UncleBear Media

Strike Force 7, by OtherWorld Creations, was originally released several years ago in an OGL/Spycraft-compatible version. It’s now been re-released in Savage Worlds and RuneQuest versions, with some updated background material. The fluff is all exactly the same between versions, with only the crunch changed to suit the mechanics of your choice. To make things less confusing, I’m going to be referring to the Savage Worlds version in this article.

Let’s not try to obfuscate what Strike Force 7 really is: a G.I. Joe roleplaying game with enough of the serial numbers filed off to avoid a lawsuit. Considering that Hasbro owns both G.I. Joe and Wizards of the Coast, I’ve long wondered why they’ve never done an official roleplaying game. There have been unofficial, fan-made versions of Joe RPGs (a Fuzion version and a d20 version, both of which play fast-and-loose with intellectual property law and are not endorsed by myself or this site), but Strike Force 7 is the closest we may ever get to a professionally produced Joe-style game. That’s not a bad thing. While you can easily recreate anything in the Joe cartoon series or comics with this by changing a few names here and there, you also have the freedom to run a Joe-style game your own way without the restrictions typically imposed by playing in an established universe. Any sort of action-oriented paramilitary forces vs. terrorists game can be run here, as straight and gritty or pulpish as you choose.

I would definitely use the background material in a game — I actually like Skorpion, the ST7 villain organization, better than Cobra. The leader, who calls himself Pharoah, has credible motivations and thinks he’s a good guy, like most major historical villains and terrorists. While he looks like a schmuck on the cover, I kind of take that as a propeganda characature. I would likely run it using Savage Worlds, because that it admittedly my system of choice, but I would make some tweaks. As with most games that get proted from d20 to Savage Worlds, the concept that Edges aren’t exactly Feats is lost. More is not always better; sometimes more is just more. Many of the Edges are unnecessary or overpowered.

Overall, though, I like it. I does what it intends to do, mostly well. Good touch, worth a look.

Want to learn more about Strike Force 7? Read on…

• Atomic Array: Strike Force 7 (Atomic Array 028)
• Game Cryer: Review by Chris Perrin
• Uncle Bear: Impressions
• Flames Rising: Savaged! Review by Todd Cash
• Emerson’s Bookshelf: Now with RuneQuest and Savage Worlds
• allgeektout: Hiding in Plain Sight
• Atomic Array: Free Mini-Mission

Drop by OtherWorld Creations today!

Like

Unlike

More from unclebear

• Impressions: Pathfinder Core Rulebook
• Play Impressions: Cornerstone
• Impressions: Werewolf: The Forsaken

Many gamemasters play music in the background for while running their games. Most seem to just put on instrumental music scores and forget about it, and enjoy the kismet when a piece syncs up with the action at the table. The problem is, that only happens accidentally and music actually run contrary to the mood or even destroy it.

A technique I’ve used is to create a selective soundtrack. Most campaign-length games I’ve run have had a theme song. Played at the start of a game session, it not only gets the players in the mood, it signals that it’s time to cut the table talk and start gaming. I usually come up with an “end credits” song, to indicate the session is over, which plays over me handing out experience points or other awards.

You can come up with stock tracks for different types of scenes – combat, chases, resting and healing, and so on. You might decide to give each player character and major NPC a theme song, to be played during their spotlight scenes. This could be as hokey as the Darth Vader march from the Star Wars films, or ring entrance music used to introduce people at WWE and UFC events. It could be most subtle, something with tun or lyrics that reflect with the character is about. Character themes could change as the characters themselves change, less intense as characters resolve personal issues, more bombastic and grandiose as they gain levels or social status. It’s also a good clue to gamemasters that an NPC might be important, if you play a new song rather than the generic “so you’re hanging out in the tavern” music. And yes, you can come up with themes for recurring locations as well.

Frequently-encountered monsters, like orcs, kobolds, Klingons, or Nazis, might get their own songs. The player says, “I kick in the door”. You say okay, and queue up the music. “Oh, crap, THEM again?”. Boss monsters and named villains can share a piece of music, or each get their own.

Music can also be used to set time limits. The theme from Jeopardy is a good example; 30 seconds long, played twice and you know your minute it up. You can use a piece of music to set the time limit for figuring out a puzzle or trap, something the players need to resolve without rolling dice. When I ran a Spycraft campaign, I found a techno song that ran a little over 9 minutes that I used for “gearing up”; the players had until the music stopped to figure out what equipment they wanted to take on a mission, to keep the game moving forward. If they didn’t decide, I’d issue them a generic kit. I told them to picture their characters in a montage, locking and loading weapons, strapping on knives, double-checking eletronics, and so on. It kept the mood up through some pretty dull administrative stuff.

There’s a tale the circulated around the time of the film Pulp Fiction’s release that Quentin Tarantino would hear a piece of music and write scenes to fit it. I don’t know if the story is true or just another bit of Hollywood apocrypha, but it’s interesting none the less. Rather than writing a scene and then finding the perfect song to accompany it, which he undoubtedly did also, he would hear something and envision particular characters doing particular things. As everyone who has seen Pulp Fiction (and Reservoir Dogs before it) knows, the soundtrack is one of the things that makes the movie work in terms of atmosphere and mood. Think about the songs you listen to when writing an adventure, and see if a particular piece sparks any ideas. If you’re using a regular soundtrack, and combat begins but you’re not using the generic combat music, the players will know this encounter is going to be different. Not just combat – puzzles, roleplaying encounters, skill challenges, anything at all.

Obviously, these songs only get played at the start of a scene. They’ll play for a few minutes, but the scene or encounter will go one for much longer. You can still fill the silence with generic music, but if you do make sure that it’s very generic and played at a lower volume. The idea is to give the soundtrack sounds a significance the enhances the entire roleplaying experience.

Like

Unlike

More from unclebear

• Worldbuilding 101
• Worldbuilding 101: The Mashup
• Worldbuilding 101: Storybuilding

Kobold Quarterly magazine, available in both print and PDF, is very 3.x fantasy-centric, which is why I haven’t picked up an issue until now. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’ve got stacks and stacks of old Dragon and Dungeon magazines that I haven’t mined all the ideas out of, and I’m not currently running any sort of standard fantasy game let alone one using the 3.x rules. That said, this really feels like an old issue of Dragon magazine, and I mean that in the best possible way. The cover art is gorgeous.  Monte Cook has an article about Old School gaming, and if that’s not Old School enough for you, it’s got an article by Ed Greenwood and an interview with Jeff Grubb. It’s got a lot of ads, but that was actually one of my favorite things about old Dragon issues and how I learned about a lot of new games and accessories back in the day. All it’s really missing is a more extensive comic strip section.

So why am I excited about this issue, if it’s just high quality more-of-the-same? John Wick. I’ll admit it, I’m a Wick fan and will read just about anything he writes. This issue he begins Wicked Fantasy, an ongoing feature where he and co-author Jess Heinig present alternate takes on standard fantasy races. They start things off with the haffun, a twist on halflings that really feels more like an interesting take on gnomes. They first appeared 200 years ago in a mine, tunnelling to escape from somewhere or something that they don’t ever talk about. They rapidly took a role as servants to humans, and quickly engrained themselves into human society. And while they seem to simply be servants, they’s got their hooks in. I’m reminded of a number of old movies where the butler is the guy really in charge of things, manipulating the lord of the manor. That’s the haffun.  There’s an implication that they were bred to be servants, and managed to escape, and are simply utilizing those innate talents to their own benefit. They’re also subject to a peculiar curse, wherein they can be compelled to aid others even if it’s against their best interests.

If you’re familiar with Wick’s recent opus, Houses of the Blooded, you’ll feel the Ven influence here. The Ven, after all, were servants of the sorcerer-kings and raised up their own society when those decadent masters fell. There’s that sense of irony as the servants slowly become like the masters they despised. There’s also a heroic quality, albeit a dark heroism, of a people trying to find their way and make their own place in the world while at once embracing and uplifting their status as outsiders and second-class citizens. The article is also full of those wonderful Wick-words, like ghuva and talda and yffur, that mean very specific things to the race and provides them with not only vocabulary and touches of culture but verisimilitude.

Stats for the haffun are provided for both OGL and 4th edition D&D. Crunch aside, there’s enough fluff to adapt them into any sort of fantasy setting, and I would. That’s the best praise I can give for an article in a gaming magazine: I would use this in my own game, and I’d go out of my way to find a way to use this in my own game.

So cynicism about the stack of old magazines in the corner aside, I’m probably going to get a subscription to Kobold Quarterly. Yeah, Wick made me look, but the other articles were good enough to keep me reading and make me interested in coming back for more. I’m giving the magazine a Good Touch.

Like

Unlike

More from unclebear

• Arts and Crafts… and Roleplaying
• In a Wicked Age
• Dark Heresy

Last week I was lucky enough to wander into BigLots (a store that sells overstock and discontinued merchandise) and found the first three seasons of Samurai Jack for $6. Not $6 for each season; all three seasons, shrink wrapped together, for a total of $6. As I’ve had them on my Amazon Wishlist forever, I could not pass up this kind of deal.

For any of you who’ve never seen Samurai Jack, the metaplot goes like this: a samurai warrior, battling a demon, is transported from his own time period into the far future, where the demon rules the world. He wanders, seeking to destroy the demon and return to his own time, helping people and meeting interesting friends and foes along the way. There are aliens, robots, anachronistic things like vikings, a kilted Scotsman with a machinegun for a leg (this predates Grindhouse by years), just about anything you can imagine, Jack encounters it. The world really makes no sense, and doesn’t hold together, except as part of the meta-narrative of Jack’s journey.

Setting matters, in so far as it allows you to tell the types of stories you wish to tell and supports the types of characters you need to tell that story. Kitchen-sink settings allow practically everything, so what you need to do is pare down the scope and the purpose. Only use the elements needed for your adventure, your plot; the rest of it is out there, over yonder somewhere, but we’re not worried about that. You can’t try to run it sandbox-style; that way lies madness, zany hijinx, and a game that will quickly run off the rails.

Of course, most of us old grognards already know this. Most of the D&D campaigns I’ve been in have had “make-it-up-as-you-go-along” elements, dropping in an homage to whatever book, movie or comic the gamemaster was grooving on at any given moment, the narrative (such as it was) tied together only by the player characters’ journeys. It made sense because we made it make sense, we brought some sort of continuity, and turned the anarchonisms and paradoxes as opportunities and plot hooks.

Enter Encounter Critical. When I first re-read this system last year (having first played it, and then forgotten all about it, in 1982), my first thought was “I want to use his to run a Samurai Jack game”. First published in 1979, I believe it was the very first “kitchen sink setting” roleplaying game. Elements of nearly every genre are in there, from fantasy to science fiction, westerns to horror. Some critics overlook the build-in flexibility and creative potential and dismiss it as juvenile, silly, or just plain unworkable. It’s the same criticism frequently leveled at Rifts (which I consider to be an inferior EC knockoff, albeit one that’s more widely played and better supported), That’s when I point to Samurai Jack. It’s not the setting, it’s what you do with it. If you have strong characters, and a good story to tell, you can simultaneously overcome and embrace the quirks of the setting and turn them into a strength. All of the disparate elements are given a context that holds it all together.

Like

Unlike

More from unclebear

• Savage Settings: Customizing Your Savage Worlds
• Encounter Critical: Kitchen Sink Settings
• Encounter Critical: My First Kitchen Sink Setting

As a continuation of this post, I went to the game session last night prepared to create a character. I brought along my three personality shemps, and my list of names. It turned out we were creating characters for a different playtest than I thought (this is a little think-tank group created specifically to playtest three, possibly four different games). I came prepared to make a character in a contemporary setting; all I can say is that the game we’re tackling first is an historical setting. So the shemps worked, because personalities are universal and the descriptions I put together were purposely loose so they could be adapted, but the names I had didn’t. I originally generated about 40 random names, and pared the list down to 10 that I felt were usable. And they would have been, for what i thought were were doing. Too modern, or too much the wrong ethnicity. To get the right “feel”, though, I used one of the first names, Clayton, as the last name, and came up with the first name Ned. My take-away: be sure you know what you’re playing so the names fit, and maybe generate a longer list of names to fiddle with.

I used Shemp #2 for the personality:  “Has destructive impulses, possibly self-destructive. Trying to overcome those demons and start a new life. May be new to this role, or may have had an epiphany as recent back story. Has empathy, a social conscience, is a sharing and cooperative person.” This dovetailed nicely with the theme of the game. Without revealing too much about what the game is, Ned Clayton was a young naval officer who opposed the slave trade. This got him into a quite a bit of trouble, and he ran afoul of (legal) slave traders who had some clout with the government. When he helped some slaves escape, he ended up branded for theft and was set to be hung. The slaves in turn helped him escape, and he joined the crew of a whaling ship, where no one cares that he’s an outlaw.

My hope is that very soon I’ll be able to reveal what this game is, and I won’t have to subject you to painful teasers. And no, I won’t tell you if you guess right, so don’t guess.

Like

Unlike

More from unclebear

• Shemping Player Characters
• Revelations from the Book of Shemp
• "Shemping" in RPGs

There’s a good chance I’ll be playtesting an as-yet-unannounced game tonight. I can’t say anything yet, but it will be using an established system and it will be a contemporary setting. I know the base system, although I don’t know what modifications will be made to fit the setting, or what specific types of characters will be available for play. All that’s fine; I can always put together a pretty decent character in terms of numbers and abilities. The hard part for me is always coming up with a personality.

So I decided to throw together some shemps before the game. Personalities, and a list of randomly generated names. What I’ll do then is look at the character types available for play, and pick the personality shemp and name that most seems to suit (or maybe not; I might pick a personality that doesn’t really suit the job, just to create roleplaying opportunities). I can pick abilities based on what seems to drive the character, and also adjust the character’s personality based on their role and abilities. I’m hoping that I’ll get a well-rounded character from the start.

Here’s what I’m going to work with:

Shemp #1
A spiritual person, nurturing and selfless. Maybe religious, maybe just dedicated to a moral or ethical code. More concerned about others than him(her)self. Very patient. Looks at the role as a spiritual practice, a way to link to the the divine, do good works, help others.

Shemp #2
Has destructive impulses, possibly self-destructive. Trying to overcome those demons and start a new life. May be new to this role, or may have had an epiphany as recent back story. Has empathy, a social conscience, is a sharing and cooperative person.

Shemp #3
A person who takes commitments seriously. Has some creative outlet as a hobby, as a way to express him/her self and let off steam. Likes challenges, going new places, seeing new things, doing what hasn’t been done.

Possible Names
Vernon Oxley
Kurt Bednarczyk
Jesse Strait
Erik Perrino
Neil Cully
Lon Sheedy
Max Borge
Christian McTiernan
Allan Dillinger
Clayton Hodsdon

I will, of course, report back on how this worked out… provided, of course, I can talk about it and the character doesn’t reveal too much about the game itself.

Like

Unlike

More from unclebear

• Shemping Player Characters: Followup
• Thoughts on Character Creation
• Revelations from the Book of Shemp

My great regret is that I’m not running a contemporary horror or conspiracy game at the moment, because the plot hooks around Michael Jackson’s death write themselves. I think I’ve strung together a number of facts into a pretty convincing roleplaying game plot.

* Jackson was surrounded by strange, unethical doctors

* The goal of Jackson’s plastic surgeries was to make him look more like Diana Ross

* There were rumors of Jackson undergoing anti-aging treatments (hyberbaric chamber, etc)

* Jackson named Diana Ross as guardian of his children, should something happen to his mother

* His sister LaToya is convinced he was murdered, and that a stash of cash and jewels are missing

* LaToya was (inconveniently?) the first family member at the hospital, and identified the body

* LaToya claims to be psychic (nothing to do with the plot, but a good story element)

* Diana Ross mysteriously declined to appear at Michael Jackson’s memorial

* They saved Michael Jackson’s brain

Obviously, the endgame is to have Michael Jackson’s brain transplanted into the body of Diana Ross. The next step in looking more like her is to be her. With his body failing more plastic surgery was no longer viable, so it would be easier to use anti-aging treatments on the body of the healthier-than-he-was 65-year-old Ross. She gets the kids should something happen to Katherine Ross, with whom Michael had reportedly been fighting with recently. She also gets some additional seed cash and a stash of jewelry, which Michael picked out and set aside to wear in his new body.

LaToya would make a great NPC, helping player character investigators with her inside knowledge and psychic powers. The question is, are Jackson’s minions holding Diana Ross against her will, or did she discover this plot at the last minute and flee for her life and throw a monkey wrench into the whole plan? She’s also psychic, after all. Can the player characters find her in time to rescue her? And what plans do they have for Katherine Jackson?

Like

Unlike

More from unclebear

• Hell's Kitchen: the Animated Series RPG
• The Atomic Brain
• The Devil's Messenger

The topic of this month’s RPG Blog Carnival, hosted by 6d6 Fireball, is D&D. A pretty broad topic, considering that the majority of RPG Bloggers write almost exclusively about D&D all day, every day. To drill down a bit, the topic has been divided into four themes. Today, I’m going to tackle one of those themes.

The Edition Wars
While I’ve already said my piece on the Edition Wars, there’s one other thing that I feel is worth mentioning. Any desire that I have to play an older version of D&D is based entirely on nostalgia. It’s not that fantasy is my  favorite genre, or that X-School is my preferred style of play, or that I think those game mechanics are particularly superior to any other game mechanics. I much prefer espionage, supers, historical and modern horror games, there are other styles of play besides Old School/New School (it’s true!), and both objectively and subjectively there are better mechanics to be found. Yet it will always be my first game, and I will carry the memories of the good times I had for the rest of my life. In many ways, I don’t want to play D&D any more because I can’t match those experiences. 4th Edition doesn’t play the same and isn’t to my personal tastes, and I’m afraid that in playing some legacy edition I’d be exposed to all the warts and flaws that I could overlook in my teens and twenties that would taint those memories. I love D&D for what it is: a pleasant, and important, part of my past. I’m seeking new experience, with new systems and settings, because if they don’t match the salad days of when I played D&D, well, they’re not D&D. If I play high fantasy and recreate the tropes, but don’t quite recreate the feel, I can write it off as not being D&D. But if I played D&D and it didn’t live up to my expectations, that would sting.

Like

Unlike

More from unclebear

• RPG Blog Carnival: D&D and I, Part 1
• RPG Blog Carnival: Goals and Resolutions Revisited
• Common Sense, Part 2: Task Resolution, Combat and Death

The topic of this month’s RPG Blog Carnival, hosted by 6d6 Fireball, is D&D. A pretty broad topic, considering that the majority of RPG Bloggers write almost exclusively about D&D all day, every day. To drill down a bit, the topic has been divided into four themes. Today, I’m going to tackle one of those themes.

Everything I Know, I Learned from D&D
Now, that’s not a true statement. But I have learned a lot from roleplaying games, and the people that I have gamed with, and all of that stems back to playing D&D. I can say that I would be a very different person today if I hadn’t been an avid D&D player in high school. I’m not willing to pronounce whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s at least been a fun ride.

I was already a fan of science fiction when I started playing D&D, but not so much a fan of fantasy. Appendix N in the original AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide provided me with a good reading list for a couple of years, and it definitely influenced my taste in reading thereafter. Would I have discovered my lifelong love of the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Lieber, and Michael Moorcock without Appendix N and the original Deities & Demigods? Would I have read all of the classic “monster novels” (Dracula, Frankenstein, Phantom of the Opera, etc) without Ravenloft? When I heard that the D&D Monk class was based on the Destroyer novels, I got into hero pulp (credit must be shared with my grandmother, who would tell me bedtime stories based on old Shadow radio shows she remembered).

D&D not only got me reading fiction, it got me reading non-fiction as well. It started with some books on medieval times, knights and weapons and castles and armor. This expanded into biographies of the persons mentioned in those histories. As other games captured my interest I became fascinated with other eras: the Victorian era, the Jazz Age, the Renaissance, ancient Egypt, various ages of piracy, the American Revolution. Roleplaying games make me want to learn.

Like

Unlike

More from unclebear

• RPG Blog Carnival: D&D and I, Part 2
• Odds and Ends
• RPG Blog Carnival: Goals and Resolutions Revisited

uly 4th is the 3rd annual Let Me Tell You About My Paladin day, and this year it’s being done as a blog carnival hosted by UncleBear.com. The rules are simple: create a LOLcats-style graphic playing off of the phrase “Let Me Tell You About My Paladin”, post a paladin or paladin-like character, or actually post a true or fictional story talking about your paladin. Add a link to your entry in the comments of the post. On July 4th there will be a new post compiling all of the entries.

Let Me Tell You About My Paladin day began in 2007 on The Dire Cafe, a small social networking site.Someone poated a photograph of Babylon 5 actor Peter Jurasik out of his alien makeup. Another poster commented that he looked like like someone who’d corner you and tell you about his paladin. A meme was born, and it has since become an annual event.

Find more photos like this on The Dire Cafe

Like

Unlike

More from unclebear

• Worldbuilding 101: Tiddlywiki
• 2nd Annual "Let Me Tell You About My Paladin" Day, July 4th 2008
• Let Me Tell You About My Paladin