlet”. They view art as “something to claim you know about to impress people”, and have no conception of doing something entirely for the personal pleasure of it, whether anyone else on the planet cares, or not. For all practical purposes, I could write this article in Word and store it on a local drive and it would have only slightly fewer readers. But I don’t care. I maintain this blog for me, because it is a thing that gives me pleasure, of a slightly different kind than just writing essays 100% for myself. I know this sounds kind of contradictory, but you’ll find a lot of creators, if asked, say much the same thing: They create for themselves, and if other people like it, cool, if not, so it goes. As usual, I digress.)

Got Wrong: Well, not knowing about the Korean Cobra Kai, or the Iron Dragons, I obviously didn’t know who the final fight would be against. As it turns out, Robbie and Miguel did have a tourney-style battle (for boys champion), and Robby won that one. In some AU where Axel’s attack of conscience happened earlier, Robby may well have been the final champion — but the rules of storytelling, as I said two paragraphs ago, really wouldn’t permit it. Although Robby’s story started back in S1 and has been crucial to the plot, he is, ultimately, not one of the deuteragonists. They are Miguel and Johnny. Everyone else, to a greater or lesser extent, supports their paired stories. 

(This is technically a definitive 1v1 Robby vs. Miguel, and it’s a tournament match (points, rules), but my prediction was purely about the Sekai Tekai. Also, it’s just a really good fight, which shows how much the actors, their stunt doubles, and fight choreographers progressed since S1. In true Cobra Kai fashion, they went all-in on the S6 fights, and it shows.)

Prediction 2:  Tory And Sam

My original prediction: 

Tory beats Sam – fairly: Why? Again, she deserves it. She needs an untainted victory. From a character perspective, winning isn’t as important to Sam on a personal level. She fights hard, but she has much more in her life than just her ability to compete. For Tory, it’s everything that defines her.

Result: Pretty much wrong on all counts, except one: That Tory needed, and got, an untainted victory (and against someone better than Sam). Again, I will plead not knowing about the Iron Dragons and that the series would be introducing a large slate of new characters.

That said, another essay I will write someday is the problem with Sam, in that, compared to the other three of the main four teen characters, karate isn’t that important to her. Remove karate, and what does she have left? Well, almost everything. She’s a smart, attractive, popular young woman with a loving family that supports her materially and emotionally. In my opinion, that’s why her story sort of just dribbles off at the end. However, as the theoretical essay will detail, the writers didn’t have a lot of choices once the series got going.

Prediction 3: Fates

My Original Prediction:

Robby and Johnny end the series running Cobra Kai (or Eagle Fang, or Miyagi-Fang, or whatever) as a father/son business: Why? Robby more than any other of the teen (well, 20-somethings playing teens) characters, has shown a talent and aptitude for teaching… just like his dad. The relationship between Robby and Kenny heavily parallels that of Johnny and Miguel, despite notably less of an age gap. It’s still a mentor/mentee relationship. He also successfully taught Miyagi-Do defenses to Cobra Kai students. Both he and Johnny come to realize that teaching/mentoring is the one thing they can do well and that gives them a purpose.

Result: Close? Johnny does end running a successful Cobra Kai dojo, applying the lessons he’s learned without abandoning his essential Johnny-ness. Robby is, presumably, going to be doing tournaments and promotions for several years, and then very likely will end up partnering with his father.

 Prediction 4: Miguel’s Dad

My Original Prediction:

Johnny and Miguel’s biological father have it out: Why? First, otherwise, the first 2 episodes of S5 were basically a waste of time, and I think the writers are better than that. Hector’s involvement with an MMA “fight club” makes a connection to the Sekai Taikai feasible, at least by the accepted standards of “plausibility” in the series. I see a confrontation of some sort, and per the show’s implicit rules, any interpersonal conflict is settled by a big karate fight. There are other ways this meeting may happen: Johnny tries to formally adopt Miguel, or marry Carmen, and this leads to legal paperwork alerting Hector that Miguel is his biological son.

Result: To quote John McLaughlin, “WRONG!” And this in turn leads back to the reason why I made this prediction, and I stand by that reasoning: Without any follow-up, those two episodes of S5 were basically filler in a show that has too few episodes to permit filler. Miguel had no long-running interest in his biological father, Carmen mentioned him maybe once, and that was it until the end of S4. That Johnny was effectively Miguel’s dad has been clear since the start, and, indeed, the emotional closeness they obviously shared, and Robby’s jealousy of it, was a big driver of a lot of the plot through the middle of S5. Perhaps the writers planned to do more with it — I sometimes wonder if Miguel’s dad originally had the role Sensei Wolf did, until the writers decided that having Miguel’s adoptive (in all but law) dad fighting his bio dad would just be too on-the-nose, even for Cobra Kai.

It’s obvious the showrunners had some plan, even if it was abstract, for Miguel’s dad. They put that gun on the mantelpiece early. The goal of giving Miguel an early bonding point with Johnny — both had missing dads — could just as easily been met if they’d established his father died. They also laid out he was a dangerous person who didn’t know he had a son, promising any number of possible plot developments that would inevitably end with Johnny kicking him in the face. It may simply be things did not work out that way as the show progressed. It happens. (Anyone remember Tory had a younger brother?)

I’ll be honest, I tend to do that, too. I will sometimes mention some things early in a book that I don’t return to. I think of it as arranging interactive spots on a battlemat for the big set-piece fight. If the PCs want to do something with the electrical cables overhead, I’ve statted them out. If they ignore them, well, they’re ignored. If you don’t know for sure where the story might go, having some spare guns cluttering the mantelpiece is fine, esp. in series TV where you can’t go back to the beginning and do edits.

Prediction 5: Kreese

Here Is Another One. I Wanted To Find One Captioned “…Mercy” But Couldn’t And Adding A Caption Felt Like Work

My Original Prediction: 

Kreese: I dunno. They may handwave the whole “committed several real crimes while in jail on false charges”, or he may be a fugitive who somehow made it to Korea, where it seems his scenes in the trailer are taking place. I think he’s fallen off the redemption wagon; he had a shot w/Tory but it feels like he gave up on finding anything better within himself. He may die for real, or fade back into obscurity. Really not sure where his story goes from here. Revenge on Silver has to be at the top of his “to do” list, though.

Result: I’m gonna call this one “correct enough”. I am slightly disappointed, but not very surprised, that they did indeed totally handwave Kreese’s crimes while in jail. Being falsely imprisoned is bad, yes. It certainly can justify many of Kreese’s actions morally — a fairly rare occurrence! — but not legally. It’s difficult to imagine a plea bargain where the state agrees to drop numerous assault and jailbreak charges in exchange for Kreese not suing, esp. since their calculus would include him being an old man without the resources to hire a good lawyer. 

However, as I’ve said elsewhere, there’s only so many minutes in an episode, so many episodes in a season. A lot of things can be assumed to have happened off-screen. (Such as Daniel becoming close enough to Robby’s mother to convince her to go into rehab.) So if anyone wants to write some fanwank explaining how Kreese got a highly-improbable deal, go for it!

Other than that, I think I got it correct, even if I sort of loaded the dice by making my “prediction” wishy-washy (“he might do this, he might do that”). (Side note: Always watch out for that trick. It’s pretty common to list several alternatives when discussing any future events, and then, amplifying only the one that turned out to be correct and memory-holing the rest. People who do that often are most likely being intentionally manipulative and should not be trusted.) Kreese had a kind of redemption, in that he finally, finally, owned up, in his own mind, to what he’d done, sincerely apologized to Johnny (vs. the many fake apologies from S2), and recognized that true redemption would require that he destroy Silver, the monster he made in his own image. (I discuss this more in another article.)

And In Conclusion

I humbly submit I did pretty well, but I must also note that because Cobra Kai leans very heavily into a lot of storytelling tropes, and five out of six seasons had happened, figuring out the end in vague terms did not exactly require a degree in Literature (but I do have one — technically, in English Writing). In a murder mystery, the killer will be caught. In a RomCom, the bickering pair will fall in love. And in a live-action shonen, the primary protagonists will level up their powers to defeat the ultimate final bosses. To reiterate what I said in the beginning, what matters in all of them is how you get to the ending, not what it will be. That is where the storytelling is.

Because In The 1970s, Everyone Was Trying To Find The Next Big Genre

As It Turns Out, Prohibition Gangs Weren’t It

TSR Tried Twice (Somehow Calling The 2nd Edition 3rd Edition)

Very Few RPGs, In Any Era, Have Two Columns Of Text In Small Type On The Cover

So anyway, I was in the den, trying to figure out what the cats were staring at in the back yard, and noticed I had “Gangster” from FGU in the pile of “Boxed Games I Moved Upstairs For Some Reason”. I have some unexpected time off, so, I figured, why not? The great thing about having a blog no one reads is you never have to worry about whether or not an article topic is of interest to your audience, because you don’t have one! Freedom!

As the headers say, the late 70s/early 80s were a time when a lot of publishers were trying to find a new genre they could dominate the way D&D dominated fantasy and Traveller dominated sci-fi and… well, those were the only genres sufficiently popular that there were enough competing game systems that you could meaningfully discuss which one was “dominant” and which one wore the gimp mask. (It will turn out the third genre was Sexy Angsty Vampires, but that didn’t happen until the early 1990s.)

FGU, or Fantasy Games Unlimited, had a “throw everything against the wall” philosophy, with games about samurai, superheroes, pul… Oh, wait. Superheroes! That was the other genre where there were competing games! FGU’s own “Villains and Vigilantes” was the one with the whips and stiletto heels for a while, until Champions game along in 1981. I digress. Where was I? Mmmm, whips and stiletto heels… no, no, FGU’s panoply of games! Pulp, pirates, post-apocalypse (loved Aftermath), fencing (the kind with swords, not the kind with pawn shops), and some I’m sure I’ve forgotten. Among this vast range was “Gangster”, which, if you recall all the way back to the heading, is the topic of this post, to the extent any post I write has a “topic” vs. “an arbitrary starting point for a stream of consciousness ramble”.

Gangsta’s Paradise

Clean Lines, No Excess Verbiage, Plenty of White Space

I hope people appreciate I looked up the exact title and changed my original heading of “Gangster Paradise” to the correct form you see now. It’s this kind of precise attention to detail you expect from at least one sentence per blog post, written when the adderall is kicking in juuuusssst right. The rest is a confused, incoherent, ramble.

Which we shall begin…. now!

The boxed set has two rulebooks, the core one being 50 pages, and the “Patrol Guide And Law of the Land” book being 16 pages. The box also contains a d20, d12, and d4 (the d12 and d4 are the classic “Holmes Basic” ultra-mushy plastic, the D20 a typical late-70s “high impact”), a thick yellow stock paper sheet of charts (de rigueur in FGU boxed games), and a character sheet that is a masterpiece of minimalism. Lastly, there is a small portion of the wrapper from a Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain Bar, which I suspect was not a standard inclusion. How it got into a game box I do not recall opening shall remain a mystery for the ages.

Although the cover image is of a 1920s car, and the fact that when most people think of “gangsters” (at least in the 1970s), they think of Al Capone, “A Piece Of The Action“, and so on, the game covers a timeframe from 1900 to the present (1979). As you might guess, the 50 pages of rules cover this ~75 year timespan with the precision and detail of a book report written an hour before class, based entirely on the book’s front cover.

Damn It Feels Good To Be Roll Up A Gangster

“Obviously, to play GANGSTER! one must create a character whose actions he will control during the game”, state the rules. Well, yes! Obviously! It’s astounding it even needed to be said! If I said this involves rolling 3d6 and summing them multiple times to produce a set of somewhat familiar (Intelligence, Dexterity, Agility, Strength, Personality, Loyalty, and Luck) attributes, would you be surprised? (Well, you might be, as FGU often had rather baroque systems. But not in this case. You are given the option of rolling them in order, rolling one at a time and assigning it to an attribute, or rolling all seven and then assigning them. There are no options for shifting the bell curve, such as the common “4d6 take the 3 highest” method, though there’s no real reason you couldn’t.

I’m just gonna do 3d6 in order. (Note that if all I had was the box set I purchased, I’d have to go find some six-siders, as they were not included. It was assumed, at the time, everyone owned either Monopoly or Risk. I think it was required by law.)

Intelligence: 10
Dexterity: 12
Agility: 9
Strength:10
Personality:11
Loyalty:13
Luck:5

The “Luck” of 5 seems to have retroactively affected my rolls. 

Reading on a bit, the game encourages non-random assignment (ah, well), and notes that unlike in many RPGs, “Gangster!” is competitive, implying players are expected to have a mix of criminals and law enforcement among them, with the GM, presumably, acting as arbiter for their conflicts. As interesting as this sounds in theory, my experience is that such “PVP” style games rarely end well. If you want to do that, play a 1-1 minis combat game (as it happens, I am reading the “Necromunda” 1e rules now, for funsies), with a referee conducting an extended campaign to create a cohesive story linking the battles. 

But alea iacta est, or more correctly, the three dice have been cast, and so, we go on.

A Very Particular Set of Skills

After you roll your attributes, and decide if you will be a cop or a robber, then you see if you qualify for any skills! (Note that attributes are not defined until after you roll them, either.)

I qualify for… no skills. Not a one. The closest I came is Wheelman, but my Agility is too low. 

Well, those are the criminal skills. Maybe I qualify for law enforcement skills?

I can start automatically with 1d3+2 skills (assuming I meet the qualifications). I roll well, so I can have 5 skills… if I have the prerequisites for that many. (I should note that even if I’d chosen to arrange my attributes, my overall low scores would still keep me out of most skills.)

I can take Level 1 Ballistics Expert, Level 1 Drug Expert, Level 1 Arson Expert, and… uh… that’s it. 

Those skills allow the player to gain “clues” from the GM if they roll below their Intelligence on a d20, with higher ranks in the skills offering a great big -1 to the roll. Except Arson. Arson only has one rank, which grants the -1 “bonus”, but any LEO can gain clues about arson by rolling under their Int. I’m not sure why this wasn’t a universal system for skills (anyone can try, each rank grants a “bonus”). For that matter, the “rank 2” of the skills requires higher Intelligence to begin with, so they already have a de facto ‘edge’.

(For no reason, I should note that Ballistics Expert requires an Agility of 7. So you don’t butterfingers the shell casings? But that’s covered by Dexterity. Agility is for whole-body motions, like recovering from a fall or doing gymnastics. Shrug. Forget it, Jake. It’s Old School.)

Gangster! has a level system for LEOs, of course, divided into several categories with slightly differing rates of advancement. It’s interesting to note that being a Sheriff requires only 450 xp (and there’s only 4 ranks in the Sheriff’s Department), while being Chief Inspector of a Large City PD requires 5000 xp! 450xp would only get you to Sergeant in the PD. I think the game designer had beef with their local sheriff.

Lethal Weapons

I am just capable of making Sharpshooter (the second level of pistol skill). I can also use a shotgun, but do not qualify for a bonus. Or… penalty? I think this must be a roll low system, as higher ranks of skill with a weapon give you a larger (smaller) negative modifer. That is, my Sharpshooter skill gives me a -3, while Marksman, the first level of skill, provides a -1.

But now I’m looking at the Close Combat rules, which definitely have a “higher is better” feel to them. However, reading on to the gun combat rules (the actual mechanics are in the middle of a paragraph in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door reading ‘Beware Of The Leopard’), it is, indeed, a “roll under” system. You must roll less than your Dex on a D20. 

Let me emphasize this for the people who think “old school” games meant simple and clean rules. They. Fucking. Did. Not. The essence of real Old School is totally incoherent and contradictory subsystems in wildly varying levels of detail based on whatever weird obsessions the designers had, so you could end up with six pages of rules (in very small type) for shoeing horses and have “Naval Combat” be a paragraph reading “Count up all the ships, add 1d6 to each total, higher number wins. Add +1 to the side with the most horses on board. +2 if the horses are shoeless. Sexy, sexy, naked hooves. Mmmm… hooves.” 

As an actual example from this game, there is no consistent pattern to how skills work. “Interrogation” has a half page (and when you remember the whole game is only 50 pages, that’s a lot) of custom mechanics and modifiers, while, as noted above, Ballistics, Drugs, and Arson together occupy about the same amount of space and just have a “roll under your Intelligence” mechanic. 

So far, Intelligence is the prerequisite for every LEO skill. This is funny when you remember a Connecticut PD once went to court to justify discriminating against candidates who scored too well on an IQ test.

The “Negotiation” skill is not available until the 1970s. I thought you might want to know.

All About The Benjamins

The header is deceptive. There are no Benjamins. Rather, there’s an abstract system for acquiring gear.

Following 10 pages or so of rules about combat, cover, explosives, and so on, we get to… sort of… equipment. If a gang wants something, the GM rolls a D20, which in turn is cross indexed to determine the percentage of the requested items available (as an example, if you want five guns, and the result, after all the many modifiers, is 80, you get 80% of what you want, or 4 guns), or if the request is for a single item (such as a speedboat), the percent chance of it being available. One chart, two mechanics!

(There’s a lot of other folderol involved, all of which makes it seem like Gangster! really did have roots in a 1:1 miniature campaign game before becoming an RPG. This is not entirely surprising. The late 70s were a time of rapid evolution between wargames and role-playing games, and there were quite a few dimetrodons¹ running around, if you get my drift.)

Cops just get what they want, based on the timeframe. The charts are only for gangsters. 

Crime Pays If You Roll Well

There is then a section on the history of law enforcement and how different US regions organize their forces, followed by a several pages of rules on running various criminal enterprises (and the occasional criminal Defiant or Voyager), from prostitution to gambling to bootlegging. Oddly, nothing about protection rackets, which were and are a very common way to make money for organized crime. 

The second booklet is mostly facts about police, including things like the contents of an emergency service truck. In the long long ago, in the before time, this was actually useful to have. There’s also simplified summaries of US law regarding major crimes.

And, uh, that’s it. I’d actually finished chargen without realizing it. You don’t seem to make a lot of choices, except to be a gangster or a lawman, and, if you use the optional methods for assigning attributes, where to assign them.

Given how important those attributes are, I would have written the rules like this:
a)No “roll in order” option, period.
b)Presented skills first, so you could see what attributes mattered.
c)Then you roll and assign stats.

But, hey, it was 1979. Game design was not science, nor barely art, but more a kind of alchemy, where people just mixed random things together and hoped they didn’t explode.

1 “They’re kind of mammals but they look like reptiles
But I bet that difference never bothered them”

Why (Spoiler’s) Death Matters

In Which I Discuss “Themes” and “Motifs” And Other Literary Things

As Regards A Series Where People Say “Karate Gang War” Unironically

So, if you’ve got this far (my headers are longer than many people’s entire social media posts), you are, I presume, uncaring about spoilers, for any number of reasons, so I’ll stop being cute. (Peanut Gallery: You were never cute!) It’s Kwon. Kwon dies. And if you’re a Cobra Kai fan, you knew this, and if you’re not, you’ll be asking “Who is Kwon?”

Kwon was introduced in Season 6 episode 3, and didn’t make it past Season 6 Episode 10 (out of 15). With most of the main characters having had their interpersonal story arcs wound up, there needed to some new villains, and he was one of them, representing Cobra Kai (original Korean branch), as Cobra Kai (US branch) had effectively dissolved, its students (and those of Eagle Fang) joining Miyagi-Do under dual (and dueling) senseis Larusso and Lawrence, and if you’re not a CK fan and are scratching your head at how convoluted this all seems, well, welcome to the glorious madness that is Cobra Kai, a live-action shonen anime, complete with training arcs, power-ups, and most major conflicts being settled by a big fight.

Anyway, it can seem, at first glance, that Kwon’s death in S10 was essentially just for shock value and as a cheap way to raise the stakes. He wasn’t quite a nameless redshirt (red gi?), he had some development in the limited time he was on-screen, but “the character introduced early in the season and positioned as a major player suddenly dies mid-season so that we can show it’s dangerous but not kill any of the main cast” is a pretty well-worn trope.

But while Kwon may have served that trope, he didn’t exist only to serve it.

PS: If you think the above segment lacks context, here’s the full, amazing, 13-minute “everyone against everyone” brawl. Please note, it actually doesn’t add a lot more context. If you know who everyone is and precisely why they’re all kicking the hell out of each other and why different people seem to switch sides or form odd alliances, this is a truly epic seen, a worthy successor to the Season 2 and Season 3 ending donnybrooks. 

PS: Today I learned “donnybrook”, meaning “chaotic brawl”, comes from Ireland, because of course it does!

Cobra Kai, Nostalgia, and Redemption

On one level, Cobra Kai is an “appeal to nostalgia” show. It is full of times that old farts watching will go “Hey, it’s that guy! Who did that thing!”. The producers took this part seriously: Every time a character, major or minor, from the original trilogy appeared, they got the same performer to play them. They scrupulously recreated Mr. Miyagi’s home (albeit adding some parts not seen in the original, as needed). They even got the same yellow car from the original movies. (Not the same make/model. The same, actual, physical car! Granted, Ralph Macchio owned it, which made it a bit easier, but still…)

The soundtrack is 80s rock, and although it’s 2018ish in the series, kids still go to malls and the same amusement park from Karate Kid is still doing banger business. There are constant callbacks and references, from dialog to props. And yet…

The actual message beneath the surface glitter of nostalgia is, to quote another great 80s film, “It’s a trap!” Longing for a past when things were better leaves you unable to live in the present, making things worse. Johnny, when the series starts, is a friendless borderline alcoholic in a shitty studio apartment with a dead-end job and nothing to give him pleasure except drifting into memories of when he was young, hot, and popular.

Ultimately, his story isn’t about him abandoning his past. It’s about him accepting that while his past shaped who he is, it doesn’t determine who he can be. He learns to use his past, rather than wallow in it. It takes a while, because is a multi-season drama, not a TV movie, and there’s backsliding, and reversals and long, dark, tea-times (well, Coors-times) of the soul, but he finally learns to integrate those parts of his past that worked and let go those which didn’t.

Not Just Johnny…

We also see this in the other former “villains”, at least, those who were peers to Danial: Chozen and Mike Barnes. We don’t get to see their own struggles, all the steps from 1-dimensional teen villain existing to get kicked by Daniel Larusso to responsible adults, but we do see that it happened. We meet them not as physically older but mentally identical adults, but as people who have matured mentally as well. For all three of the teen villains, we see a meaningful lesson: Who you were are as a teen doesn’t define who you must become as an adult. 

(As an aside, Yuji Okumoto, who plays Chozen, is really good at comedy! Simply having a scriptwriter give you funny lines isn’t enough. An actor needs excellent timing as well as perfect physical and vocal expressions to deliver the lines, and Yuji, as Chozen, delivers. Er. As it were.)

And here’s where we get to Kwon.

Kwon Never Got The Chance

The death of a teenager is self-evidently tragic, even if they’re a jerk, which Kwon was. He was scripted entirely in the mold of teen-aged Johnny, Chozen, and Mike Barnes, as an arrogant kung-fu guy who was good enough at fighting to be a significant opponent but whose ultimate destiny was to get his ass handed to him in the final-act cathartic battle.

Kwon did, indeed, face a curb-stomp beating by Robbie, but that wasn’t the end of his story. His death, an accident entirely of his own making, was.

In so doing, it was a direct rug-pull of one of the main Cobra Kai themes. Who Kwon was as a teen was who he was going to become, forever, because he never got the chance to make choices, either to be better or double down on being evil (as Kreese and Silver did). The series doesn’t promise that redemption is automatic — indeed, it shows it’s hard work, it’s easy to backslide, and some never even try — but there’s a constant undercurrent that it’s possible, if you choose it. Kwon being denied this chance not just a tragedy on the face of it, it’s a tragedy per the theme of the series, the loss of an opportunity to be better, whether or not it would be taken.

Breaking Kreese

Kreese is shown as continually failing his best, chosen, students, and always blaming them, not himself. That’s part of why he never had a real redemption arc; he pretended to have learned lessons or reformed solely to manipulate others, in Johnny’s case directly exploiting Johnny’s own goals of self-improvement by seeming to echo them. When Johnny defends Kreese to the rest of his former gang, saying “people can change”, he’s as much trying to boost his own confidence that he can as he is supporting Kreese’s claim. (The incredulity of the others is well-earned.)

Kwon’s death seems to be what finally broke him. Kwon was set up in the early part of S6 as Kreese’s last, best, hope, as Kreese finally accepted Johnny was never going to trust him again. Kwon had everything Kreese wanted in a student: Exceptional talent, exceptional rage, and a willingness to obey orders that granted him moral license to give in to his darkest impulses. All that unrestrained rage, and taking Kreese’s “no mercy” doctrine to the limit, refusing to accept defeat even when it was well-earned by superior skill, as in the final fight with Robbie, led to Kwon trying something really stupid and dying for it, entirely due to his own overconfidence. 

At long last accepting responsibility for himself and what he’d done gave Kreese his last shot at redemption, and it had to be the last. He had reached the end of his story, and he chose to burn out (literally) rather than fade away.

(He also managed to complete Johnny’s arc, giving Johnny the emotional catharsis he needed to fully and completely move on, in a scene that had absolutely no right to hit as hard as it did.) 

So In Conclusion…

Just like Cobra Kai manages to simultaneously be an insane, often-ridiculous, karate soap opera/live action shonen and a series with some things to say about mentorship, redemption, generational cycles of abuse, and the contextuality of power and bullying, Kwon’s death manages to be both a fairly stock trope and a meaningful, important, echo of Cobra Kai’s overarching themes.

Another Random Spell

Because I Need To Keep This Alive

I edited 6K words this morning — go, me! — and decided to reward myself by finally posting something here after three months, but I wasn’t sure what. So I decided to go for another random spell! As noted previously, I randomly generated a set of names, and am going through them arbitrarily. The list as it stands:

Aura of Binding
Chimeric Insanity
Lesser Cataclysm of Constructs
Dawning Pierce
Noxious Rhythm
Trap of the Theif (sic)
Missile Burst
Condensed Bullet
Bloody Torch

As somewhat given away by the title, today’s episode is “Bloody Torch”. This is not what someone shouts when their light source, purchased from Honest Tom’s House Of Torches, burns out after two minutes rather than the promised two hours. No, this is… hmm. What is it?

Well, let’s just go with a literal interpretation. 

First, from the Alternate Universe OD&D Supplement VI, Keoland, where it appeared for Magic-Users and Clerics

1st Level
Bloody Torch: The caster loses 1 hit point, which cannot be magically healed, and a torch they’re holding casts a baleful red light for 1d6 hours. It doesn’t need fuel and produces no heat. Only one bloody torch can exist per caster at a time. The caster can dim the light to a 1″ radius or extend it up 6″, or temporarily turn it off completely.

It’s longer-lasting and more flexible than a light spell of the same era, but caster hit points are a damn scarce resource. In order to truly capture the spirit of Old School, I do not specify if the ‘clock is running’ when the torch is ‘turned off’. (It is, as will be explained in a ‘Sage Advice’ column in The Dragon, kicking off a six-month long flame war on the letters pages.)

Bloody Torch (Necromantic, Alteration,)
Level: 1
Range: Touch
Duration: 1-6 Hours
Area of Effect: See Below
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: 2 segments
Saving Throw: None
To cast this spell, the magic-user or cleric must hold a wooden torch or a lantern in one hand. When cast, the caster takes 1 point of damage which cannot be healed by any means other than natural rest. The torch/lantern will emit a baleful red glow for the spell’s duration. This light will cover any radius the caster desires, from 1″ to 6″, or it can be snuffed completely, though the spell’s duration continues to run even when it is shedding no light. The torch or lantern produces no heat (thus, it does not affect infravision, and cannot ignite oil or anything else). It consumes no fuel. Anyone can hold the torch/lantern as long as they are within 12″ off the caster. It cannot be extinguished by normal wind, rain, or dampness, though it will not function if submerged in water (this ends the spell). No other bloody torch can be made during the spell’s duration; if it is cast again, the first one goes out permanently. The material component is a sharpened sliver of bone.

Basically the same effect, though more detailed. Note that it explicitly does not affect infravision, a common problem in 1e games. (Again, this is much like the standard light spell). The debate with this edition is if a gust of wind spell is “normal wind”. (Yes; magic animates the air, but the wind is not magical. However, similar effects originating from creatures from the Elemental Plane of Air are magical wind.)

Pathfinder 2e

At last, we come to the Pathfinder 2 version! I am feeling extraordinarily lazy right now, so, I am just going to paste a graphic. 

For Pathfinder, we make duration less random, and offer what I think is a nifty upgrade — the ability to create light that others, notably enemies, cannot see! That’s worth a little blood loss, don’t you think? I also chose to directly address more edge conditions — what if you can’t bleed?

Based on overall spell power in Pathfinder 2e, you might want to make this a Cantrip, and change the ‘Heightened’ effect to 2nd level.

Because That Was a Movie About Mutants, And This Is a Game About…

Oh, Never Mind

This Is A Skeleton In A Pilgrim Hat. Your Argument Is Invalid.

So, spent most of the morning not writing this, but, instead, trying to find a GUI editor for WordPress I liked and which worked. I failed. I just want something that gives me fine-grained control over text, like I have in Word. If I want to have a box or a sidebar, I should be able to do it easily. In particular, I want to be able to use non-standard fonts and see them in the editor. Sigh.

Anyway, back to BaB, which does not mean “Basic Attack Bonus”, any more than “B&B” means “Bunnies & Burrows” or “BnB” means “Bed ‘n’ Breakfast”. Now, if you recall from last time, I was going to use a class from the “Radioactive Boogaloo” supplement, and I think there should be a brief aside here. The “Noun 2: Adjective Boogaloo” snowclone comes from a movie that came out when I was in college, which was so long ago that we didn’t have FORTRAN, just THREETRAN. Hah! So it’s weird to me it survived, especially since the movie, as I recall, wasn’t exceptionally popular or culturally significant. Anyway, where was I? 

Ah, yes. I am going to try to make him a Geiger, which, you will recall, I describe as “a Paladin, but for mutants”. Indeed, the rules make this clear: 

A radioactive form of Paladin whose powers are closely related to the mutating flow of the Borderlands. [sic]Either stoic guardians from the toxic steam or conduits of it’s[sic] dark power.

I shall stick to my belief that the typos and sentence fragments are a conscious effort to maintain the old-school style, despite evidence (as discussed in the first part) to the contrary.

I had the following stats, generated by 4d6 keep 3: 10, 14,12,11,18,16, 8.

So, let’s dole them out:

STR: 16
DEX:  12
CON: 16 (14, +2 from Saurian race)
WIS: 11
INT: 9 (8, +1 from Saurian race)
CHA: 18
RAD: 12

Seems pretty good. As a Paladin sub-class, I need to choose an alignment (which can be anything, none of this ‘only Lawful Good’ stuff!), then I get a Devotion score, which I guess starts at zero? Doing things to further my cause raises it; harming my cause lowers it. If it’s over 10, I get a blessing, like “Devotee may prepare 1 of their spells each day without risk of miscast. Additionally Paladins may choose 1 weapon and gain weapon mastery in that weapon”. If it’s low, I suffer a curse (such as “Devotee loses bonuses to Saving Throws from class”, and if it falls below -10, I lose my palad… Geigerhood. There’s a pretty decent range of both blessings and curses, for each of the five cardinal alignments. (Nothing on bluebird or raven alignments, sorry.)

Unlike most old-school games, B&B has no apparent limits on class and race. I can be a mushroom Geiger if I want! But I kind of like Saurians. They have no attribute penalties and a +20 to “psychic potential”. (Oh, yeah, borrowing from Eldritch Wizardry and AD&D 1e, any character has a (low) chance of having “wild” psionic powers. Due to my charisma, it would be 6%, plus the saurian bonus makes it 26%… might as well roll for that!

(Spends five minutes hunting for a set of percentiles that match. I will not make an important roll using mismatched dice!)

(Gets a 72, Sigh.)

So much for that. Stupid matching dice. 

Getting back to my alignment, I guess Chaotic Good works. This affects how my class abilities manifest. All Geigers, regardless of alignment, get “radioactive hands”, but if you’re good, this allows you to grant 2 points of radiation resistance per day, per level. (If you’re evil, you can inflict radiation damage instead.) It also allows me to suppress mutations, which can be used, I imagine, to aid an ally with a negative mutation, or hinder a foe with a positive one. I am also immune to all diseases (not including lycanthropy/vampirism), and reduce incoming radiation damage by one. Lastly, I have an aura which grants radiation resistance to all near me. At low levels, it’s probably below their natural value, but by 4th level+, everyone’s gonna want to “hug the Geiger”. 

Possibly worth noting: The Law/Chaos axis seems less relevant to a Geiger than the Good/Evil axis. 

As an optional rule, I can turn mutants as Paladins turn undead. Per the rules, this ability was popular w/players but the author was less than impressed. I like that it’s thrown out there as a “thing you can do”.

Sign, Sign, Everywhere A Sign

I now roll a birthsign. This is a D20 to determine the sign, and a d2 to determine if it’s positive or negative. That last bit is kind of vague. You don’t get a penalty instead of a bonus, rather, a ‘2’ means a ‘harsher’ version of the sign. Precisely what that means seems to be up to the GM. In any event, I rolled a 2 on the D20, giving me “Crown”, which means “authority, earthly, power”, and gives a +1 to melee damage. I also rolled a 1 on a d2, so I experience the… uh… “not harsh” version. Go figure.

(This trope of ‘random ability that may or may not be relevant to your class’ was fairly common in early TTRPGs, often linked to some kind of pseudo-astrology, either based on real-world traditions or on the serial-numbers-filed-off cosmology of the game setting. Having an aptitude for something useless, or an arbitrary penalty, was often deemed ‘realistic’.)

The Odds of Mods

Modifiers, that is. Roll bonuses. Plusses and minuses.

Ability scores tended to be less impactful in Old School, and Barrows & Borderlands is no exception, except where it is. It uses a “roll a d20 under your ability score” system as a default “the rules don’t cover it” mechanic. Well, that’s one of them. Another is a “Roll under the ability on 3d6”, with additional dice for harder tasks. I’ve used both, and the “roll dice under” tends to be more reliable with a higher score, while “roll a D20” is better with a lower score. For example, there’s a 70% (roughly) chance of rolling 12 or less on 3d6, but only a 60% chance on a D20. Conversely, there’s a 25% chance of rolling 8 or less on 3d6, but a 40% chance on a D20.

You might well ask, “Given such disparities of probability, why offer both as options? Doesn’t that make it hard to assign a meaningful difficulty to a task in the rules?” And the answer is “Forget it, Jake. It’s Old School.” Besides, there’s few, if any, times where the rules say “This is a Dexterity check”, and even fewer where they give a specific difficulty or modifier. Cases where this does happen usually have their own bespoke mechanics.

(Please note that some things, such as thief skills, use a single d6, with a ‘roll under’ mechanic. If you have a score of ‘2’ in ‘Pick Pockets’, you succeed on a roll of 2 or less. If your score is 6, you must roll 2d6 and you fail if both die show a 6. It’s implied, but not explicit, someone lacking those skills may not attempt them. Otherwise, you’re much more likely to succeed using either of the alternative resolution systems, at least at low levels. I’m not sure why this system was used instead of the more ‘traditional’ percentile system (as per the OD&D Greyhawk supplement which introduced thieves, AD&D 1e, and AD&D 2e.)

Multiple incompatible resolution systems in the same general gameplay space (‘skill use’) is a hallmark of Old School, so, let’s just go with it. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and who wants to have to deal with hobgoblins?)

Back On Track…

“And Behind Door Number One…”

I was supposed to be talking about modifiers due to ability scores, not about task resolution systems. Those are, to restate, generally minor. Let’s see what I have:

First, a 10% bonus to experience for a Prime Requisite of 15-18. In the earliest days of D&D, this was almost all attributes were used for. In original “brown box”, Strength affected only encumbrance, not to-hit or damage; Dexterity gave a +1 to missile weapons if >12 and a -1 if <8, and a high Constitution meant you would “survive adversity” and possibly get a +1 per hit die. This was expanded somewhat in Greyhawk, and Barrows & Borderlands uses something close to that.

My Strength of 16 gives me a +1 to hit and damage. (Please note that there’s not a firm formula; a 17 also gives a +1 to hit, but a +2 to damage!)

Dexterity also gives, in theory, a bonus to hit and to damage, but a 12 gives bupkis. Granting a damage bonus for a high Dexterity was not a common mechanic. Dex can also give a bonus, or penalty, to breath weapon saves and Armor Class.

A 16 Con gives me +1 HP/hit die, and a +1 on saves against Radiation. Might as well roll now: I got a 6, for a total of 7.

Intelligence only affects languages. I can learn no extra languages.

Wisdom of between 7 and 16 is basically the same, making it an excellent dump stat for any class where it’s not a Prime Requisite. If it were 17+, I’d have a +1 save against sorcery. 

My highest score, a Charisma of 18, gives me a +2 on reaction rolls, which I never recall ever seeing used in Actual Play, and I can have up to 8 retainers. However, if the GM is using the task resolution system above, and I’m sufficiently canny, I can try to find an excuse to use Charisma to get around a lot of problems. (As there are no formal diplomacy/lie/intimidate rules, the effectiveness of this depends on how the GM is feeling at any moment.)

Cash and Carrion

We’re almost done, so, equipment time! I get 3-18 silver pieces…. I roll a perfectly average 10. I also start with a weapon of my choice. The table is a little confusing… a lot of weapons have damage listed as 1-8(1-10). Based on the specific weapons, I am guessing the second number is 2-handed damage… and a little more checking reveals, that, yes, if the weapon name is followed by (*), it means “can do more damage if wielded 2-handed”. There are a lot of little marks next to weapons.

If You Think This Is Bad, You Should See The D&D Cyclopedia Weapon Modifiers

It’s a good thing I get a weapon of my choice for free, because, damn… they’re expensive! As I am going for the whole “Paladin of the Wastes” vibe, I will take a bastard sword, normally 25sp, which does 1d8 or 2d6.  

My 10 remaining SP will buy… pretty much nothing. I can spend all of it on the weakest armor possible, a padded doublet. I can’t afford a backup weapon. I can buy some “adventuring” gear, such as a bedroll (1sp), backpack (4sp) rope (3sp), and a tinderbox (2sp), and that’s that. This is… not merely old school, but some sort of primal edlritch school! A typical 1st level “Brown Box” character had a lot more cash to start with. Well, it’s the apocalypse, I suppose. The economy isn’t that great.

That’s pretty much it for character creation. But not the end for this series! There’s enough high weirdness that it deserves an article covering it… including the fact I can identify some unusual sources it is pulling from. Hint: There’s a spell that summons a flying saucer.

Post Apocalyptic Gonzo

The Good Kind of OSR?

Brown Woodgrain Box With Cover Illustration On A Piece Of Paper Glued On

OK, first, the usual “Why I Ain’t Updated Lately” drivel. Because I’ve been a little depressed, a little distracted, and a lot lazy. Stuck and frustrated as I near the ending of a book twice as long as it was supposed to be, and unable to think of an ending, but lacking in even the energy and motivation needed to instead work on this, or another project, but instead, just spent hours not writing but also not allowing myself to do anything else. 

It looks like I might be back to writing tomorrow, but I have a few hours now, and I am slowly crawling out of my mental hole, so, I felt I should write something before the end of the year. 

So, let’s look at Bunnies and Barrows… no, Barrows and Borderlands. I saw an ad for this and decided to take the plunge. I’m glad I did. 

All In On Nostalgia

A lot of neo-old-school games go for a more modern “look and feel”, with full-color art, fancy binding, and so on. Barrows and Borderlands goes all-in on the stylistic quirks of the oldest games. The images on the top and side of the box are on paper, glued down, not printed on the box itself. Inside are four light-tan booklets, each with a black-and-white image on the cover and similar art inside. The booklets have a small bit of color in the “Barrows and Borderlands” logo on each, just like another game’s set of Little Brown Books. Very nice attention to detail.

The overall production quality is actually a step up from the original — the paper seems better quality, the binding stronger, the covers a tad thicker. This is subjective; I didn’t measure. My 0e “white box” rules are from the late 70s, and thus, have aged; perhaps in 50 years, these will be in the same shape. I won’t know, I’ll be dead.

Art is definitely not by This Guy I Know; perhaps he was unavailable. It’s a mix of original art and public domain; no AI, thank all the gods. (I would not waste time reviewing this if it used AI, period.) They also have about twice as many pages as their inspiration.

Ah, but what matters is… what’s on those pages?

Words. And some pictures. What a weird question. Sheesh.

Words. And Some Pictures

Hmm.

I was going to start off with “and they’re really in the Old School Spirit by having plenty of grammatical errors!”, but, here’s the thing… the PDF I have (purchased alongside the physical books) differs from those books! They’re clearly updating and improving the digital presentation, which is a Good Thing. It ruins some of my jokes, of course. Sigh.

Print: “Such as Malores, it’s[sic] elite legions of soldiers…”
PDF: “Such as Malores with its elite legions of soldiers…”

But, hey, both are still broken, as this text follows “A sampling of histories and lores exist within this book which suggest Nations
and Powers exist outside the Confines of the Borderlands. Such as[sic]…” . It should be “…of the Borderlands, such as…”. 

“Hang on, hang on. You’re criticizing that, after starting a sentence with a conjunction?”
“Yes. Yes, I am. Wanna make something of it?”
“No, no, carry on. Hypocrisy is fine as long as you lampshade it.”

Glad we’ve got that settled. Where was I?

Oh, Yeah, What’s It About?

Barrows. And Borderlands. You Really Ask Strange Questions.

B&B (which, to me, means “Bunnies and Burrows“) is one of the few “OSR” games to invoke the more insane, gonzo, side of 1970s gaming, and fully embraces the wild mix of themes and genres seen in the actual play of the era, vs. the dull, ‘kobolds and copper pieces’ attitude of many others. It is not a retro-clone, it claims, and it’s correct in that. This is what I wish more OSR games were: The kind of thing someone might have made as an early D&D competitor or supplement “for use with all role playing games”, vs “95% White Box/Holmes Basic + a minor rules tweak to satisfy the author’s pet bugaboo they’ve had with D&D since their half-orc cleric/thief got killed by a pit trap”.

Fine, Lizard, we get it. You like it. But what is it?

Sorta Gamma World + 16th Century + Standard D&D?

That’s a pretty odd mix.

Yes. Precisely.

The setting is vague. There’s enough details given to use the author’s world, if you wish: A flat Earth surrounded by a void, the result of a corporation meddling with a reality-warping device left behind by prehistoric saurians. There’s mention of four major civilizations, and between them, the eponymous Borderlands, filled with ruined cities and mutant monsters. All of this can be ignored; the rules mention “Dynaco” a lot, but it’s not deeply tied in to mechanics. There’s a very strong atmosphere of making this your own. The places mentioned are deliberately generic and archetypal: Oppressive theocracy, city ruled by sorcerer-king, swashbuckling pirate city, etc. 

Terms of Endearment

Rather nicely, before we jump into character creation, we get a list of key terms. There’s the 6… no, 7 attributes (the standard 6, plus “Radiation Resist”), THACO, Saving Throw, and so on. There is also “Skills”, defined as a chance on a d6 to do something, using a roll-low mechanic. (If your skill is 2, you succeed on a roll of 1-2 on a d6.) To be really old school, there ought to be some weird exceptions to this, like “surprised on a 3 or less on a d8”, or whatever. Perhaps there are! Let’s find out!

THACO or Not THACO, That Is The Question: As with a lot of old-school-style games, the default system uses THAC0 (which is actually a 2e innovation; if you look at the combat charts for 1e, you’ll see there’s a weird quirk where a range of Armor Classes are all hit only on a 20, and then begin to be hit by lower numbers. THAC0 requires each AC be hit by a number 1 lower/higher, depending on direction). However, you can, if you wish, reverse it, and use ascending AC and give a +1 to hit whenever THAC0 would otherwise go down. (Yeah, there’s a “to hit Armor Class 0” column in one of the 1e DMG appendices, but it doesn’t actually make a lot of sense if you look at the monster to-hit tables. Some creatures have a split value, too, which isn’t explained that I can see. But enough digressions.) (Hah! Never enough!)

Races

There are a lot more here than the usual pseudo-Tolkien set, though most of them are present, of course. Some of the options, like kobolds and greenskulls, are mutants, while others, such as dwarves and fairies, have always been around, but emerged after the Big Kablooie. You’ve also got mushrooms (Mycelians), and totally-not-elves (Starborn).

I figure I’ll roll some dice and see what seems to come up. I can roll 3d6 in order, or 4d6 (keep 3) and assign, or 2d6+6… I’ll go really old school and just do it 3d6 in order.

STR: 4 (Or maybe I shouldn’t do that…)
DEX: 10
CON: 3 (Are you kidding me?)
INT: 12
WIS: 12
CHA: 8
RAD: 9

Yeah, this ain’t happenin’. Let’s try again, 4d6, keep 3:10, 14,12,11,18!,16, 8.

So, I know have to arrange them, and to do that optimally, I need to pick a class. Hmm. In addition to the core set, there’s a free supplement “Radioactive Boogaloo”, which includes material that occasionally rolls into the main rules (PDF, of course; they won’t keep sending me updated print copies.) And one of the classes in it looks intriguing: The Geiger, which is a Paladin, except for mutants instead of undead. I’ll think about it. (The supplement also adds chronomancers, a robot PC race, and many other such goodies!)

Since That Was Kind Of The Third Phase

After G1 And G2? Remember The First Trial Releases?

Where Megatron Was An Alligator?

Robots In Disguise! (Not, As My College Roommate Thought “Robots In Da Skies”)

OK, six weeks or so since last update. Not great, not terrible, as they said in Chernobyl. (Spoiler: It was, actually, terrible.) Once again, being stuck at a plot point in my novella, where the two plots converged in a wood and then diverged again, two groups of characters are on the verge of major revelations, but I’m not sure how to actually end it. I suspect there’s going to be a third factor involved, I kind of set that up earlier, so I think I should use it. But while I’m thinking, I’m going to shift gears (see, I’m writing about robots) and work on something else, just for a little while.

So, Commandroids. I created the human half of the character in Part I, and spent Part II looking at the background information for creating the robot half. I wasn’t expecting to spend that much time on that, but, hey, when you do extemporanea (that’s a fancy-ass word for “making shit up as you go along”) you never know at the start of the page where you’ll end up by the bottom.

And not speaking of that at all, I just learned something cool. There was a completely different backstory and cartoon planned for the Transformers toyline, with scripts and concept art, written as a rival to Marvel’s setting, that ended up not being used. While this would be cool enough to mention for its own sake, it is particularly relevant because in that setting, the Transformers came to Earth as “energy orbs” and took over pre-existing Earth vehicles, and the human characters (A trucker and a teenage girl) were the former owners of those vehicles. 

Which is, if you’ve read Part I of this, very close to the premise of Commandroids! I do not know if the writers of Commandroids knew of this alternate take, or if it’s simply a case of spontaneous creation, which happens a lot more than some people think. (And by “some people”, I mean, ‘idiots who do not grasp how creativity works and think X ‘ripped off’ Y because there are some common plot elements or themes”. Even setting aside the Big Universal Stories, creators in a field often have similar personalities, read similar books, watch similar movies, get involved in similar debates. Given roughly-equivalent inputs into brains that have a lot of things in common in terms of how they perceive, interpret, and value information leads to a lot of roughly-equivalent outputs. You see sudden floods of works in the same genres (be it film, games, or books) not because of ‘copying’ or ‘imitation’, but because they creators are all plugged into the same zeitgeist, which is a fancy-ass word for (gestures at everything). But I digress. Of course.

Behold… Erm, I’ll Think Of A Name In A Bit

As I recall, I started with the idea of our hero… did I name him? Lemme check… ‘All Posts’… ‘Open In New Tab’… Yes, I did. Clayton (“Clay”) Hammond… would have an ATV or motorcycle. This is a type of motomecha, as explained in Part 2, and I also picked the role of “Infiltron”, which include spies and scouts. I see the partner as more ‘scout/explorer’ than ‘spy’, but she (I’m not sure when I decided she was a she, but I did, so, there you go) prefers finding cool hidden spots in the Terran wilderness to skulking through Evil Corporate Factories looking for USB drives… er.. floppy disks… full of Nemesite schemes.

The Mechform, Function, and Matrix, described in Part II, are like the Type, Training, and Talent for the human pilot. Once again, I have 8, 6, and 4 dice to assign to each, with the dice split between Active and Passive.

Mechform: Motomecha. Specifically, a Kawasaki Ninja, for which the stats are provided. She likes this form, perhaps too much, as she’s forever attempting cool tricks and daring maneuvers. Because of that, she’s 3/1. She also gets a dyaclone chip from this; she picks “Turbo Actuator”, which grants 2 bonus dice to movement-related abilities and lets her take two Maneuvers in a combat round.

Function: Infiltron Scout. As discussed, she’s an explorer. And she’s good at it, so let’s make that her primary stat, with 3/5. Her “Primary Chip” is a Smuggler’s Hatch, a hidden compartment in which she can store a “standard size’ item, implied to mostly be used to sneak weapons into secure areas. However, if not “on mission”, it’s likely to be camping gear. (Many of the other Primary Chips for infiltrons are focused on spy work, such as being able to mimic the form of a recently defeated Commandroid, or partition your mind to maintain a cover identity against intrusive software.)

Matrix: Trinary. I’ve decided she’s a triple-changer, with her other alt-form being a sort of semi-powered hang-glider. Not quite a plane, but also not entirely dependent on air currents. There’s no stat block for this in the core book, but one of the bonuses of rule-lite (really, this game is close to rules-weightless) is that you can just “make shit up” using finger-in-the-air balancing for the handful of stats. So I will.

She can’t go very fast (maybe 20-30 mph), or hover, and needs a high place to start from (a running start and a leap will provide short-term flight, but starting from a cliff can let her go for hours, losing altitude only slowly), but can stay aloft for a long time, circling and descending at a leisurely pace. In this form, her pilot is partially enclosed by what would look like a high-tech, lightly-armored plastic suit around his torso and legs, with his arms, hands, and head exposed. (If she goes from cycle to glider mode directly, her rider stays ‘attached’, the cycle parts wrapping around to form the harness.)

This becomes her secondary stat, with a 4/2. Any tasks she attempts in glider form would be handled by this stat. 

Chips And Dip

Gonna take a quick sidestep into Dyaclone Chips. These are the “k3wl pow3rz” you get, which can reinforce your theme (such as the “Turbo Actuator”, an example of a “Dynamic Diode”, a class of chips which enhance maneuverability) or which can grant unusual powers, such as the Transform Override Ray which can force an enemy to transform, apparently in either direction (from robot to alt, or vice-versa). Some are limited to Commandroids below a certain size (you cannot install the Cloaking Device (max Size Class 4) on a car carrier (Size Class 5). Sorry, Ultra Magnus. Some require “protovoltage” to operate.

The categories are:

Acuity Inductors: These improve mental skills or perception, such as a Holographic Pilot (useful if you need to travel in vehicle form but don’t have your human with you) or the ethically-dubious Neural Override (temporarily control another being).
Dynamic Diodes: Chips which enhance speed, mobility, and reactions, such as Jump Jets (granting short-range flight) or a Reflex Tuner that enhances your dodge.
Combat Circuits: Pretty self-explanatory, these improve your combat abilities. Examples include Electro Tendrils, energized metal tentacles which can strike distant foes or demonstrate your knowledge of hentai, and  Techno Venom, a mechanical ‘poison’ that breaks down machinery.
Utility Oscillators: General-purpose functionality, for example, you can have a Reinforced Frame to give bonuses to Strength or Endurance rolls, or an Integrated Repair Toolkit to patch up non-sapient machines.

There’s a nice long list in each section, ensuring characters will be unique. None seem overwhelmingly unbalanced or ‘must have’.

Guns And Gear

Last, but most certainly not least, weapons! There’s a decent list, clearly inspired by the cool weapons described in Transformers Tech Specs but almost never actually shown in the associated media, where everyone just shot generic beams that never did any damage or even hit a target (until the movie….). A few require a special dyaclone chip to take, while others are considered so basic you get a bonus piece of equipment. I’ve decided to give her a slightly nastier edge than you might expect — she doesn’t like to fight, but if she has to, she’d going to go full “No Mercy!” and use a Thermal Blade, which is like a Warhammer 40K chainsword, except, it’s also on fire. Other weapons are the Glasser (which turns metal brittle and fragile), and the Ion Blaster, which is one of the few weapons with a “stun” setting. For wimps.

Behold… Skycycle!

Not To Be Confused With The Hyundai Pirate or the Honda Zombie

Yeah, there’s the name. I am going with a more traditional Transformers-style name, rather than the Commandroids-style Vaguely Latin Stuff. I suspect they went with that to create another point of Being Legally Distinct, or maybe to help reinforce that while it is utterly obvious where the serial numbers were filed off when the design started, the setting clearly evolved in its own way to become something that is not a mere search-and-replace on the IP it was inspired by. I know this pattern, I’ve been there often. It’s a nice feeling when you start out ripping off homaging an existing IP or concept, but, step by step, each small thing you change becomes part of a larger pattern of creation, and you begin building your own ideas on top of the inspired ones. (This can be a great vehicle to take a setting you like, but “do it better”, fixing all those little things that have always bugged you. All creation builds on prior creation, sometimes by imitation+mutation, sometimes by reply/deconstruction, what high-falutin’ types describe as “in conversation with”.)

Skycycle and Clay will, sadly, never be played, but at least they now exist. Even though I am very much on the “M0AR R000LZ!” side of design preferences, I would be willing to be in a Commandroids campaign. I should note it would not be hard to use the official Transformers rules to play in this setting; it’s not very far from the {Head/Target/Power}masters, mechanically. You’d want to make the partners a bit weaker, overall, to emphasize the fact they’re kids.

Until Next Time…

No idea when that will be! I’m at about 70K words on this novella, so, it will probably be done soon, one way or another. I think I let my reach exceed my grasp here, in terms of plot complexity. I am tempted, when I’m done, to really bite the bullet and do “Imagine”, as I keep threatening, but I got a bunch of new games at GenCon… we’ll see.  

Remember Those? With The Funky Colors?

And The Cartoon That Was The Original Cartoon, But With Digital Effects?

More Than Meets The Eye

More than a week, less than a month. Third novella in the series is coming along, I’ve got two seemingly separate plots mostly completed, they’re the first two-thirds, and I need them to join up, and that’s where I’m kind of stuck, plus, I got edits back on the second book, which I am supposed to be going over, but I dread seeing every error and typo and plot hole called out, so, I’m procrastinating by writing this. You’re welcome.

(Digression: I mentioned Imagine, which I called the heartbreakiest of D&D heartbreakers, last time, and on a whim, checked to see if their site was still up. It is, and not only that, but they’ve published two more books, including a massive 600 page tome in 2023. I now own it, and the only slightly-less-massive book from 2013. This guy does what I can’t do — stick to a passion project and not only complete it, but expand it. It really merits a deeper look. For the future.)

OK, when last we left our intrepid man/machine pair, we’d finished the human half. All of this, and the backstory, is detailed in Part I. 

Form Follows Function

Actually, as it turns out, Function follows Mechform. At least in the order you pick them.

Mechform

Commandroids are, per the rules, less free-form than humans. They’re purpose-built machines and thus narrower in overall scope. I guess if you’re built to transform into a microscope, you don’t become a firefighter. (Seems like there’s some good RP material there, though — just because you look like a tank doesn’t mean you can’t want to be a race-car!) Anyway, we start with picking a mechform. Our human is an older teen, but not an adult. So while he could in theory be driving a car, he probably doesn’t have a license and this could lead to annoying encounters. Also, his general personality makes me think he’s the outdoorsy sort — and not all adventures will take place near a highway, or even a paved road. Given that, I’m going to go with Motomech, including bikes, motorcycles, ATVs, and so on. (As it turns out, having now completed the first pass and am now editing, mechform is really important and ties in to a huge amount of lore, and discussing the various forms ended up being most of this article. Huh. Go figure.)

Function

The next step is function. Alphatrons are leaders, Medicrons are healers, Battletrons (I like “Combatron” better, but my input was not sought) are soldiers, and so on. I am going to go with Infiltron — scouts, spies, or saboteurs. In this case, the emphasis is on “Scout”. This Commandroid is more explorer than spy. Possibly, it was pushed into an intelligence-gathering role by the war, but it would rather just be seeing things no one else has seen, looking for hidden, uh, cyber-caves, lost, er, digi-valleys, and rivers of energy… stuff. (As I read the lore more, there used to be a cyber-wilderness on Quazaros, so this kind of works!) Here on Earth, everything is new and alien to it, but it would rather not be in the built-up areas — reminds it too much of home. Whatever fictional community this game would be set in, I’ll assume it’s located just a few miles from a national park or other wilderness area. Possibly, Simpsons-style, there are a multitude of biomes improbably nearby — a beach one way, mountains the other, deserts to the north, swamps to the south. All within an after-school drive!

Matrix

No one can be told what the Matrix is. Thus, this section is blank.

As are the stares from my imagined readers. Don’t y’all remember that tagline? It was only… (checks date)… a freakin’ quarter century ago? Seriously? People whose parents came home from seeing that movie and decided to make the beast with two backs are now in their mid-20s? That’s just… no. No, I refuse to accept it.

Anyway, Matrix is… uh, wait, I spent so much time on that dumb gag I forgot what I just read. Maybe it was 26 years ago…

“Matrix” is the Commandroid equivalent of “Talent” for a human, but again, rather than being free-form, there’s a list. It’s “what makes you special”, aka “what gimmick your toy was sold with”, such as Apparatex (has an add-on not sold separately), Primacronic (animal form), and Trinary (triple changer). The default is “Omnicircuit”, which give you an extra Chip Slot. Still not sure which I want, so let’s read on a bit.

The next section gives more details on the individual mechforms. This gives a good bit of background lore. Some summaries:

Aeromecha (planes, helicopters) were the ruling class of not-Cybertron, divided into five houses, such as Aquilae, who played too much Warhammer 40K, and House Toreador, I mean, Falco, patrons of the arts. On Earth, many adapted military forms, only to learn that a Mig flying over Ohio was the opposite of “staying unnoticed”. It’d be fun to play against type and have a crop duster or an advertising blimp. They tend to pick the kind of humans as their pilots who match them as, well, kind of arrogant show-offs with an attitude. 

Automecha can transform into 1940s-style self-serve diners, with a wide range of food and drinks at.. no, wait, that’s Automats. As one might guess, Automecha transform and roll out! They’re sort of the proletariat/blue-collar class on Quazaros, the most common types, and with something of a complex about the speed of the Aeromechas. On Earth, they can be anything from compact cars to monster trucks, taking forms to match their character, Human pilots are equally varied. As the Commandroids take over existing vehicles, they may become someone’s family car, which creates an interesting dynamic.

I Love The Cigar So Much

Combatmecha …wait, aren’t these “Battletrons”? (scroll scroll scroll) No, “Battletron” is a function, “Combatmecha” is a form. These are military ground vehicles, from jeeps to tanks. I’m not sure I’d have split them from “Automecha”, but, for the fourth time in this series, no one asked me and no one should have asked me. They did what they did because it’s their project. On the other hand, this is my review, and I think the lines between the two forms, and between Combatmecha the form and Battletron the function are a bit blurry, but, on the gripping hand, I’ve already noted this is one of those hippie games where the GM… no, wait, it’s got some other name, the Director… has to decide for themselves where the boundaries are. As there’s little mechanical weight to these choices (kind of funny, because, robots, right? Eh? Eh? Sigh.) there’s likewise little reason for some munchkinbot to try to find a sleazy Form/Function combo that gives them an unexpected edge. So it’s all good. 

There’s some interesting lore for them, too. They “began as border tribes of the MechaShōgunate” and can we hang on just a second? That is precisely the right point between “awesome” and “cheesy” a game like this needs. I can one-hundred-percent see that as a throwaway line on a toy package some overworked, underpaid writer who had to crank out 20 “tech specs” a day would write, as quickly forgotten as it was created, and, decades later, ended up feeding into thousands of pages of fanfic and licensed comics. It goes on a bit into “War is hell, mmmkay?” territory, as the Combatmecha became, naturally, the front-line soldiers of warring factions, often being lied to and manipulated into conflict, then scrapped when no longer sufficiently useful. Imagine Kup w/serious PTSD. Their pilots are not necessarily military personnel (given the game’s preference for most pilots being under 18 and the oldest topping out at 20, this makes sense), but they need to be cool under fire. A military brat would make an excellent concept for a pilot. Some bored 12 year old on the third base she’s lived at this year suddenly finds one of the tanks talking to her? Oh, yeah. Damn. I want to play this now.

Motomecha Motorcycles, trikes, ATVs, scooters, maybe golf carts and lawnmowers? (They’ll fuck a gopher up, man!) On not-gobotron, they were couriers, mechanics who could slip into small spaces, and so on, and also seen as… treacherous nogoodniks always sneaking around and up to no good? The small workers banded together into clans, and these clans  were “often met with the same warmth and confidence that a farmer might welcome an oncoming locust swarm”??? Whoa. It’s clear from the text this was irrational prejudice on the part of the larger robots, but apparently the evil AI Mainframe got all of its information from watching Foxtron Cybernews, and so, attempted to wipe them out. On Earth, they retain a lot of their clan identity as shown by colors and markings, which has led to some interesting confrontations with, or alliances with, biker gangs. And, oh yes, it explicitly says a few are, indeed, golf carts. Their pilots tend to be daredevils and thrill-seekers.

Technomecha These turn into…. things. TVs, radios, microscopes, cameras, etc. While this is very useful in many ways, in Actual Play TM, I’d imagine there’s a risk of not being able to do much in their alt form. The Aeromecha flies across the city to attack the baddies, the Motomecha races a Nemesite cop car, and the guy who turns into a microscope… sits in the High School science lab. Well, let’s see what the actual rules say. In lore, they were diplomats and ambassadors to other worlds, able to fit in and offer services as a literal piece of gear. They also tended to go a little nuts, with odd speech patterns and other ‘quirks’. On Earth, they take over arcade machines and bleeding-edge tech like an Apple II! (Which suddenly has more processing power than every computer on Earth at the time., put together. Huh. Given the timeframe, one could easily become an early-model Macintosh. And now I want to create one called “Gooey”. For GUI. Get it?) Their bonded humans aren’t actually pilots — you don’t climb into a Walkman. (The Commandroids don’t have the same size-changing ability that the inspirational media had, at least not by default or to the same degree.) And, yes, the rules do mention this can be a challenging role, as technomecha have to out-think, rather than outfight, their enemies, and their human “pilots” lack the protection of being inside a robot body.

 Terramecha Another case where I think the distinctions are blurry, Terramecha are heavy construction equipment — bulldozers, cranes, cement mixers. Is a ruggedized dump truck used by the Army Corps of Engineers a Combatmecha or a Terramecha? I guess the GM decides. This category can include tractor trailers and garbage trucks. The rules acknowledge there’s not a perfect bright line, at least. (And, as a sort of a little dig at the “Where does Optimus’ trailer go?” question, it’s called out that if a Terramecha takes over a truck, the whole truck is part of their body — they can’t detach the trailer any more than you can detach a leg. Personality-wise, they are big, tough, and not too sociable, and their human pilots are likewise generally burly and rough, or if kids, very high-energy types who can keep a living crane powered up. (Think a ten year old who has just eaten three bowls of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs.)

Rolling Out!

For now. I did not expect to be diving into this much detail, but hell, I like the lore — it echoes the inspirational material without mindlessly copying it, and it contains many seeds for characters and scenarios. I would really like to play or GM… er… “Direct”… a session of this. 

No idea when I’ll get to finally stat out the Commandroid part of the character, but hopefully it will be in under a month. Now, it’s time to play Rimworld and commit war crimes.

Kind of Like The Go-Bots Of Transformers RPGs!

In That It Came Out Before The Official One

This Is So Eighties It Makes My Hair Feathered And My Shirt Pastel.

Well, there’s been a wee bit of a gap again, because I’m hard at work on the final book in the Kleptogenesis Trilogy, and, like the first two books, hating every single letter I type. And I am stuck at a point where I need to advance the plot but also justify a major character not simply “noping” right out of the situation, because while “I won’t leave my 8 month pregnant wife” is normally a good motivation for any nominally-decent person to stay, even if it’s dangerous, it weakens when you learn she’s been clandestinely letting people inject strange DNA into the fetus and lying about it. (She has a good motivation, though.) (Arguably, she’s not lying, just not mentioning it. I mean, he never asked “Are you letting them use our child-to-be as a test subject?”)

Anyway, I needed a break, and while I was tempted to finally write my next Cobra Kai piece (which I might end up doing anyway), or hauling out my copy of “Imagine“, one of the heartbreakiest D&D heartbreakers of the late 90s, I ended up looking at one of my shelves of digest-sized RPG rulebooks I buy in bulk at GenCon, and noticed “Commandroids”, an eighties-flavored game about giant robots, on Earth, who transform into other things. Having just bought the PDF (as my physical copy would break if I tried to scan pages, as well as being hard to hold open while I type), I guess I’m committed. (Well, I should have been committed long ago, but that’s another topic. Ba-dum BUM!)

Let’s begin.

Story Time!

It starts with… first person fiction. Sigh. OK, it’s not nearly as turgid and unreadable as in-game fiction usually is — props for that. Robot wakes up on Earth, discover he’s now in the form of a very expensive sports car, which isn’t bad, but also that he needs to bind with a human due to lack of energ protovoltaic power. In his memory banks is a message from Optim Alpha Columbia telling him he has to be nice to the humans, and try to stay hidden. Also, we learn he imprinted his ‘bonding frequency’ on a cassette tape, which the teenage mechanic listens to, forming a mental link between them. (We also learn our POV Symbitron is a Commandroid from Quazaros, named Lux Maximo.). We get a big one-paragraph infodump, in the form of a message from Lux Maximo to his new potential pilot:

“This war has been going on literally as long as your species has existed, and it destroyed our world completely. If you agree to help me, you’ll be making enemies of the Nemesite Capacitors- evil, parasitic religious zealots from Quazaros. If we’re here, they must be here too. Their cruel Inquisition would snuff out all organic life on this planet and replace it with their psychotic “Mainframe,”a power-mad Artificial Intelligence that wants to take over and reformat the whole universe.”

You got all that? Good. There’ll be a quiz later.

Sure, it’s corny, but it’s supposed to be. This is 100% in the spirit of the era — if anything, it’s a tad more complex, reflecting how Transformers lore evolved, from “We need some hook to sell these random, unrelated toys we licensed from Japan” into a complex, often contradictory, mythos now in its fourth decade, one that gets me to spend mumblemumble dollars on faux-leather hardcover compilations. 

Anyway, some Rich Asshole (a classic 80s cocaine-snorting businessman) tries to buy Lux Maximo. The Kid who bonded w/Lux gets all cybered-up due to nanomachines, hurls Rich Asshole out, and they both take off through the plate glass window and into the Everglades, looking for adventure, and the rest of the rules.

Operation: Exposition

Seriously, that’s the chapter title. You gotta love it! I’m going to say the same thing I say about Cobra Kai: The writers know exactly what kind of thing they’re making, and lean into it unreservedly.

We get a bit more backstory, first. Comandroids were sent to Earth in 1987 as “frequencies” which took over cars, planes, Walkmen (Walkmans? Walks Man?) and so on. They can install “Dyaclone Chips” that can grant them temporary unique powers (e.g. teleportation). (If you’re well-versed in the history of the toyline, you understand that reference.)

Symbitrons, and their nemesis the Nemasites (I would have spelled it ‘Nemacytes’, because that’s k00l3r, but no one asked me, unsurprisingly), need human pilots to transform, making them sort of a cross between Transformers and Mecha. This is not merely to avoid violating the dread Rites of K’hopee, but also means each player effectively runs two characters — a youngish (13-21 is recommended) pilot full of Adolescent Angst, and a sapient robot from Gobotr Cybertr Quazaros (Not ‘Quazartron’? Ah, well. Again, I was not consulted, for perfectly obvious and justifiable reasons.)

Shogun Warriors!

There is also a ‘Shogun Configuration’ which allows three or more Commandroids to combine into one entity. (On a second skim-through, I noticed there are also rules for triple-changers. They really do hit all the most memorable variants and sub-groups.)

Backstory

Hoo, boy, they definitely built out their universe, filing serial numbers off a lot of the core franchise elements that evolved after the initial “Good guys cars, bad guys planes, they fight” premise that launched the toy line. There’s Unicr Quopoth, the remains of Quazaros, now a dead machine world run by an evil mainframe, there’s the Sacred Parameters that prevent the two sides from engaging in open conflict on Earth, there’s even  stuff on how the insignia each side wears is a manifestation of the individual’s inner code (but special Infiltrons can wear the enemy’s signature without changing their nature).

The Evil One Is Purple, As Required By Law

And I’ll Form The Head!

Again — this is literally a chapter title. We will now (after 7 pages of defined terms — which, honestly, imply a lot of cool stuff about the setting, albeit clearly mapped to the inspiration, e.g., you have “Primacronic Cores” which allow a bestial rather than humanoid form, or “Kremzoid Electrogremlin”, a small creature made of electricity.

OK, this is one of those hippie games where you have a bunch of keywords for your character, instead of math equations (there may be math later, I guess. The game uses math rocks, aka, dice, so how can there not be math?). It breaks down into Type (archetype), Training (skills) and Talent (some unique aspect).

Typecasting

The main archetypes (you can pick something else) are directly from Breakfast Club, and if you don’t know what that is, get off my lawn, you damn punk kids. Or you can read the Wiki article, I suppose. In my day, we had World Book, not Wiki, and we called nickles ‘bees’, give me five bees for a quarter, we’d say, and… where was I? Oh yeah. Archetypes.

Athlete: The jock, in other words.
Brain: NERRRRRRRD!
Basket Case: The Weird kid. A decade or so later, they’d be Goths or Theater Kids. This can also be the Class Clown, or anyone who is kind of an outsider. Jughead, obsessed with food and disinterested in girls, would be this in the Archie-verse.
Criminal: The juvenile delinquent. The Rebel Without A Cause, or sometimes, a Clue.
Princeling: Rich, spoiled brats. Mean Girls. You know the type.

Each type is modified by some free-form adjective, and examples are given from the inspirational media of the day. An example of a “Pensive Princeling” is Princess Allura from Voltron, while Paternal Brain could represent ‘Sparkplug’ Witwicky from Transformers.

Training

This is wholly free-form, but it’s assumed the GM (or “Director”) will reign in the more munchkin types. Examples are ‘Journalist’, ‘Karate Kid’, or ‘Meanest Girl’. You then get three skills, each of which can have several effects, which are player/Director defined. An example is “Took A First Aid Class”, which is defined as “Character enjoys a -1 Challenge rating [to] heal and stabilize injured characters. They can patch a Scraped or Bruised character back up one level after five minutes of in-game care.”

(Reminds me a bit of “Over The Edge” or FATE. This is definitely one of those systems where the social contract matters, or the game quickly devolves into arguments over how broad or narrow a given trait can be. Players will always try to find ways to apply any mechanic they can, no matter how strained the rationale.)

Interestingly, there’s no real connection, mechanically, between your Type and Training. Again, this seems to be an area where the Director and player need to work cooperatively to make sure the character can do “what it says on the tin”. 

Another thing that’s a bit confusing, to me, is that each sample Training is written as a flavorful descriptive phrase, followed by a more mundane term would be a skill name in crunchier systems, such as Ear to the Streets (Streetwise) or Bowling Balls and Roller Skates (Improvise Traps). Reading this, I suspected there was a formal skill list somewhere, but, upon searching, determined there was not. Maybe it’s there to help narrow down or define what the skill means. Skills are, in essence, specialties of Type and Training.

Talent

So next we have Talent. Talent is the abstract ‘what makes you special’ ability, and it’s supposed to be the most specialized and least likely to come into play. (However, that’s not really clear from the examples: “Honorary Ninja” seems like it could be invoked, legitimately, in a lot of situations, including stealth, climbing walls, and giving someone a Boot To The Head.) Once more, it looks like this will require a lot of negotiation as to how/when it’s applicable.

I’ve Been Told I Need To Break Up Text With Pictures, So Here’s A Picture

Hooray! Math!

At last, we get to stats! You have three dice pools, Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary, which boil down to 8, 6, and 4. You then assign a pool to Type, Training, and Talent, based on which you think are the most defining aspects of your character. Lastly, you divide the assigned dice in each pool between Active and Passive. (Skills don’t have a dice pool, as they modify the difficulty of a roll or have other effects.)

Given that we have math now, it’s time to actually make a character.

I’d been considering a jock even before the chargen options called it out as a core archetype, but, since this is a fantastic, unrealistic setting, after all, we’ll have him be a basically decent guy.

Type: Supportive Athlete. (Competitive and wants to win, but cheers his teammates, admires good play by opponents, and protects kids from bullies. He’s everyone’s big brother, and not in the Orwell sense.)

Training: Letterman. (Not the late-night comedian. He’s an all-round athlete, on whatever team it’s the season for. He’s not the best in any one sport, but he’s second-best in most of them. Given his Type, he prefers team sports to one-on-one competition.)

Skills: (Note I don’t really know the mechanics, like, at all, so I’m just imitating how the sample skills are written.)

Team Player: Can reduce challenge rating by 1 for a teammate if it’s reasonable he can help in some meaningful way.
Medic: (Copied from ‘First Aid Training’) Character enjoys a -1 Challenge rating to heal and stabilize injured characters. They can patch a Scraped or Bruised character back up one level after five minutes of in-game care.
Good Reputation: Reduces Challenge rating by 1 when trying to negotiate with people around town who are not actually enemies. Suspicious cops, glowering principals, or cranky groundskeepers will be inclined to leave him alone, and, by inference, his less-reputable allies (if they don’t go out of their way to antagonize them).

Talent: Ready To Play: Somehow always has just the tool for the job, if it’s sports-related – a baseball bat if something needs smashing, roller skates for quick travel, a football helmet if there’s robot shrapnel flying around.

So, give that, I have to assign Primary/Secondary/Yaddayaddaary. What was that again? 8/6/4?

I think his Training is primary. He’s spent most of his life honing his athletic skills. Almost by definition, he is proactive. He’s not the Cobra Kai type, but he does prefer to Strike First. So we’ll divide that as 6/2. If I knew the mechanics better, I might regret that.

Type is Secondary, so, 6 dice. He’ll go 2/4 on this.

Lastly, for Talent, I might as well go 1/3. I see it as a reactive ability — it’s a response to a problem. How that might work in play, I dunno.

Oh, of course, he needs a name. Quickly, to the name-o-tron! A few spins of the ol’ dial later, we end up with Clayton (Clay to everyone but his parents) Hammond.

Truths and Ideals: Yeah, you know it’s a hippie game when you have to fill out this part. Eh? Arguably, that goes back to Champions and its Psych Lims, or Pendragon and its Virtues? Look, how am I supposed to be a cranky grognard if you keep pointing out most of the stuff I am required to bitch about, per the Official Grognard Rules, is actually How It’s Always Been, just with different names? Bloody annoying Voice of Reason in my head, ruining all my fun…. mutter grumble mutter…

So, there’s three questions, if I want to cross the Bridge of Fate:

I Love That: I’m usually able to help.
I Hate That: So many people need help.
I Know That I Can Count On: My as-yet-to-be-defined robot pal.

There are also ‘relationships’, which establish connections to other characters — who don’t exist for this example. Sigh.

Next time — who knows when that will be — I will generate his Robot Buddy! Probably a dirt bike, though a golf cart or Zamboni would be hilarious.

It’s late Sunday Wednesday afternoon Thursday morning (this was written on Sunday 4/27/2025, but I haven’t posted it yet — though if you see this, I have posted it, obviously), and very soon I will have the outline for my next book in hand from my co-author (I am a reasonably skilled writer, but a poor plotter, so it helps me to have a skeleton to build on, or I either don’t get started, or, end up in the weeds and can’t finish.) But I’ve managed 9 weeks of regular updates, and this will be the 10th, after the kind of multi-month silence that usually means “This Blog Is Dead”.

As noted in some other post — I am not sure which — I generated a list of random spell names using a non-AI tool, and I am plucking from said list those which seem intriguing. I may eventually do all 10, I may not, who knows? Today’s, however, is “Noxious Rhythm”.

Hm. Think think ponder ponder think…

(Yeah, I just stream-of-consciousness these. Sometimes, it’s more a muddy trickle than a stream. Hell, sometimes, it’s an arroyo. No, that’s not the one from the X-Men with weather powers.)

Alright. While I could think more deeply, I’m going to go with my first instinct, that this is clearly something bardic, at least in later editions where bards had their own spell lists. In earlier versions, it would likely be a magic-user spell (later “Mage”, then “Wizard”, then “Arcane Caster”), but to go with the tentative bard theme, let’s also make it a druid spell, as it kind of fits the vaguely-defined 1e druid paradigm as a “primitive” caster, in the sense the vaguely-Celtic culture that inspired the Druid class was, indeed, seen as “primitive” by the Romans.

(Excuse me, humming “A Pict Song” now.)

Original D&D

OK, first off… from an AU “Eldritch Wizardry”.

EXPLANATION OF SPELLS (Addition)
Clerics (Druids):
4th level
Noxious Rhythm: The caster beats out a discordant rhythm on any available surface. Those within 24″ of the caster (only 6″ if indoors, unless in a large natural cavern or the like) must save vs. spells or become violently ill and off balance, and can take no actions except to move at half speed. Their AC is at -2. They may attempt to save again at the end of each round. Monsters with no hearing are unaffected.

Magic-Users:
3rd level
Noxious Rhythm: This is identical to the 4th level Druid spell of the same name.

AD&D Version

Druid Spells
3rd level spells

Noxious Rhythm (Evocation)
Level: 4
Duration: Special
Area of Effect: 24″ radius outdoors, 6″ indoors
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: 4 segments
Saving Throw: Special, see below

By pounding out a discordant beat, the Druid sets up vibrations which nauseate creatures within the area of affect. Those who fail to save vs. spell are reeling, dizzy, and nauseated, and can take no actions except to move at half speed. Affected creatures may attempt to save at the end of each round. Creatures which cannot hear are immune to this spell, while those with sensitive hearing (such as elves) save at -2. Anyone who stated they were taking precautions (covering ears, or stuffing beeswax in them) gains a +2 on their saves.

Magic User Spells
3rd level spells

Noxious Rhythm (Evocation)
This spell is identical to the Druid spell of the same name, except the material component is a broken toy drum and an ounce of rotting fish.

Pathfinder 2e

Bard Composition Spells

Noxious Rhythm Focus 5

Uncommon,Bard,Composition,Focus,Concentrate,Manipulate,Sonic
Area 30 foot emanation; Targets All enemies in area
Saving Throw Fortitude; Duration 1 minute

Unlike the pleasing, inspiring, or enthralling performance you usually create, this composition is raucous, discordant, and disorienting, shaking bones and shattering minds with its chaotic beats that follow no discernible pattern. All targets must make a Fortitude save, with the following outcomes:

Critical Success No effect
Success Sickened 1 until the end of their next turn
Failure Sickened 1 for one minute
Critical Failure Sickened 2 for one minute

In addition to the effects noted above, those who failed their save suffer a -10 foot status penalty to their Speed.

The pretty version: