RPGaDay Challenge - Day 23

Day 23 - Coolest looking RPG product / book

I'm a visual person.

While it's not hard for me to imagine strange aliens, frightening monsters, colossal starships and unearthly vistas, I do enjoy a good illustration, painting or other artistic depiction of these things. I am more easily and thoroughly inspired by artwork than I am by music or even the written word (though I do love a good written word).

IMO, the art in most American RPGs is, well, disappointing.

Not all, but a lot, and certainly that of the most mainstream of them. Now I am leaving out licensed RPGs here, as they usually have the benefit of using art from the comic books, computer games, TV shows, or films they're based on. I am talking about D&D, Pathfinder, Traveller, and many, many others. Their art just doesn't do much for me.

Especially not when, for example, Traveller can look like this:

Ok.

 

The Fifth Frontier War

Japanese Edition 

 

and this...

  

 

Traveller Box Set

Original Cover Art - Japanese Edition

 

Yeah, I'm a little miffed that we get this...

 

And they get this...

 

 

 

I mean, it's not just more, and better art, it's the design skill that goes into it, the quality of the printing, and just the overall presentation, and format of the books. They just look great.

 

Check out these pictures of Wares 1092, an artbook made for the Wares Blade RPG that actually has game content in it! Let that percolate in your brain juices for a second. This is not a game book with some nice art; This is an artbook with game information! Do we do that? No! Why don't we do that?!

 

Our Superhero games tend to look good, especially M&M, DC Adventures and Marvel Heroic (again though, licensed products), though not so much Champions. Why? Why is the art of Champions still so weak sauce in 2014?

 

Anyway, in conclusion, the coolest looking RPG products I own are all from Japan.

 

Enjoy...*

 

Wares 1092, Front Cover Art

 
  

 

Map Fold Out in the Inside Front Cover

 

 

Locations on the Map

Machine Soldiers

This picture came out badly due to my crappy camera.
The following pages of this section list various Mecha of the setting, how powerful they are,
how much they cost to operate and maintain, and other details useful in game play.

Some pages, like this one above, show how the cockpit and control systems
of the various Machine Soldiers look. 

 

*The camera on my phone stinks. Doesn't do it justice. 

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Barking Alien
  

Sorry this came a bit late. We had our first session of our new Bushido campaign today. A character creation and prologue session, it took longer than intended.

Fret not, a post about the results will be forthcoming.

MAGIC AND MACHINERY

A slight change of plans.

 

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am going to be easing up on the theme of Anime/Manga gaming and just posting whatever I feel like talking about, including Anime/Manga gaming if indeed the mood strikes me.

 

With the generally lackluster response and interest in the subject however, I am loosing steam and my thoughts are drifting to other ideas. I've mentioned this before, it's how my head works.

 

So for now, I did want to show off one of my favorite Japanese Table Top RPGS. A mix of Dungeons and Dragons and Battletech - Medieval Fantasy crossed with Giant Robots. Lord of the Rings + Pacific Rim =

 

WARES BLADE

  

   

Clockwise from Upper Left;

Wares Blade - 1st Edition Boxed Set (1988),
Wares Blade 'The Renewal' - 2nd Edition Boxed Set (1995-97)

Wares Blade D20 Rulebook (2008), Fan art from one of dozens of Wares Blade blog sites

Wares Blade - Wares 1092 Tactical/Strategy Game for the Playstation (1997)

Wares Blade 'Ryude Knight' Resin Model Kit (2000),
One of the many Wares Blade setting novels (2003)

Center: Wares Blade Fold Out Poster From 'RPG' Magazine (1994)

 

 

The cover of the May 1991 issue of one of my favorite Japanese gaming magazines, entitled simply and elegantly enough 'RPG Magazine'. This is probably one of the first issues I ever purchased and it is still in mint condition. The feature article is of course, Wares Blade.

Rules

In its original form the game plays like a modified and slightly streamlined version of the original Battletech game, with PCs handled in a system most closely akin to Call of Cthulhu (Basic Role Playing system) meets D&D.

Magic

Magic is somewhat akin to Ars Magica crossed with Runequest. There are schools of magic, known as 'Gates', that correspond to various elements. The eight Gates are Earth, Fire, Metal, Moon, Sun, Water, Wind, and Wood. There is a ninth Gate that isn't directly connected to any of the elements called the 'Outer Gate', often referred to as the Out Gate. It deals with simple magic that doesn't fall under the auspices of the other domains.

Interestingly, the Undead are tied to the Earth Gate, since the dead are buried in the Earth. Dwarves are usually of the Earth or Metal Gate, leading many to distrust them and view them as having contact with Necromancers. Dragons, most of them anyway, are connected to the Fire Gate and Shapeshifters with the Moon.

Mana, known as Renpo in the game, is everywhere and in all things, although the type/Gate of the Renpo is dependant on the thing you are referring to. Mountains contain mainly Earth and Metal Gate Renpo while the Ocean contains mainly Water and perhaps some Wood.

Ware Stones are rare mystical rocks (more minerals than gems or crystals) that contain and focus Renpo. Wizards often wear jewelry and carry foci embedded with these stones to assist  them with spell casting. The stones are required to create any kind of permanent magic item, including the 12-18 foot battle armors known as the Machine Soldiers.

Original Wares Blade illustration by Qu-Ro-Quro
  

Machinery

Machine Soldiers are the giant robots that give this otherwise traditional fantasy game its rather specific twist. There are many kinds of Machine Soldiers and indeed, 'Machine Soldier' is perhaps the least impressive of them. Those that existed in the time of the 'Old Dynasty Empire' were far more amazing than the ones being built in the setting's present (Wares 1092) and are called Ryude Knights. Between the artifact-like Ryude Knights and the cheap, 'modern' copy Machine Soldiers are the Machine Knights, which are either of superior, modern craftsmanship or are partially made from the remains of a damaged Ryude Knight.

Geography and Setting

Map of The Ahanic Western Continent
from The Wares 1092 Artbook and Sourcebook

Modified by me. I removed the Japanese place names
and intend to rewrite them in English.

 

The physical setting is called Ahan, also known as 'The World of Wares' (in reference to the importance of the Renpo stones). Only the Ahanic Western Continent is fully fleshed out in the original game, with the East being a 'land of spirits'. At one point, we do learn of a Human and Elven land whose people resemble the Celts and Gauls mixed together. The land in questions sits on the border between the Western Continent and the Eastern spirit lands. The country itself, 'Farthest Ki'Dein', is somewhat like Ireland or Scotland.

The center of the Western Continent is called Kedamon, a land of demons and monsters that also houses the ruins of the Old Dynasty Empire. It is mainly desert and in some areas borders haunted Jungles and woodlands prone to terrible storms. 

At the continent's Western most edges are the kingdoms most player characters would call home. These include many 'holy sites', places of historical, cultural and spiritual importance to the people of Ahan. There are few if any gods remaining, as apparently most of them were killed in a war between the Old Dynasty Empire and the heavens which resulted in the demon infested wasteland in the middle of the continent. Instead, the people worship spirits and spirtual places. These locations are often fought over by various factions and are one of the key sources of conflict in the Wares Blade setting.

There is a lot more I can tell you but for now this will do.

I am disappointed in the turn out for this month but at the same time, I realize not everyone is going to get jazzed about something so foreign (pun intended) to their experience.

Next up...I'm not sure.

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Barking Alien

Super Robot Wars

They go by many names.

Armored Trooper. EVA Unit. Mobile Suit. Mortar Head. Jaeger. Heavy Gear. Ryude Knight.

They are Mecha.

Giant Robots.

While the term 'Mecha' was actually coined by the Japanese to reflect any kind of mechanized vehicle or device (a car is a mecha), it has become synonymous in Western culture with the large, humanoid, usually human piloted or otherwise operated robots seen in a vast number of Japanese Anime and Manga series.

For the most part, mecha, being machines of some sort, are largely relegated to Science Fiction settings, although a more than casual glance across the Anime/Manga spectrum reveals mecha in such diverse genres as medieval fantasy and steampunk to World War II alternate history and modern day 'superheroes'.

The granddaddy of all Mecha RPGs is, well, sadly it's Battletech. Unfortunately the giant robots of Battletech have little to do with Japanese entertainment fiction mecha. In Battletech, the very existence of the Battlemechs they use seem questionable at best. They overheat more often then tanks in the setting, are slower than all the aircraft, and don't generally seem as versatile as you'd imagine a robot with legs and arms would be. In attempt to capture the 'realism' of what giant, humanoid robots would be like (wait...I need to stop laughing. Realism. Giant Robots. Hold on, I can't breathe. OK. Whew.), they took away the beauty of having giant robots in your setting in the first place, IMHO.

 

The first game to truly 'get it', and the only name you'll ever really need to know for giant robot gaming goodness, was (and is) Mekton.

The creation of Mike "Right on Time, Ahead of His Time" Pondsmith and produced by R. Talsorian Games, Mekton wasn't inspired by the art of giant robots from Japan, it was ABOUT the giant robots from Japan. At the same time, it was very much about the people who piloted said robots, especially in its second and third incarnations (Mekton II and Mekton Zeta respectively).

Nailing the style and feel of Japanese animation and comics perfectly, as well as hitting that oh-so-hard-to-hit sweet spot between simplicity and crunch*, Mekton became a major favorite among Players and Gamemasters alike in the gaming circles in which I roamed. The flexibility and versitility of the rules system meant that it was adaptable to many different campaign concepts.

While the default for many is the military style giant robot war story seen in Votoms, Macross and the various Gundam series, the game also makes the superheroic mecha of Giant Robo, The Big O, Mazinger Z and others possible. With a few of the supplements (but in all honesty just a little imagination and a minimum of effort) you can easily create powered armor, cars, starfighters, massive space battlecruisers and even fortresses and space stations.

Practical? No. Easy to construct? Pretty much, yeah.

 

 

A number of other mech games have come out since the original 1984 release of  Mekton and, more importantly perhaps, the 1994 release of Mekton Z. The vast majority of these have been very much flashes-in-the-pan. The most popular and successful non-Mekton mecha game that really got the feel down right was Heavy Gear and the Jovian Chronicles, produced by Canadian based Dream Pod 9 and utilizing their Silhouette System. Heavy Gear was the most commerically successful, also generating a huge line of miniatures and a CGI animated cartoon.

 

Other notable mecha games include the mecha supplement book for GURPS (GURPS Mecha if I am not mistaken), Bliss Stage (a very cool and clever indie game patterned after Neon Genesis Evangelion) and to a fairly significant extent RIFTS (which is full of mecha, from battlesuits to gigantic striding metal menaces).

 

I could easily go on forever discussing this element of Japanese Amime/Manga and to that end I will follow this up with a post detailing some of the giant robot campaigns I have run in the past. For a long time, to many people who were only generally familiar with Japanese pop culture entertainment, all Anime and Manga was Mecha Anime and Manga. While the field is obviously far more diverse than that, it remains a favorite sub-genre of yours truly, possibly due to my general fascination with robots outside of gaming.

 

If you're interested, here are a few older posts on the subject of Mecha and Mekton:

 

Breast Fire, Rocket Punch, Form Blazing Sword

God From The Machine

M is For Mecha, Heavy Metal Gear

 

Watashi-tachi wa tanoshinde imasu ka?

 

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Barking Alien







My Mind At Warp

Hmm...no responses to my previous post on the intro to my new BattleTech Reborn campaign are a bit discouraging. I was hoping someone out there would tell me if I was hot, luke warm or just plain cold with the lead in to the game's setting and main premise. -Sigh-

The problem with me is that sometimes, when I don't see any reaction or enthusiasm to my ideas, I start to get distracted and drift toward other ideas in hopes that they may wow where the previous one has perhaps failed.

This is especially true when other things are occupying my mind and double-plus-so if they were lurking in the gray matter before the current project even got started.

No, I am not dumping my BattleTech Reborn idea but I am in the 'lull before the season starts', not as excited about it as I was when I came up with it or as I will be when I am ready to start running it. And I will be excited when I am ready to go, of that you can be certain. Right now I am in a holding pattern, trying to complete our current Champions game and prepping for BR but not quite set to launch.

Other things bouncing around the padded room that is the inside of my noggin' are Star Trek-like games and Vegan Pancakes.

When I say Star Trek-like games, I include Star Trek itself of course but what I am really thinking of is Starships & Spacemen (especially E.T. Smith's variant, which I played at RECESS some time back) or my Galaxy Quest games or any number of other alternate 'Trek' themed settings, systems or campaign ideas. I recently read Redshirts by John Scalzi and while I didn't end up liking the book very much, I liked the initial premise and it definitely inspired me to start toying with a pet project I started a while back but haven't looked at again in a while.

I had this idea of mixing the aforementioned Starships & Spacemen game with the resource management elements of Meikyuu (Make You) Kingdom, the Japanese TRPG where you play the ruler and court of a small nation who go adventuring in dungeons to build up the coffers and expand your country.

One of the neat ideas in Meikyuu Kingdom is that each PC has a number of minions, little more than pips on his or her character sheet, that serve the sole purpose of adding bonuses to certain rolls the PC makes or dying in the PCs stead. For example, if you are attacked for 5 hit points you can put three of these minions in front of you and shave the damage done to 2.

Imagine that in a Star Trek-like setting. Each PC can beam down with a number of extras that are pretty much there just to die when the group is caught in a cave in or attacked by an Altairian Flint-Eel or whathaveyou. Perhaps a system could be put into place that differentiates them as Science Extras, Security Extras, etc. Maybe you can use your experience points to bump one up from Extra to Reoccurring Character and get a more useful henchman.

I really like this concept and I think I'm going to put some work into it on the side while I force myself to work on BattleTech Reborn...ooh...did I say that out loud? I didn't really mean it. I just...so...Vegan Pancakes...

By Vegan I don't mean the pancakes originate on a planet orbiting the star Vega. Those are much more difficult to make and digest if you are not a solinium based life form. No, see, my girlfriend is Vegan and I love to cook and I make awesome pancakes so now I want to make ones she can eat and enjoy. This may be a tougher task than getting my current gaming group to agree on a single course of action but then again I have never been one to take the easy route when it comes to creative problem solving.

Wish me luck...in all endeavours. Hey, if you're already wishing you might as well...

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Barking Alien

Preparing For War

In summarizing the setting for our upcoming, new campaign, 'BattleTech Reborn', I came up with this...


***

THE END OF THE SUCCESSION WARS, THE BEGINNING OF THE CLAN INVASIONS
THE HISTORY OF BATTLETECH REBORN





Comprised of many hundreds of worlds and overseen by the five Great Houses, the Inner Sphere of our galaxy's Orion-Cygnus Arm was once the home to the mighty Star League, an alliance of the Great Houses that achieved wonders no governing body had achieved before or since.

Following the collaspe of the Star League centuries ago, the galaxy has known virtually nothing but conflict and division. It was long believed that nothing could again unify the Inner Sphere, except the eventual victory of one of the Great Houses.

Unfortunately, the end of the many Succession Wars did not unify the Inner Sphere but instead shatter it into many smaller nations, with each of the Great Houses controlling a portion of the region.

What came next was as tragic as it was unexpected. The former Star League Defense Force, now broken up and reorganized into group known as The Clans, invaded the Inner Sphere looking for resources that were desperately few in the other star systems known as the Periphary.

As the the Clans began their guerilla raids and surprise attacks against an Inner Sphere exhausted from centuries of war, a retalitory strike against several Clan colonies resulted in enraging them to fevered levels. Now it was not only a quest for materials and food, it was a matter of honor. It was personal.

No military force of the Great Houses claimed responsibility for the attacks on the Clan colonies, which were largely civillian outposts and their destruction took many innocent lives. As the Great Houses and Clans clashed on planets all across the Orion Arm, the truly wise and observant asked the question, "Who really attacked the Clan colonies and why?"

Sadly, it was a question drowned out by the thunder of war on the fields of battle. The Clans blamed the Great Houses, the Houses shed no tears for their invaders' kin and ComStar ,the governing body that held control of Humanity's birth place, the Earth, claimed neutrality in the conflict but showed no desire to help any one party over another.

Now, in the year 3052 AD, our story truly begins. The Star League is gone. The Great Houses fight against invaders and each other. The Clans attack the Inner Sphere for resources and revenge. A mystery remains unsolved. The Succession Wars are over but the necessity for Battletech is reborn.

***

Well? How's that sound for starters?

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Barking Alien

Canons In Front of Me

Battletech's 'canon', like that of any long running series, be it a TV show, comic book, RPG or whathaveyou, has been developed over the long history of its production. With the first edition of the Battletech game having come out in 1984 (originally as a boardgame/wargame called Battledroids), we're looking at a good 28 years of material to sift through. There have been numerous splatbooks, Mechwarrior - The Battletech RPG, card games, video games, novels, etc. All in all, there's a freakin' lot of Battletech.

How am I going to make use of all of that?

Well, I'm not. Or at the very least, not right away.

A firm believer in the concept that less is more when initially introducing a group of players to a setting, I am working now to distill all that canon and history into an easy to digest summary. I want to focus my next campaign, BattleTech Reborn, on conflict between the Great Houses of the setting's 'Inner Sphere' of charted space (roughly 450-550 light years around Earth) and the Clans, the former military defense forces of the fallen Star League, who are returning from their self-imposed exile into what is known as the Periphery, a vast area of largely unexplored space some 500 more light years beyond the Inner Sphere.






Here is a preliminary design for the campaign map of known space. The colored borders indicate the areas of space ruled by the various interstellar government powers. I may be adding or taking away or simply shifting the position of some political entities but for the most part this is the way they will all sit next to each other.

The deep blue-grey-green circles indicate the regions of the Periphery and Deep Periphery. At the center of the map (well, a tad off center actually) you may note a small, white circle around a yellow star. That star is Sol and that represents the position of the Earth.

Now, I have not quite laid out all the details in my version of the Battletech universe's history, nor am I completely certain yet what event or events specifically set off the new state of conflict the PCs will find themselves in. The finishing touches in repainting and restoring this old jalopy are not complete by a long shot. In the meantime, here's another cool mech...





Great! Now quickly, while they're distracted...

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Barking Alien

God From The Machine

I've got quite a bit to cover this morning so let's get started...

I've finally decided what my next campaign is going to be.

It was a long, winding and none-too-smooth process to come up with this bad mamma jamma but I really think my group and I have a winner on our hands.

Over the course of our last few Champions sessions and several one-shot side games, I really tried to analyze what I was doing right, wrong, not as good as I could do and what elements I wanted to add in that I wasn't adding in and why.

I also paid close attention to my players, their likes, dislikes, personal styles and I had a pretty powerful Q&A with them in this regard a week ago and a report on my 'findings' a week later (this past Saturday).

To a small extent, there are definitely elements of our gaming techniques that are different enough to rub each other the wrong way on occasion. I am just as much at fault in this regard as anyone else (except my good buddy Dave, who we all agreed is the one person in the group whose approach to gaming sits well with everybody), if only in that I need to show a little more patience with those whose styles are most different or contrary to what I find fun. Honestly though, I certainly acknowledge that there are other elements of my style of GMing that may not be perfect for everbody.

With all of our sins laid bare (er, so to speak), I was able to begin putting together something that would appeal to everyone...even me.



While the concept for this game was surely the result of the efforts I mentioned above (as well as being the fulfillment of a long time pet project of mine), it was just as surely cemented by a conversation I had with my girlfriend this past weekend about atheism, spiritualism and quantum physics (Yes, she's THAT awesome. Yes.). In that conversation, which also discussed different approaches to the creative process and how communicating with someone passionate about their craft can inspire the desire to create in yourself, I realized that depending on ones perspective, the Art Film can be viewed as a Blockbuster and vice versa.

I wanted to create a game with a very unique atmosphere, a 'look' and 'feel' very different from what we've been playing over the last year or so. At the same time, I definitely didn't want something unregoinizable, where my slightly more conservative players would find themselves lost. I needed action, intrigue, grand vistas and awesome 'special effects' complete with my signature big explosions. I also needed and wanted there to be Human passions, philosophies and a perceived meaning behind it all. This campaign idea called for a grand epic across disputed stars, where survival of a people was at stake, not just a quest for fame and glory.

Sounds exciting, no?

The end result, is something I have been wanted to do for some time. I really like the Battletech universe, always have. It's Great Houses, Clans, various political, economic and social factions battling for control of a massively large space opera setting is the perfect backdrop of an action/adventure game with the potential for a bit more character depth. Plus, it has giant robots. Mecha are like bacon. Everything is better with mecha.

Except...Battletech mecha suck. They just one-hundred-percent-no-ifs-ands-or-buts suck the big wazoo. Slow. Limited in function. Ugly.

First things first. Replace all the images and designs with ones that are actually in the style of Japanese mecha and look cool.






Excellent. Moving on...

And the rules to Battletech and Mechwarrior? Clunky, wargamey and definitely not what I want. I want Battletech as if it were an modern Anime or Manga series. I want fast, kinetic with cool robot designs that can do what robots in Anime do.

Got it!

A little while back I brushed off my ol' Mekton book and my homebrewed alternate version of the free RPG Extended Mission and created a very fun kitbashed frankenstein of a game I call the Extended Mecha system. I have decided to clean that up a little and use it for this game. Essentially a simplified Mekton, the key difference is that weapons don't do points of damage, they do 'rolls' of damage. When you score a hit, the targets armor removes a numbers of rolls. If any rolls get through, the attack rolls on a chart to see what damage was done to the enemy mecha, vehicle, etc.

So let's say my Particle Cannon does 5 rolls. I hit my target, who has an armor of 3. I scored 2 rolls. I roll twice and get:

- Component Damaged. Operates at -2.
- System Offline. Skill action needed to restore.

Based on where we were in relation to each other and the way I worded my attack ("I am not letting him get aways again!"), the GM decides the Component Damaged was the Flight Jets in his left leg. The System that went down was the enemy mech's Enhanced Maneuver System and he can't really steer right now. The enemy pilot needs to rolls his Computer Skill or Mecha Engineering to get the system fixed and the system back up and running.

While I am normally not one for charts, I have used this system in the past to excellent effect so I am willing to go with it for this type of setting. By defining a mech's operational capacity as made up of Components (Physical Parts like Hands, Feets, Weapons, Rockets, etc.) and Systems (Functions programmed into or handled by the computer such as Communications, Targeting, Sensors, etc.), players get the feeling they are operating a robotic vehicle and not just a tower of numbers.

I have a lot more to say on the subject and rest assured I will be detailing the campaign elements and how it all plays out here on Barking Alien.

Oh before I go...almost forgot...

New summer session has begun at the learning center in Brooklyn where I run a combo Creative Writing/Storytelling/RPG Playing class on Sundays. We just started and it looks like it's going to be a blast. I am running a sort of humorous horror game based on the Japanese TRPG 'Peekaboo Horror' where the kids play Middle-School club of supernatural investigators who each have an otherworldly companion/side kick - played by another player! So each kid is playing two characters, their own club member and some other members 'Boo'. I am using InSpectres crossed with Monsters and Other Childish Things.

RIP Ernest Borgnine. Sad to see him go but he left us with a great body of work.

I'm sure I am forgetting something...oh well, I guess I'll just have to blog more. ;)

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Barking Alien