PDQ Week, Pt 2: Silver Branch Games

Chad Underkoffler is the creator and dark lord (just kidding Chad) of PDQ but he's not the only author producing great PDQ material (which is good considering I'm trying to create one myself). The second most prolific member of the PDQ family is Tim Gray of Silver Branch Games. Tim has produced several PDQ games and supplements and I'll give a quick overview here. 

Questers of the Middle Realms

Questers of the Middle Realms is the "lighter side of fantasy gaming". Now, classic high fantasy adventure RPGs are a dime a dozen and D&D parodies are hardly less common but I still feel like Questers is something special. First and foremost it doesn't fall into the most common trap parody games suffer from: making everything a joke. A game with a sense of humor is great but it gets tiresome when every monster is a walking pun and every sword swaps your gender and hair color or makes a farting noise when you smack someone with it. Questers has a sense of humor but it's more than just a bare-bones RPG thinly wrapped in a lame joke book. If you felt like it you could ditch a few of the goofier monsters, slightly change a few locations and you'll find yourself with perfectly serviceable and interesting fantasy setting. 

One of my favorite parts of the book is the unusual take it has on the standard D&D fantasy races. Elves for instance are not simply long lived or ageless, they're actually highlander-esque immortals. Only complete dismemberment or destruction of their bodies will permanently put them down. As a result of their immortality they suffered from a massive population explosion, leading to the gods creating Orcs as ideal elven predators to hunt down and eat the pointy-eared bastards. Quester's contractually required "tiny folk", Hoblings, also have the best racial disadvantage ever. Forget stat penalties or reduced damage...they're delicious. 

The second great thing about the book is that Tim is not afraid to play around with the PDQ system and really see what it can do. While Truth and Justice is how I got started with PDQ it was Questers that actually made everything really "click" for me and showed me just how much this little system could do. Questers has all kinds of interesting and intriguing mechanics that can be used not only for Questers but just about any PDQ game. It has special rules for Racial Qualities, rules for the use of Props that are basically "free-floating" Qualities not tied directly to a character which can represent everything from magic swords to loyal mounts to sacks of cash. Questers and it's Book of Bewildering Beasts supplement provide the largest collection of pre-statted PDQ critters out there. Obviously it's easy enough to whip up your own but Questers still provides a great set of tools or templates to make the process even faster.

For me the shining jewel of QMR is the magic system. Even though it was released back in 2006 it still remains my favorite choice for PDQ magic. It's simple and supremely flexible without overwhelming non-magical characters. You've got Thaumaturgy, your classic wand-and-robes wizardry which can be powerful but potentially unreliable. There's also Mysticism which is a more limited but more reliable set of powers wielded by psychics or zen martial artists. Finally you've got Divine Aid which is not only my favorite god-based magic in PDQ, it's my favorite form of divine magic in any system. It's a system that makes using miracles more than just casting spells using a different mental stat (although amusingly the Qualities that influence miracles are those related to persuasion, fast talking and/or butt kissing) and allows just about anyone to call on a little bit of divine intervention here and there.

PDQ Week, Part 1: Truth and Justice

So it's been a while since I've managed to make regular posts here. I moved last month and with the amount of junk me and my wife have we've needed a month just to get mostly unpacked. There's still lots of work to do before things are actually done but we've also reached the point where we're fine just shoving lots of things into our spare room and dealing with them when we need to. So, I'm looking to get back into a pattern of regular postings here. That brings me to the PDQ system, readers of the blog know I'm a fan of the system and a recent thread over at RPG.net made me realize that I haven't given it much attention recently, certainly not as much as it deserves. 

Attentive readers may also remember that I'm working on an RPG of my own: Battle Royale. Well...I'm working on several actually (DICE and the Drive System are still alive somewhere in the back of my brain) but Battle Royale is going to be my first, serious publication. It's also going to be a PDQ-licensed product, using my own special blend of various PDQ versions to create something that will hopefully be quite a lot of fun. I haven't actually talked much about Battle Royale here in the past mostly because it's been quite hard to find the time to actually give the project the attention it deserves so it's moved on and off the backburner for a couple of years now. 

This has changed recently though. A combination of a new job and a fresh dose of inspiration has spurred things forward significantly in the past several months and now the game is well and truly approaching completion. Well...approaching the final stages of completion at least. We've still got some editing phases to go and we'll see how much reworking it needs. Here's hoping it's not too riddled with flaws. 

So, in the interest of picking up the posting pace here at Zombie Toast, showing some love to the PDQ system and providing some extra info on my upcoming book Battle Royale I'm declaring it PDQ Week here at Zombie Toast. I'm going to provide some info on the different PDQ games out there and help share what the system has to offer. These aren't exactly reviews, you can go ahead and assume that I'm recommending all of these products, they're more just info dumps to help pimp a relatively obscure system (on an extremely obscure blog...but that's a different issue). In addition I'm going to provide some of my own house rules, tweaks and concepts for each of the system. 

So, for our first entry in PDQ week.

A self-defense arsenal clearly designed for PCs

If there's one thing every RPG player knows it's that the more exotic and interesting a weapon is the better it is. In RPGs deadly assassins duel-wield Desert Eagles and vampires carry around a brace of katanas under their ubiquitous trench coats. So, here's some real-world weaponry that you'll almost certainly have some player try and fob off on you.

Knife: The Wasp Knife

So, what's the most ridiculous, over-powered knife out there? Are we talking some kind of grotesquely oversized bowie sort of thing? Or one of those insane Bud-k contraptions that has a dozen spikes, half of which will try and carve you to bits the moment you use it?

Nope, the Wasp knife is a fairly small, unassuming little thing. However, notice those three cartridges? Those are compressed air cylinders which are loaded into the knife and released through a vent that runs along the blade and out of the tip. The knife was apparently originally designed to defend against underwater predators like sharks...but it's equally effective against it's natural prey: the watermelon. Now, who can watch that without imagining the potential...especially with a bit of creativity (imagine a Wasp spear!).

And of course since the compressed gas instantly cools to below-freezing when released the knife obviously inflicts additional Cold damage as well. Of course, on the downside you've invested in the only knife you need to reload.

Handguns: The Pfeifer Zeliska .600

No, that picture isn't photoshopped. That's the Pfeifer Zeliska .600 Nitro Express. It's a handgun that's as hard to lift as it is to pronounce. The gun is 16 lbs and is pretty much the most powerful handgun in the world...it probably makes a pretty effective blunt instrument too.

Now, if the sheer size and weight don't indicate just how utterly ridiculous this weapon is then check out the picture to the right. That's the bullet. This is a handgun that fires elephant gun rounds.

Now ask yourself. Who in the world needs enough firepower to take down an enraged pachyderm in a package that fits (theoretically) under a jacket? Monster hunters and vampire assassins of course.  For when you absolutely, positively have to make the guy with the desert eagle feel inadequate. Of course if your PCs come up to you begging to be allowed to stat out this weapon...just remind them that it costs over $16,000 and $45 a bullet. At that price, just buy a used SUV and run over the eldritch horror.

Taser: The Bodyguard

 When it comes to taking down opponents there's very few PCs who look for a "non-lethal" solution. All too often the standard player's idea of "minimum force" is "don't double-tap them after they're down."

But come on! Look at that thing! It's an electric gauntlet. We've apparently started to live in the world of Shadowrun and I never even realized. Because who would settle for punching something...when you can punch it with lightning!




All-In-One: The OSA
If there's one thing everyone hates about monster hunting it's how damned resistant or immune they can be to just about anything. Sure, you'd love to solve all your problems with a flamethrower, but one day you're going to run into a critter that's just going to shrug it off and proceed to rip your face off. For the modern day adventurer who isn't sure what the hell they're going to fight next, we've got the OSA multipurpose pistol.

The thing can be chambered with four types of ammunition: mini flash-bang grenades (great for creatures with sensitive hearing or a vulnerability to bright light), flares (i.e. bonus fire damage), electric stun bullets (i.e. electric damage), tear gas cartridges (for those critters resistant to physical damage but vulnerable to poison) and rubber bullets (boring but good for taking down cultists without a murder charge).

The only drawback is its unintimidating size. Creative players should easily find a way to upgrade it to a 4-barreled shotgun-sized version however.

Sketches I made at work

Just a few sketches I found and scanned while moving.

The first couple here are villains from a brief pirate-based playtest I ran for Battle Royale.

These next two are a bit less clear. You ever find something you did a while ago and you can't figure out why? Or what the hell inspired it?

Another Shallow Review: Hell on Earth Reloaded

So, is horror-slash-fantasy-slash-steampunk-slash-western not enough for you? Then what about some horror-slash-fantasy-slash-dieselpunk-slash-western-slash-post-apocolyptic RPG gaming? Well, then perhaps you're the target audience of Deadlands' Hell On Earth setting.

I'm a big fan of Deadlands, if you recall the first full-length campaign I've ever completed was a Deadlands game and it was a hell of a good time. So once I heard today that Pinnacle was releasing their post-apocalyptic version, Hell On Earth, as for Savage Worlds then I was all over it. So far I've only skimmed it but just like the Savage Worlds Horror Companion I figured I'd give my first impression chapter by chapter. 

Introduction

For such a nutty, kitchen-sink setting Deadlands has always had a rather complicated to justify it's zombie cowboys on steamcycles. It's interesting stuff but I often steal from far too many different sources to keep the canon intact. Besides I already know the general background (ghost rocks fall, everybody dies) and I'm just doing a quick skim to make sure I got my money's worth so I'm skipping most of it for now.

However, the writers should be commended for how completely they address various important setting issues such as "what is used as money?" or "are there still any satellites" and how people get around the place after the disaster.

Definitely an interesting read and probably pretty essential if you want to run the setting without any modification but for now let's move on.

Makin' Heroes

Character creation is pretty familiar, no big changes and it'll be even more familiar with it if you've got experience with the original Deadlands Reloaded. All the g's are removed from skills and you've got some familiar Hindrances along with some new ones like Rad Intolerance and Mutations. All good fun.

Now one of the things I liked most about Deadlands Reloaded was that a lot of it could be used for other settings. Many of the Edges were useful for other settings and they weren't at afraid to play around with the Arcane Background rules and came up with a lot of interesting variations that could easily be used in other ways. The hucksters for instance make a good set of "wild magic" spellcasting rules and the Blessed were an interesting departure from the regular Powers-and-power-points rules.

Unfortunately so far Hell On Earth doesn't quite seem to share that potential. The majority of the Edges are pretty setting-specific things like Rad Resistance or starting off with a car. I was especially interested in the Kung Fu edge because the martial arts rules from Deadlands Reloaded were very useful for other games. Unfortunately it's clear that the rules here are meant to work with Hell on Earth's higher tech level. The Kung Fu abilities range from "Too powerful for non-fu
turistic settings" to "too powerful for any setting". Mainly because a lot of them don't actually involve martial arts or even hand-to-hand combat. A cyborg cowboy with a laser pistol is just as likely to benefit from Kung Fu as an unarmed fighter, probably more because the cowboy has the benefits of his weaponry on top of it. The worst is that one of them grants the Hardy advantage, which anyone familiar with Savage Worlds should know is way too powerful to give away as just an Edge.

Equipment

Now, the equipment chapter I quite like. It's full of some useful gear for modern or close futuristic settings like specialty ammo, modern body armor and so on.

In general when it comes to near-future settings like post-apocalypse and cyberpunk gear tends to go two ways. Either they take into account the march of current technology (see the most recent edition of shadowrun where everything went wireless) or they go with the future of the past. Technology that, while futuristic in style, is often fairly unimpressive compared to actual modern devices. Hell On Earth is definitely of the second category which I find quite nice. It's got a kind of odd charm to it and much of it makes some sense when you think about it (after all most smartphones can't survive being sat on much less a supernatural apocalypse. So what's left is the clunkier and more durable bits of tech and things cobbled together from bits and bobs.

That said some of the more advanced equipment is fairly unimpressive. Compare for instance the gyrojet rocket pistol (2d6+2 damage, 24/48/96, half damage vs armored targets) to the Peacemaker (2d6+1 damage, 12/24/48, AP 1). Now, the gyrojet has slightly higher damage (very slightly) and impressive range it's six times as expensive and much more expensive to reload not to mention even a leather vest would render it useless.

But like I said, for the most part the equipment is solid and useful. The vehicle rules especially are going to be a godsend for a lot of Savage Worlds players who might be looking for some rules on tinkering with or customizing their vehicles. It's far from completely comprehensive but it's a good start.

Setting Rules

This extremely short chapter doesn't have much to comment on, except for the scavenging rules which I'm sure will see plenty of use and seem quite serviceable, although I probably would limit the scavenging to one player with others aiding them (otherwise players are likely to rack up huge hauls).

No Man's Land

So here we have the setting's Arcane Backgrounds. You've got a pretty big variety, Doomsayers (mutant radiation priests), Junkers (techno-wizards), Sykers (psionicists), Templars (holy knights), Toxic Shamans (shamans of pollution and garbage). You've also got the harrowed who are basically unchanged from the original Deadlands.

Unfortunately unlike the basic Deadlands setting the Hell On Earth ABs are pretty darn setting-focused. The Junkers are far more powerful than your average mad scientist for example and Toxic Shamans and Doomsayers are tied integrally to the setting. The Templars seem like your average Miracle wielders but they get a selection of Edges that make them truly impressive when battling evil. They might work in a modern setting (think the Knights of the Cross from Dresden Files) but otherwise they're far too kick-ass in for most settings. Psykers are amusing (baldness is an unfortunate side-effect of their powers) and they have some good new powers (like the ability to wipe memories or mentally communicate).

The powers are fairly useful and can easily be harvested for your own use or used as-is just fine. The only one that struck me as odd was the Slow Burn power (designed for Psykers to bust up heavily armored vehicles and the like). Unfortunately it doesn't actually work very well. For instance against a toughness 10, armor 70 vehicle the power inflicts 5d10 damage...now the probabilities of dice in savage worlds can be tough to calculate but to beat 80 on a 5d10 is still pretty damn astronomical odds. Also, as written it can't even hurt an unarmored target. But otherwise some fairly useful stuff and the AB's are fairly well-designed for the setting.

Marshall's Section

There's some pretty interesting stuff going on here. We've got weird weather, rules for mutations and fear levels. All of it seems okay.

Then we've got the setting info for specific cities and locations throughout the West. I don't have anything like the time needed to actually read through all this yet but what I do see is fairly interesting.

Then afterwards we've got a big collection of monsters. Some mutated, some mechanoid, some undead and some all three at once. Again, it looks serviceable but far too detailed for me to plunge into yet.

Quick Overview

There's a couple of things that bear mentioning in regards to the quality of the book. First, the art is quite nice and although there's plenty that was probably recycled from older Hell On Earth books it's all cool and evocative. Unfortunately the layout is pretty rough. The gear is pretty awkward (the tables of gear stats are all clustered at the end of the chapter) and the No Man's Land chapter is worse. It starts off immediately with one of the arcane backgrounds with no intro or explanation, then jumps to the rules for the Harrrowed, then back to the rest of the Arcane Backgrounds. Then we've got various rules scattered throughout the book like the (extremely bare-bones) bionics rules stuck in one of the city descriptions.

The other thing that bears mentioning is price. For some reason Hell On Earth pretty darn expensive, about 40 bucks for a 200 page book. That's quite spendy when you consider how reasonably priced the core Savage Worlds material tends to be. The Print and PDF package together is over 50 dollars when many companies include PDFs for free with their book (or at least at a very small extra price). All that was too rich for me so I went with the PDF alone which is a better deal at (a still quite high) 25$.

Final Thoughts

 So, all in all it's a pretty mixed bag. There's a lot of stuff in Hell On Earth that's interesting or potentially useful but at the same time it's pretty darn expensive.

If you're a deadlands fan and you know for sure that you want to run or play in a Hell on Earth game then I'd say that the book's definitely worth picking up. You'll have a lot of fun. With minor editing it could easily be adjusted to various levels of post apocolyptic adventures. Some aspects of the setting bear a more than passing resemblance to Rifts for example (notably a high-tech conquering nation-state called the Combine with robotic minions with a skeletal motif).

However, if you're just a general fan of Savage Worlds and you're hoping to chop up the setting to use in completely different games then I don't think you'll find it very worthwhile considering the minimum price of 25 bucks.

Busy Busy

No new posts recently, been busy packing up all the things and moving them to a new place. There's nothing like moving to make you realize just how filthy things have gotten when you weren't looking. So, I'll get back into the swing of things next month once we're re-situated.

In the meantime, check this out if you want something to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside: http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/pictures-that-will-restore-your-faith-in-humanity

I thought of it first: Stick Warriors Omega Supreme (Ultra)

Bleegh. Just a warning. This post is being made at 4:00 AM while in the month-long process of getting ready to move and suffering from the combined effects of a 4-day cold and insomnia. It may be entirely incoherent.

Side-note: You know you've finally reached "adulthood" when you and your wife get really excited about finding a cheap bottle of nasal spray that works really well to clear up your mutual congestion.

So, this installment of "great ideas that I will never be able to produce" comes courtesy of several days spent playing Angry Birds (I just got my first smartphone) and fevered ideas that grip your mind when you're tossing and turning in bed trying not to wake your wife while you figure out why you can't get back to sleep even though you're exhausted.

The idea being an epic stick figure fighting game. Now, I know that's hardly original. The web loves epic stick figures, everyone knows that.

I could literally watch this all day.

So, that's clearly not a new idea...so what have I got? Well, basically a (hopefully) more unique interface and battlefield. The battlefield being a lot like angry birds, constructed of blocks and shapes of varying materials and durability along with a physics engine to let said materials be knocked around the battlefield. It sounds cool already doesn't it?

Well, lets combine that with a simple way to create your own custom attacks. First premise...every attack has identical DPS (damage per second). You can choose to create a spray of rapid light attacks or one big heavy attack (which is just the difference between rapid tapping or holding down the attack button to "charge") and it all ultimately evens out, assuming all attacks hit. So damage isn't customizable. But just about everything else about the attack is: range (from melee to long range), penetration (to determine how easily it "punches through" materials), width (how "big" the attack is), burst (explosive power at the end of the attack's range) and knockback (how easily the attack sends your opponents and materials flying). All of these can be simply set to sliders or a point/dot/star system that has to balance out for each attack. Each player gets a small pool of attacks (say 4) that they can customize and save, plus one "limit break" special attack that can be charged up or gotten via power-up that either gives you more dots or lets you add weird special features (like homing attacks or damaging status effects, etc).

Now, try and picture what that would look like. You've got a big, wide open battlefield that's both destructible and movable and a nearly endless variety of attacks customized through a few simple values. One guy can spray blasts that cut through stone while the other sends a fireball that blows up and sends everything flying into the stratosphere. Charge up and drive an energy ball deep into the ground where it detonates and collapses the battlefield, then you both burst out and continue whaling on each other. In fact, there should be a mode entirely without health bars. Just two people fighting until they run out new ideas for combos or someone gets carpal tunnel. Record the whole thing as a two-hour youtube epic of stick carnage.

And of course there'd be plenty of opportunity for downloadable content, you could easily have simple costumes, or themes for your attacks (instead of generic bolts or energy balls one guy has guns, another attacks with ice claws!), and of course new levels and so on.

But, of course like I said this is possible the worst mental condition to come up with new ideas in (or is it...the best!?) and there's a pretty good chance that someone could point to 4 or 5 things out there that basically already do what I just described. But here's hoping I'm creative.