Welcome to Sunnydale Preview

As follow-up to yesterday’s #RPGaDAY post, here’s a melancholy visitor from the past: the preview PDF of Welcome to Sunnydale, courtesy the Wayback Machine. Welcome to Sunnydale was the next Buffy the Vampire Slayer supplement in Eden Studios’ pipeline when they lost the license from Fox. There were more books written and various stages of development as well, like a Watcher’s handbook, and books for Angel paralleling the players and beasties books for Buffy, but apparently none were so far along as Welcome to Sunnydale was. So well developed, in fact, that Amazon lists it as “out of print.” If only we’d had that brief, shining window of market release.

Thanks to urbwar of RPG.net for digging up the Wayback Machine link.

#RPGaDAY 12: Old RPG You Still Play/Read

The #RPGaDAY prompt was concocted by Dave Chapman of Autocratik. Grab the list and join in!

I don’t especially want to think of Eden Studios’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an old role-playing game, but the game is more than ten years old now, it’s out of print — though not circulation, by some miracle of licensing — and the Buffy property seems to have become passé with the young peoples. But my loyalty for the game as a workhorse for whatever I want to run is indefatigable. I used it for a BPRD scenario when I first began running games at conventions, layered in elements for Scions of Time, and then recently switched over to using Buffy for my Ghostbusters games at Carnage. And during the playtest of Post-Diluvian Predators of Rochester, certain players snickered at the informal style of the writing, and its apparent lack of tables, so that’s where my sense that the game’s line into the gaming culture zeitgeist sunset some time ago.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and its siblings Angel and Army of Darkness, has a few key qualities that keep me coming back to it as the engine to run my scenarios. First is ease of play. Like its classic Unisystem cousins, Buffy uses a single d10 plus skill and ability for most questions of resolution. On the GM’s side, it gets even easier: most non-player characters are rendered as a series of target numbers for the players to roll against. If you’re juggling multiple creatures with weird abilities, and trying to keep in mind the state of everyone else in the fray, not having to worry about rolling dice or adding up numbers correctly is huge. Cinematic Unisystem delegates that work to the players, and really, they were going to roll dice anyway. Why make the GM roll too, when you can get mostly the same result with a pre-calculated target number?

Secondly, it’s super easy to adapt material to fit a preexisting idea, or come up with something new. Buffy and Angel both have guidelines for roughing out new monsters for players to beat up. If that’s not enough, I can flip through WitchCraft books for more concepts already rendered in Unisystem terms. I did that with Post-Diluvian Predators, as well, actually, pulling some “Vampyre” abilities from Mystery Codex to simulate a variant I found in Night’s Black Agents that I wanted to be the default vampire type in my Ghostbusters world.

Thirdly, Buffy‘s Drama Points are something I wish more games offered. I get that the whole point of the dice is to introduce change and risk. But there should be room to stretch when a character is exceptionally motivated to succeed. Drama Points provide that stretch. I think maybe they’re too plentiful in a convention game — everyone could probably do with a fifth of what a starting character gets for Drama Points — but as long as they’re in short supply, players will value them as a resource to ensure that what they want to happen, will.

If you’re curious about Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Cinematic Unisystem, check out the original quickstart, which is still available courtesy the BBC.

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.

Monday Mashup: The Madness Conspiracy

With the confirmation from Sean Punch that the contract for a new version of The Madness Dossier in some form has been signed and the resurgence of Conspiracy X material in recent months, the thought occurs to me that the two worlds would interlock rather snugly.

AEGIS is a ready-made secret agency to drop in the place of Project Sandman. Its agents are already trained to cover up unknowable horrors. The Red King and its implications are right in their wheelhouse. In that way, the impending threat of History B slots right into the world of AEGIS.

For a more integrated presentation, the irruptors match up fairly well with the Atlanteans. They’re still wielders of incomprehensible, godlike technology from another time, only that other time is now sideways rather than forward.^[1] Their objective is to reclaim their world, rather than ensure its existence. And like Captain Chronos and other inscrutable time travelers, that objective may be served by acts that work in harmony with AEGIS agents’ own as often as they hinder.

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^[1] And I write that lacking the full skinny on the Atlanteans, not having yet pored over The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook.

The Kickstarter Compulsion

I’m starting to think of Kickstarter projects as addictive little rushes. I’ve done two now — I can’t remember if crowdfunding the original edition of Wild Talents was actual Kickstarter or something Kickstarter-esque — for Conspiracy X books. There’s more than a bit of frisson, repeatedly checking in on the total, wondering if the project will reach its goal in time.

Most recently, with The Paranormal Sourcebook, Eden Studios threw in some additional enticement. First they offered Zener cards for pledges of a certain level, then created a secondary fundraising goal, on attainment of which the pledged get GM screens for the game. The project reached that secondary goal today, so I’m feeling pretty jazzed, like I accomplished something good and right for the world. That’s probably a gross overestimation of a role-playing game supplement’s impact on the destiny of billions, but it’s possible the book may not have seen the life of day if I hadn’t pledged and done my portion of sharing links and so forth.

And that’s maybe one of the cleverer parts of Kickstarter: the projects are set up that the pledged are motivated to promote. They want the thing being promised, so it’s in their direct self-interest to make it happen by telling friends and interested parties. It’s a built-in marketing effort. And at the end of it, one gets to feel good for contributing to the creation of something that likely otherwise would not have existed.

Of course, I’m crowing before the game’s over. I haven’t actually gotten any of this stuff for which I’ve pledged. The Extraterrestrial Sourcebook has reportedly gone to the printer by now. I wasn’t happy that the two fundraisers overlapped such that I wouldn’t be able to receive and gauge the first book before the pledge deadline for the second passed, but I took a gamble. The play’s still underway, so we’ll see how it goes.

The Dilemma of Supplements

There is a dilemma in which I find myself trapped again and again when it comes to new role-playing games. A new game comes out whose premise I dig, so I pick it up. It turns out I like the game and then I look forward to picking future supplements expanding on that game. Only . . . the supplements get trapped in the pipeline or they don’t cover topics of interest to me.

In the first case, I’m a fan of WitchCraft and Conspiracy X, two games published by Eden Studios. Both have had chronic issues with Eden getting supplements through development and into the market. As I’ve seen it related on web forums, they need an infusion of cash to pay the printer for a run of a supplement, so they knock out an All Flesh Must Be Eaten book to generate that sum. But somehow that doesn’t work out due to time and energy concerns, so books like The Book of Geburah and Grace & Guidance linger in development hell.

In the second case, consider The Day After Ragnarok, published by Atomic Overmind Press. I love the primary setting book. It’s awesome stuff. The published supplementary materials available so far which I . . . don’t really care about. Sten guns? Monster Island? Not for me.

The quandary for me in both situations is this: I want more books to do with the game in question. I understand I need to vote with my dollars to make that happen. But buying the things available seemingly sends the wrong message. In the case of WitchCraft and Conspiracy X, there is nothing to buy; supporting them would mean buying All Flesh Must Be Eaten books; and an uptick in sales for that line isn’t going to help its beleaguered siblings. Similarly for The Day After Ragnarok, if I buy the existing supplements, it tells Atomic Overmind two things: I am interested in those topics — when really I am not — and I buy PDFs — when really I do so only under duress. Additionally, my luxury cash is not so plentiful that I can buy books willy-nilly without having any interest in the content.

So it’s a bit of a bind. Buy stuff I don’t particularly want in the hopes that the rising effect somehow affects the products I’m really interested in — or could be, if they existed — or buy nothing but the books I want and watch the line quietly taper into “Sure do wish they’d published some more books that . . . what was it called again?”

(There are the other options of buying extra copies of the core books, which leads back to needless waste of limited cash, and running the game to get other people into buying the books. Grassroots promotion is probably the best route, but it’s so time intensive compared to buying a book, you know? Really though, that’s probably the way to go, so long as the books are actually still available for purchase.)