Night Town

Hello and Welcome to the Night Town Citizen Enforcement Program (NTEP). As Night Town proper is currently under a witch's Curse of Enteral Twilight and subsequently becoming a Keyhole to Hell due to the town being denied the demon-repelling properties of sunlight, the ability of our small police and fire services fall short of the town's needs. That's where NTEP comes in, you are trained to deal with crime and Unnatural Disasters that municipally employees are unable to deal with themselves, and licensed by the town to do so legally.

While for some reason some of your peers refuse to submit to town mandated six week training course and invasive background checks. Remember to keep your NTEP Card on you at all times to avoid expensive liability claims and indefinite detention, your Special Power doesn't make you above the law.

Many people have a special power (such a telekinesis, flight, herculean strength, and so forth) and only one. Asking for more than would be rude, and also futile as we don't know where the powers come from or why they only seem to appear in own city. It's best not to think about it too long.

Since being granted the same rights as our human residents, Night Town's resident demons, vampires, and lycanthropes have become model citizens...for the most part. There is for profit blood bank to service the town's growing vampire population, and a concrete-lined hunting resort for lycanthropes that can not control their transformations. Also, demons are allowed to claim Dual-Citizenship with the Underworld. Though the reverse maybe not be true for the other side, so best not to going through the mysterious key-shaped hole in the center of town that leads to the demon's home plane. You may even be one of these groups, using your natural talents for the greater good. It goes without saying that Witches Are Not Welcome and these accommodations for differently talented citizens do not extend to them.

Crime is on the rise in Night Town. The Night Town Municipal Bank in particular is robbed at gunpoint at least once a week, along with the Museum of Cursed Artifacts, which was the town council's way of leaning into the twilight curse, getting broken into on a monthly basis. In many cases, criminals that steal from the museum end up dying in ironic ways, but it take time to track them down and clean up the mess. Be sure to bring your collars in alive, five successful convictions on your license and you get a $25 give certificate for the Night Town Municipal Gift Shop.

Stunts

Because Guns are Useless, you get +2 when Quickly defending when being fired on with firearms.

Because Offense is the Best Defense, you get +2 when Forcefully attacking when a foe that has already attacked an ally or bystander this scene.

Because There is Always Another Way, you get +2 when Sneakily overcoming an obstacle when a foe monologues about the futility of the attempt.

FAE Game Sheets

I've been playing around with ideas for Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE) settings, and using the bronze rule to build a little "character sheet" for the setting, aspects and stunts that any character can use to establish the basics of the setting and reinforce its theme.

I've currently have six of these mini settings in various stages of doneness in my notebook: the catalogue, a generic magic girl game, modern magica, the silent castle, greys in black, and night town.

For each setting, I'm trying to do the following:

• Define the core conceits of the setting and the specific tropes I want to encourage. The former being a good source of aspects and the later stunts.
• Give the PCs things to do and tools to do those things. This includes thing like weird powers and technology, but also possible allies.
• Generate interesting antagonists and challenges for the PCs to face.

For each setting will have a short description with aspects highlighted with bolded italic text, followed by a short list of stunts.

Here's an example based on one of my old blog posts:

Onyx, City of Mysteries

It is a seven day trek across a desert black as midnight to the Lost City, Onyx, once stood at the center of a continent spanning empire but now is only A Shadow of its Former Glory. Only an unmarked trail from an anonymous village serviced by Unsavory Merchants leads through the rocky peaks that seal Onyx off from the outside world.

The city has only One Taboo, It is forbidden to venerate of any god within the city, but this is only a pretense. Such worship was common during the city's heyday, but when the territories rebelled the city turned against their imported gods. Despite the ban, the city is controlled by Mystery Cults devoted to Strange Foreign Gods.

The city is the home to many Sorcerers, with inborn magical powers that grow with use. Sorcerers built Onxy's empire and Sorcerers control its mystery cults, but sorcerers are also drawn to the city to learn to control their powers.

Stunts

• Because Sorcery Knows No Master, you get +2 when you Forcefully attack when ignoring the consequences of unleashing sorcery.
• Because Onyx Eats Secrets, you get +2 when Cleverly overcome obstacles when revealing a secret as leverage.
• Because Mysteries Breed, you get +2 when Carefully creating an advantage when fighting an unknown foe.

Fate Accelerated Edition is Magic

I’ve been playing around with ideas for Fate Accelerated Edition(FAE), an offshoot of Fate that came out as part of the Fate Core kickstarter, and I discovered something delightful about it. The game supports character to use magic, psychic powers, or any other extra-normal abilities out of the box without any additional rules.

FAE trades in the discrete skills Fate Core uses for generalized approaches. Rather than being good at specific things FAE characters are good at ways of doing things such as being forceful or clever or deceptive.

Due to the way approaches work, a character can use magic or psychic powers or what have you without needing any special rules. The only thing the character might need is an Aspect (1) to establish the character is capable of using the power if that is something that most people can’t do (2).

On the other hand, I also find this trait a little annoying as I like the activity of cobbling together subsystems and the Fate base makes doing so fairly straight forwards due to the bronze rule(3). Just a few hours ago, I was working on a bolt-on magic system but I think that I in writing this post, I’ve talked myself out of using the idea.

1 A piece of freeform character definition where sentence fragments such as outlaw psychic are given mechanical teeth including establishing that the character is a psychic as well as an outlaw.

2 Though if the rest of the group isn’t interested in a game with that sort of character, then that is a horse of a different color.

3 You can use the basic building blocks for characters to build other things.

5e Musings & Slightly More

A new edition of Dungeons & Dragons has been announced and the internet is abuzz (or at least the parts of the internet I frequent).

5e Musings
5e is supposed to be modular*. We’ve already know, that miniature-based combat is optional (though we no idea what the other options would be). I’m wondering if this will extend to character creation. I’m envisioning a system where someone building a wizard could take the old school option to have all daily powers, the 4e option for a mix of at-will, encounter, and daily powers, or something else entirely.

I would like to see them add pools of powers that multiple classes can draw from (probably based on power source and/or role) while cutting down classes to just the features and specific powers that best define that class. This also reduces the number of powers you need to put in the book and makes individual class write ups shorter (hopefully giving you room for more classes) by removing powers that are overly similar to each other.

I’d like to see less static bonuses from magic items, feats, and the like. This makes it easier to adjust how many magic items you want to include in your game without making things too easy or hard, and it opens feat slots for other thing that might be more interesting than +1 to hit or +2 to damage.

I like that 4e gives first level characters a bump in hit points, but I wish the hit point totally were scaled back a little for monsters.

I rather like the skill systems posited in these Legends & Lore articles: Skills in D&D and Difficulty Class Warfare.

A few people online have thrown around the idea of combining a content management system with print on demand for made to order core books. I have seen no indication this is even close to being an option, but I think it’s a cool idea. There was actual talk of something similar for the d6 system (but for .pdfs rather than pod) but it didn’t end up going anywhere.

* To quote Mike Mearls, "The new edition is being conceived of as a modular, flexible system, easily customized to individual preferences. Just like a player makes his character, the Dungeon Master can make his ruleset. He might say ‘I’m going to run a military campaign, it’s going to be a lot of fighting’… so he’d use the combat chapter, drop in miniatures rules, and include the martial arts optional rules." He also wrote a Legends & Lore article about the same topic a few months ago as part of the preannouncement build up.

Building a 4e Retroclone
In case 5e does ends up being unsuitable, someone (probably not me as I don’t have the motivation for such a project) could go digging into OGL sources to find bit and pieces that can build a new 4e (or something like it).

Just as an example, here what I could find in Unearthed Arcana.

• Player’s Roll All the Dice includes static defenses for monsters (albeit with a base of 11 to keep the same average hit rate).
• Complex Skill Checks are the predecessor of 4e’s skill challenges and there are two different methods of simplifying skill acquisition.
• There is a version of Action Point, but it’s very different than the 4e version.
• Reserve Points are kind of like a fiddlier version of healing surges.
• Recharge Magic is like a first stab at changing the power economy.
• Don’t forget Level-Independent Experience Awards.

Sharing the Fun: "Carts, Horses, and the Arrangement Thereof"

Trollsmyth with a post on build the mechaincal parts a game to match the types of conflicts you want to excourage.

Sharing the Fun: "A ragtag, fugitive fleet, on a lonely quest..."

In this post ChicagoWiz using an exodus as part of a sandbox campaign. I'm going to have to file this idea away for later.

Sharing the Fun: "The Worst Adventure Ever: Making it Work"

An interesting post about running the Avatar Trilogy which I think can be applied in principle to similar adventures.

Charlie Brooks has been a good friend to me for over twenty years, and he ran my first few D&D games. I'm slightly surprised that I haven't linked to his site sooner. I also want to point out that Garyl Shadowslayer is one of my favorite NPCs, though I didn't get to participate in that particular campaign.