Spes Magna Games

As I blogged about a couple or so days ago, my son Giant Boy and I decided to add some survival horror to Go Fer Yer Gun! (which is published by Beyond Belief Games). Not wanting the stereotypical Romeroid zombies, there was some brainstorming, and these five traits are what fell from the brainclouds:

Trait 1: The “zombies” are created by a bloodborne pathogen that infects a human host. The host’s lymph nodes swell into buboes. These buboes fill with a mixture of blood, pus, and live virus. Not only can they pop if roughly handled, the virus changes the host’s body so that the host can vent its buboes’ contents via the mouth and nose.

Trait 2: The infected do not respirate the way humans do. Their lungs do not serve any particular purpose. More physiological changes, however, give an infected the ability to voluntarily control its thoracic diaphragm. By contracting or relaxing this muscle, an infected can inhale or exhale, permitting it produce limited vocalizations. The infected cannot speak, except perhaps single syllable words that would be more hissed than articulated, but they can growl, moan, et cetera.

Trait 3: Further physiological changes alter bone structure and density. The proximal and distal phalanges fuse (N.B. limited finger dexterity), and the fused bones grows into something very much like a spike. Since the bones are denser as a whole, the infected is more durable and less suspectible to injury.

Trait 4: The infected’s brain changes as well. It enters a hyper-adrenaline state which constantly floods the infected’s body with this powerful hormone. At the same time, the nervous system is less sensitive to pain and fatigue.

Trait 5: The infected kill and eat the non-infected because uninfected human tissues contain a variety of hormones which nourish the virus. Chief among the hormones that the infected crave are arenaline and cortisol, the hormones that trigger the flight-or-fight response.

Next up, we need to look at how the heroes (meaning the PCs) will survive this apocalypse. As a player, I don’t like having to make up a new character every session or two. As a GM, I don’t like having to figure out how to introduce replacement PCs to the rest of the group. Something needs to be done that mitigates hero death but at the same time preserves the horror element of the survival horror genre.

GFYG! uses a hit point system to track character health and damage. Heroes heal one hit point per day. At 0 hit points, a hero passes out. Below 0 hit points means the hero is seriously injured and bleeding out at a rate of 1 hit point per round. When -10 hit points is reached, the hero dies. A critical hit might occur on a natural 20 attack roll. A confirmation roll, essentially a second attack roll, that meets the target number means the attack is critical. All critical hits inflict double damage.

So far, there’s nothing all that surprising here. These rules are pretty much old hat. They don’t, however, seem well-suited to survival horror. Let’s tweak things, taking inspiration from another old hat idea.

Bruises & Wounds

At each level in standard GFYG!, a hero gets 1 Hit Die worth of hit points. The hero’s Constitution modifier is added to the Hit Die result to determine hit points at that level. At 1st level, a hero gets maximum hit points. For our survival horror version of GFYG!, hit points don’t work quite this way. At each level, the hero’s hit points (not counting Constitution modifier) are divided between Bruises and Wounds. If hit points generated are an odd number, Bruises gets rounded up, and Wounds gets rounded down. The hero’s Constitution modifier gets added to Bruises only.

For example, Tex McGraw is a 1st-level gunslinger with a 14 Constitution (+2 modifier). Tex gets maximum hit points at 1st level, or 10 hit points. These are divided by two, and his Constitution modifier is added to Bruises. Thus, Tex has 7 Bruises and 5 Wounds. (Well, not that he actually has that many bruises and wounds; those are points, not injuries.) Tex survives to 2nd-level. (Yippee-ki-yay, Tex!) He rolls 1d10 and gets a 7. This yields 6 more Bruises (included Constitution modifier) and 3 more Wounds, bring Tex’s totals to 13 Bruises and 8 Wounds.

Since hit points (and related systems, such as Bruises and Wounds) are abstractions wherein damage doesn’t necessarily mean gushing wounds, here’s how this modified system works. When Tex gets hit (shot, stabbed, punched, bitten, et cetera), he takes damage to Bruises first. This represents minor bumps, scrapes, pulled muscles, and so forth. When Bruises are gone, Tex takes damage directly to Wounds. These represent serious injuries. A successful critical hit deals half damage to Bruises and half damage directly to Wounds.

A hero still becomes unconscious at 0, but 0 Wounds instead of 0 hit points. He starts to bleed out if reduced to -1 Wounds, and dies at -10 Wounds.

Bruises heal much more quickly than Wounds. A hero recovers his character level plus Constitution modifier in Bruises every 8 hours of rest. Wounds, however, still heal at the much slower rate as normal for GFYG!.

Under most circumstances, special attacks (such as infection from an infected’s bite) do not affect a hero unless the attack does damage directly to Wounds. An infected’s bite that only causes Bruises doesn’t potentially turn a hero into a frothing-at-the-mouth homicidal cannibal. This gives heroes a “buffer” during which they can fight the infected without risk of infection (barring critical hits or being splattered by an infected’s head being blasted apart by a shotgun). Eventually, a pitched battle against a mob of the infected is a losing proposition. Those Bruises are going to build up until a hero finally suffers Wound damage.

Survival of the Fittest?

GFYG! uses the tried and true 3d6 arranged to suit preferences method of attribute generation. This fits survival horror, and I see little reason to change it. One of the themes of survival horror comes from naturalist literature, such as the stories of Jack London. Check out his classic “To Build a Campfire”. Nature doesn’t care about virtue. It doesn’t mete out justice or distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving. Nature kills indiscriminately, and sometimes no amount of native ability or acquired skill makes much difference. Sure, a character with a 16 Strength has a survival advantage over a character with a 6 Strength, but it’s not a guarantee of success.

During the A to Z blogging challenge, I wrote about using exploding dice with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. I like this idea. It can be linked to character strengths while at the same time helps represent the fickle whims of circumstance that don’t give a hoot that the hero is the hero. In the next post on this topic, we’ll look at adding an exploding dice mechanic to GFYG! that takes into account that game’s system of primary, secondary, and tertiary attributes.

I’ll also look at GFYG!‘s character classes to see if maybe there needs to be some changes to the way they work in a survival horror game.

Until then, don’t get bit!

Tags: adventure design, horror

My son Giant Boy and I watched 28 Days Later a few nights ago. This film often gets lumped in the zombie genre, but it’s not really a zombie movie (but it is survival horror, which includes zombie pics). The infected in 28DL aren’t zombies. They’re people driven into a seemingly permanent psychotic frenzy by some sort of biological experiment accidentally released from an animal testing facility at Cambridge.

The day after we watched 28DL, Giant Boy said, “Patermaximus, might we write some sort of zombie horror apocalypse adventure?”

I said, “I dunno. I guess.”

And so here we are, with me writing this and you reading it.

The first question Giant Boy insisted we answer was what game system to use. The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game doesn’t seem a good fit. Fireball-lobbing wizards, vital-striking fighters, and disease-curing clerics don’t look they’d work well in the survival horror genre. Giant Boy suggested Mutants & Masterminds, but that is a math-intensive game when it comes to scenario design. Other suggestions included True 20 (which I have in unprinted PDF format but little experience with) and Savage Worlds (which I have only the short, free test drive PDF). Obviously, there are other systems specifically written for horror games. There’s even a zombie horror RPG, All Flesh Must Be Eaten (which I own none of and don’t feel like purchasing).

Watching me poo poo one game system after another, Giant Boy said, “Patermaximus, which system shall we use if we use none of those?”

Good question. One thing I enjoy is taking a game system and making it do things it wasn’t necessarily designed to do. I also like blending genres, which my players in Man Day Adventures will soon discover. (Muahaha!) As I pondered Giant Boy’s question, I thought these thoughts:

“The system needs to be something simple. Rules lite seems better than rules heavy for this sort of game.”

“The system needs to be something I already have a copy of.”

“The system needs to be something decidedly not intended for survival horror.”

One RPG kept pressing itself to the forefront of my brain each time I asked these questions. Yes, that’s right. Beyond Belief Games’ Go Fer Yer Gun!. What could be cooler than a blending of 28DL with cowboys and Indians? (Yes, yes, I know about Deadlands, but I’m not going for the weird west).

With that decision out of the way, it was time to brainstorm about my zombies. Foremost, I don’t want slow-moving, brain-eating undead. I mean, I love George Romero as much as any red-blooded American boy, but Romeroid zombies just seem so typical nowadays. 28DL was intense because its zombies aren’t zombies, and they’re fast and relentless. I mean, really fast. Those raging maniacs could windsprint like nobody’s business even after they were set on fire. On top of their speed and relentlessness, 28DL “zombies” didn’t have to bite you to infect you. They could projectile vomit blood at you instead. They could splatter on you when someone hacks them with a machete. They were a bloodborne pathogens worst-case scenario on steroids. As Frank (the most affecting and best acted character in 28DL as portrayed by Brendan Gleeson) demonstrated, even a single drop of blood from one of the infected after death could turn a loving father into a frothing-at-the-mouth killer in a matter of seconds.

Now that’s scary.

So, now I had the beginnings of a “zombie” checklist:

1. They’re not really zombies. They’re infected by a super-virus.
2. They’re jacked up on adrenaline and homicidally psychotic.

After this, my mind wandered toward other source material. You know how zombies eat brains? Do you know why zombies eat brains? It was explained in The Return of the Living Dead. Zombies eat brains because they’re in constant pain from decomposition, and brains act as a sort of anesthetic. I also recalled the two of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s novels in their Strain Trilogy (which reminds me that I still haven’t read the third installment). Those books are about vampires, but not Bela Lugosi vampires. Instead, Strain vampires are infected with a bizarre parasite that transforms the host’s entire physiology in grotesque, horrifying ways.

Two more things for the checklist:

3. Motivation for cannibalism.
4. Physical changes caused by virus.

That looked like a good start, and so I took Giant Boy’s ubiquitous pad of drawing paper away from him while we waited for Mrs. Chance to get done at work. I jotted down some notes about traits of the infected:

Trait 1: The host’s lymph nodes swell into buboes. These buboes fill with a mixture of blood, pus, and live virus. Not only can they pop if roughly handled, the virus changes the host’s body so that the host can vent its buboes’ contents via the mouth and nose.

Trait 2: The infected do not respirate the way humans do. Their lungs do not serve any particular purpose. More physiological changes, however, give an infected the ability to voluntarily control its thoracic diaphragm. By contracting or relaxing this muscle, an infected can inhale or exhale, permitting it produce limited vocalizations. The infected cannot speak, except perhaps single syllable words that would be more hissed than articulated, but they can growl, moan, et cetera.

Trait 3: Further physiological changes alter bone structure and density. The proximal and distal phalanges fuse (N.B. limited finger dexterity), and the fused bones grows into something very much like a spike. Since the bones are denser as a whole, the infected is more durable and less suspectible to injury.

Trait 4: The infected’s brain changes as well. It enters a hyper-adrenaline state which constantly floods the infected’s body with this powerful hormone. At the same time, the nervous system is less sensitive to pain and fatigue.

Trait 5: The infected kill and eat the non-infected because uninfected human tissues contain a variety of hormones which nourish the virus. Chief among the hormones that the infected crave are arenaline and cortisol, the hormones that trigger the flight-or-fight response.

As Giant Boy read this over my shoulder (which I find annoying but tolerate because I’m so loveable), I could hear him shuddering. I think this first draft of “zombie” traits is a good start for an Old West survival horror scenario.

Next post, I’ll turn the spotlight onto the player characters. Since this looks like the sort of setting that lends itself to high levels of PC death, I need to implement some sort of “survival of the fittest” considerations that keeps the threat of death very real for characters but also makes it easy to keep the players involved in the game after their heroes get eaten.

Tags: 28 Days Later, adventure design, horror, undead

Mythopoetic Games “is dedicated to publishing a small number of free tabletop pencil-and-paper roleplaying games.” The site and the games are from the minds of Christopher Johnstone and Dean Suter. On the downloads page, Mythopoetic Games has five free tabletop RPGs. The one that we’re interested in today is Danse Macabre. Here’s the blurb:

A Roleplaying game of horror, intrigue and dark fantasy set in an alternative and dark Medieval Europe. Dark and monstrous things haunt the shadows of the forest and mountain. Old gods lurk mad and forsaken in their sacred pools. Wars between Heaven, Faerie and Hell have left all the mortal world bloodied and broken beneath the surface of things. A rot of destruction is spreading, and soon the final reckoning of creation itself may be at hand.

Five PDFs comprise this free horror RPG, and these aren’t piddly little documents typed up with large amounts of amateurishness. They are laid out in simple, readable two column format with evocative illustrations and printer-friendly goodness. The only downside to the PDFs is the lack of bookmarks, but this is really only a small complaint applicable to the Core Rules, the largest of the PDFs.

The Core Rules weigh in at about 140 pages divided into 10 chapters, including the introduction. The game uses a d6 dice pool action resolution system, and includes a nice little differentiation between subjective resolution (for things that don’t require dice rolls) and objective resolution (for things that do). Regarding the former: “The key to Subjective Resolution is acknowledging that clever ideas and well-narrated actions deserve rewards. Encouraging Subjective Resolution speeds the pace of a game considerably.”

Action resolution is by rolling the relevant number of d6 based on the appropriate trait and counting successes. Each 6 is one success, and “Easy” tasks require no roll to succeed. These traits tests can be simple (unopposed), opposed, or prolonged (for things like a foot race). Characters also have a pool of Effort points that can be spent to increase the success range for a die. For example, one Effort point makes rolls of 5 or 6 a success. Overall, this is a simple and quick action resolution mechanic, and the addition of Effort to increase success is at least close to inspired.

Character creation starts with a concept. Characters have a motivation (example: “I am an Irish wanderer, driven to seek out the mysteries of my ancient Celtic roots and beliefs.”) and an upbringing (such as noble or serf). The latter provides bonus skill points for certain skills.

In keeping with the medieval theme, characters also have “aspects of nature” that “define where you [sic] character falls in the endless wars between Heaven and Hell.” The player picks at least one but no more than three personality traits chosen from two lists: one for the Seven Heavenly Virtues and another for the Deadly Sins. Players earn Fate Points (used for character advancement and improvement) for roleplaying their PCs’ personality traits. Characters also have five background points that are spent buying Background traits that may affect skills. Skills are likewise purchased on a point system. Sorcery skills are accessed via appropriate background choices.

Further chapters detail character traits and background effects, the combat system, the magic system, the setting (which is chock full of win and sufficiently generic to fit a wide variety of game systems), an essay on roleplaying, various beasts and devils, and two short introductory scenarios.

Darkest Arts is a 10-page PDF that expands on two systems of magic, warlockry and necromancy. Another magic expansion, The Sacral and the Lost, talks about “white magic” such as angelic pacts. The wee people figure prominently in Danse Macabre, and another 10-page PDF, Faerie Lore, offers more detail about these mercurial creatures. Lastly, Tales Told by Shadows offers five short scenarios in 27 pages.

There is a wealth of good stuff in these documents. Even if you’re not inclined to play the game itself, the scenario, setting, and character background sections offer oodles of inspiration for anyone interested in running a dark fantasy game set in a horror-filled Middle Ages.

Tags: A to Z, horror, Mythopoetic Games