#RPGaDay2015 18: Favorite SF RPG

Conspiracy X isn’t your typical science fiction. It combines the weird pre-millennial “is there an apocalypse coming?” zeitgeist of the 1990s with the UFO lore of the 20th century and paranoia about government overreach, packaging it all in a familiar but legally distinct wrapper of federal agents investigating weird phenomena.

The game enjoyed a brief renaissance thanks to Kickstarter, as Eden Studios pushed out a number of supplements stuck in the pipeline after publishing a second edition of the core book, but it seems to have petered out in the years since. One of the stretch goals of the final fundraising campaign was to publish a long-rumored sequel game, Extinction, advancing the timeline one hundred years to an era when the various races are locked in all-out war for their own survival. No word on that front, and Eden’s efforts seem to be going into All Flesh Must Be Eaten and a new kid-friendly game, Adventure Maximus.

The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook for Conspiracy X 2.0

The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook collects previously published information about the alien races at large in the Conspiracy X role-playing game, and then brings their activities up to date with the new oughties timeframe. That said, the book is very rooted in the past. Each of the three chapters goes deep into the history of its species. “Way back, before you were born”-deep,^[1] to the origins of each species. Which is great for the long view. Midway through the Saurians chapter, I started asking myself, “Is this all we’re going to know about what they’re doing now on Earth?” Atlanteans, Greys and Saurians do all have a section on what they’re up to at the moment, but it’s so tantalizingly brief and vague compared to the full, detailed histories of the three species.

A lot of that must come from the original remit of The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook: condense material written for supplements of the first edition of Conspiracy X into one volume for the current line and move the timeline up by fifteen years. In light of that, each chapter does a remarkable job covering history and culture of three distinct species.

The name of the podcast escapes me, but I remember hearing the designer of Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, Chad Underkoffler — I think? It’s been a long time since I heard the episode in question — describe his realization that long histories of how Sir Buffington defeated Lord Nemesis, and so on, can and ought to be elided into “Epic stuff happened leading us to this tipping point. Now you guys need to do something.” I’ve taken that to heart, and any time I run across supplemental material that is basically a long timeline of events that sound very cool, but are of limited utility to informing the present situation — unless you decide all those points on the timeline are covert plot seeds to bring forward to your game’s time frame — I do look askance, and wonder if this space could have been given to something a little more relevant to the contemporary status quo, and how it’s about to fall apart.

That said, I did appreciate the look into the culture and mentality of the extraterrestrials, different and varied as they may be. The Greys are the closest to monolithic, since they’re so deeply interconnected by telepathy. But even they have differences and internal division — especially, interestingly, between those on Earth and those on Greyworld. Greys on Earth are quarantined from the rest of the species because of concern about psychic contamination. The Saurians, it turns out, are divided into many factions, unlike their representation in the corebook, which is really just one faction that is most visible to AEGIS. And the Atlanteans wind up a race of radical individualists, as everyone strikes out on their own.

The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook is an interesting peek into the alien races interested in Earth. I’m dubious, though, how much use the information is here to 80% of the Conspiracy X games out there, as it seems unlikely most of them are going to go that deep into interaction with any one species, let alone all three. I’d rather have much more information about what they’re doing on Earth right now, and examples of how AEGIS cells and Black Book agents interact with them.^[2]

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^[1] “Do you know how you got that dent, in your top lip? Way back, before you were born, I told you a secret, then I put my finger there and I said ‘Shhhhh!'”

^[2] Acknowledging that any throwaway mention of what an AEGIS cell did or reported is really a coded plot seed for the GM’s own campaign, either to kick it off or provide a template of what the players might get embroiled in.

The Rendlesham Incident

An artist’s depiction of the Rendlesham Forest Incident.

Balor of the Burning Eye is a Mad God of the WitchCraft universe that’s lived in the back of my mind for the last few years. It manifests in Malkuth as an enormous red eye, usually wreathed in flame, sometimes dripping blood. The original concept for Balor was a Mad God whose frequent incursions into Creation drove a cadre of Gifted to found the Brotherhood of Argus, dedicated to combating the Mad God and its minion’s efforts wherever they may be.

In this depiction of the Rendlesham Forest Incident, think of Balor as a manifesting ultraterrestrial. Balor has sent portions of its being to probe into the material world for many long aeons, for as long as there has been something on interest for it to probe. Long ago, Balor’s appearance was interpreted by locals as a relentless, burning eye. As time progressed, so did the interpretation of its appearance. These days, the ill-informed would call it a UFO, assuming it’s a vessel from another world piloted by beings of some form of flesh and blood.

But what they think is a ship is really still a four dimensional extrusion of an entity from a external space-time continuum that may not as few or as many dimensions as that. Balor’s appearance in Malkuth has no relation to however it may appear in its Creation of origin. It may not even realize how it seems to us, as the Mad God’s own perceptions are warped by the translation of four dimensional phenomena into its own sensory elements. The goals and motivations of such an ultraterrestrial may be even more opaque and unintelligible.

Consider the archetypal alien abduction encounter. An abduction victim recalls a sterile location, often white or some other neutral color. Small beings perform any manner of tests on their victim. In the ultraterrestrial hypothesis, these beings are from another dimension, rather than another world, maybe one coterminus with Earth as we know it — following the notion that it’s easier to step sideways into another world than cross interstellar gulfs. With the Mad Gods as ultraterrestrials of an extreme extra-cosmic order, maybe all those little beings are different expressions or manifestations of a larger being. Its natural state might be distributed across multiple organisms — as in Peter Watts’ short story companion to The Thing, the aptly-titled “The Things” — or it might be the translation to this Creation’s physics that cause a fracturing effect. In the latter case, an interesting twist would be different portions of the Mad God’s being working at odds with each other. Maybe one even founds the group that works against the Mad God’s ineffable goals.

In the case of Balor and the Brotherhood of Argus, the brotherhood may trace its founding to an encounter with the “true” Argus Panoptes, the watchman with one hundred eyes, which traces its existence back to the moment when the Balor entity first intruded on Malkuth-space. A portion of its being sheared off as the probing limb entered four dimensions, taking the appearance of a hundred-eyed giant. Lost and confused with no frame of reference, Argus associated the entity behind the now-truncated probing limb with danger and pain. Then it somehow pulled itself together sufficiently to use the overweening awe of local witnesses to sow the seeds that became the Brotherhood of Argus.

[Via Stochasticity.]

Conspiracy X Extraterrestrials Sourcebook is on Kickstarter

The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook for Eden Studios‘ Conspiracy X game line may see the light of the material world after all. Yesterday afternoon, George Vasilakos opened the Kickstarter page to put out the hard copy version of the book.

I jumped right on board, pledging enough money to get the printed edition. (I think I may have been one of the first two backers, actually . . . ) Of course, this being a Kickstarter project, Eden needs to raise the whole $5,000 by the November 30th deadline in order to collect the funds and send the book to the printer.

Conspiracy X has served me well as the engine for our Doctor Who campaign. I would love for crowd-funding to revive the series, which gets undue short shrift in the ever-balkanizing role-playing hobby. In addition to the Conspiracy X universe, which blends together the modern mythologies of Men in Black, grey aliens and other weirdness, the game is a solid platform on which to base any game in the modern era. Plus it’s cross-compatible with the other classic Unisystem games, and pretty equally compatible with Cinematic Unisystem material as well.

Furthermore, I would also love for this venture to show Eden Studios that crowd-funding can work for their other unreleased works, especially the WitchCraft supplements caught in their pipeline, so I have more than one reason to throw down for The Extraterrestrials Handbook. Not only could I get that book, but WitchCraft fans might have the opportunity to front for The Book of Geburah.

[TotalCon 2010] The Unexplained: Abduction: CE4

Friday night of TotalCon was my first scheduled game: Abduction: CE4, a game using Brad Younie‘s The Unexplained to chronicle the activities of the Foundation for Paranormal Investigation. Brad’s worked on The Unexplained for as long as I’ve known him, and possibly longer. We met at OGC in 2006, where I played his Ghosts of the Lady Grace adventure. Then it was called Strange World — and, the Ogre’s Cave’s review tells me, apparently grew out of Brad’s prior game, Now Playing, which used “FPI: The Show” as a sample game framework. It particularly piqued my interest because at the time, and even since then, I hadn’t come across another role-playing game that took straight, real world paranormal phenomena and the study thereof — as in, the paranormal as we know it, rather than as game designers imagine it might be in a world of secret supernatural beings — as its primary subject matter.

In addition to finally checking out the game, I had the secondary purpose of revisiting FUDGE, the super light rule system Brad uses in his games. I had an absolutely miserable experience with FUDGE in Ghosts of the Lady Grace with a phenomenal run of poor rolls and wanted to give the rules another play experience.  Abduction: CE4 billed itself as investigating the abrupt disappearance of a college student during the observation of a low flying UFO, a true close encounter of the fourth kind.

Signs of Alien Abduction

Our Strange World offers up fifty-eight potential indicators of alien abduction.¹ My favorite is the very last: “Have many of these traits but can’t remember anything about an abduction or alien encounter.”

Running a scenario centered around alien abduction can be tricky. You can go the X-Files route, with the players acting as investigators looking into a strange occurrence. It’s the traditional tactic, I suppose, but one I’m leery of. I like to have outright fantastic elements in my modern games, rather than dancing along the “is it genuine or something mundane?” line that The X-Files liked to play with. Asking players to putz around interviewing characters is more procedural than seems interesting to me. That and my ability to improvise their half of the conversation tends to peter out after the second exchange, leaving it down to interaction skill rolls, which isn’t terribly fun for anyone.

An alien abduction adventure that I ran would have to be more situational than interaction-based. “Here’s the premise of the situation. Now poke around and try to achieve a goal.” Which is why I like the set up of Tri Tac Games’ Incursion. Player characters are alien abductees, kidnapped to serve as slave labor elsewhere in the galaxy. But they escape their captors and must not only defend their planet from further predations, but first find it. It’s Lost in Space meets Communion II: Communion Harder.

Moreover, I’d put more moving parts in the adventure, things the player characters can experiment with, or at least take advantage of. A lot of archetypal X-Files episodes involved Mulder and Scully fumbling around in the woods, looking for things or avoiding things. A roleplaying adventure would need to be more tactile, in a mental sense: a spaceship to explore, alien widgets to brandish unwisely, agents to strive against and confound.

My mind keeps going back to an adventure written for West End Games’ Ghostbusters game, Hot Rods of the Gods. It played with UFOs, ancient astronauts and, of course, how they might tie to modern perceptions of paranormal phenomena, all with a cheesy sense of humor. I wish I hadn’t accidentally traded that away with a stack of Teenage Mutants Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness books.

¹ I’ll point out a lot of these indicators also apply to older beliefs about faeries, their tendency to abduct humans and changelings.