Star Wars Faction Write-Up, Inspired by a Board Game

 Mood Music

This, right here, is one of my all-time favorite board games, packed so full of chrome and drama that you can rewrite the Original Trilogy with a single play. This is not a post, however, about the board game, nor the similarly-styled and eponymous computer strategy game which came before it. This post is about how my friends and I played this video-game-turned-board-game in order to inspire the setting for our tabletop adventure game campaign. Layers. 

The same new Galaxy Far Away campaign which I mentioned last time (including the example of real play therein) came about when I pitched "Star Wars D&D" to some guys I mentor on a regular basis. Both of them have played Rebellion against me many times, so one of them said "hey, what if we play again and whatever the outcome of the end-game state is, that's the prompt for our Star Wars RPG setting?" It was a stroke of brilliance, and it led to a near-five-hour haul to reach the natural conclusion of play. And hoo boy, did we end up with a compelling springboard.

Any Source Is Gameable

 Reposted from Issue #2 of The Neverending Drachenschwanz, an FKR fanzine.

Weird West, or Some Hoot-Hollerin' Hijinks for Weird North

Mood Music

Far from the titanium citadels of the Necrothanes, the unblinking gaze of the Blood Moor obelisks, and the shadow of the dinomancer-ridden Dank Tower, a tumbleweed ambles like an aimless toddler across sun-choked plains of brittle soil. The world has changed so many times, shedding its skin like a desert rattler. What is old is new, what is new is old, and nothing is saved from the long finger of the weird. 

Falls of the Colorado Chiquito

Weird North is a setting. It is a cracked world. An old world. A new world. A place somewhere in the acid fantasy dreams of Jack Vance's cat who had to put up with years of listening to the author prattle on just so. Weird North is a cheater's setting, to be entirely honest. It makes sense in consistent meta terms, at least as far as shared history or global effects and parameters are concerned, but it is still a cheat. A cheat, because frankly neither I nor my players really care that everything must make perfect sense. Perhaps some call this gonzo, perhaps some call this amateur. Perhaps, well, perhaps I don't have much vested interest in what most folks think about my mental gymnastics. The Post/Post/Post Apocalyptic genre is a toolkit and sandbox fit for the kings of recess playgrounds and Saturday morning cartoons. It is, at least, useful for my daydreams.

Faction Procedures + Dolmenwood Example

Sandboxes tend to imply factions, but faction play is sometimes a boogeyman for open world games. Should it be subtle, just a thought? Should it be a tracked rubric of needs and wants, like a private rumor table with bonuses? Should it be a complex system of rolls and resources, like a solitaire Matrix game the referee plays behind the screen on off-hours? Well, it ought to be something if merely to add some variability to whatever sociopolitical forces prop up the flavor of the setting. 

VILLAINS FLY ZEPPELINS - Pulp Adventure in the Style of Indiana Jones & The Rocketeer

Mood Music (Look, I can't help myself. I love mood music.)

In October of 2020, the Free Kriegsspiel Revolution (FKR) Discord released the first edition of its APA-style zine, The Neverending Drachenschwanz, with the theme being "Zeppelins & War." The iconic and ominous zeppelin conjures images of dieselpunk esoteria, disaster, and 100% nefarious villains piloting them to enact schemes of global manipulation. 

Timothy Dalton as Neville Sinclair, from The Rocketeer

As such, I took it upon myself to leverage Norbert Matausch's excellent Landshut and go full-camp into the tropes of moustache-twirling, scheme-hatching, globe-trotting villains flying around in sinister zeppelins while you, the players, race to thwart their plans and unravel their public prestige. 

You might be a journalist, armed with little more than a bowie knife and a tome of ancient lore. You're great at brawling, but you're bad at driving. Regardless, it's up to you and your friends to stop the plot of Kitanova Vadimovna, the dread cultist from the USSR whose signature explosions bristle from her heavily-armed sky fortress. Can you work with your contact, Barnaby St. John the fixer, to recover the ebon monkey of Ibn Fatullah before Vadimovna and her goons get to it first? Will you be able to evade the meddling of Illuminati mercenaries pursuing their own ends, but intervening in yours?

The above is a full plot generated across sixteen short d6 tables. A few rolls is all you need to whip up the seed for a complete adventure, a party of "good guys," the villain, their zeppelin, the artifact, and more. The game is run primarily by description, impact, and common sense consequences, with opposed 2d6 to adjudicate situations with unclear outcomes.

Michael Byrne as Ernst Vogel, from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Grab your whips, your flashbulb cameras, and your side-car motorcycles. Indulge your spirit of daring and dauntless adventure and rise to the occasion. Pit yourself against the evil caprice of cabals, conspiracies, and grandstanding public enemies while VILLAINS FLY ZEPPELINS!

 Grab the simple two-page spread PDF here.

Android Setting: Jinteki

Mood Music 

"Never forget that your clone is a living being. Like pets and even humans, clones have biological necessities that must be addressed. New owners can at times forget, and clones--especially ones placed into new circumstances--are often reluctant to bring them up..."

In 1873, Satoshi Akiko stepped out of the fuedal holdovers of rural Japan and into the modern world of pharmacy. Kyoto was on the up and up, and the Satoshi family made a name for themselves by cutting ahead of the curve regarding industrial distribution for their wares, and riding into the 20th century on the wave of progressive company policy, cross-media investment, and private outsourcing of medical research. The pharma boom of the 21st century rocketed the Satoshi name into household presence, though their milieu was limited mostly to the staples of combating common illness, improving skin health, and adding shine to the pearly whites of the world's suburban sprawl.

Everything changed when the Big War came and went.

Android Setting: Haas-Bioroid

 Mood Music

Effective. Reliable. Humane. A Different Breed of Machine.

Cars, guns, transcendence--a strong company ethic grows and adapts to meet consumer demand. 

What began as a heavy manufacturing business in Germany over a hundred years ago, Haas Industrie transformed from automation process supplier for the European Union to the most profound technology conglomerate in human history. What Jürgen Haas didn't know when he started his production company was that his descendents would learn not only how to play God, but to sell his miracles at a competitive margin.

Cybernetics was always a passing fancy for heavy industry and tech start-ups alike, but what cybernetic interface research needed to truly flourish was a framework which could fully leverage automated intelligence. Anyone can build a tank or a crane or a side-arm, but can they create a self-diagnostic artifical leg which passes for the real thing? What about replacing a damaged central nervous system and making the lame man walk? Can they build a computer so nuanced, it sincerely believes it is human? These were questions which Haas Industrie began to ask after Jürgen's son, Dieter, took over the company after his father's passing. 

Limb replacements and augmented implants stepped out of the medical field and into the cosmetic and security industries. Hand-held weapons which could think and see for their wielders became staples for UN peacekeepers in dangerous territory. Subdermal arrays helped not only to combat congenital defects but reinforce the perfection of celebrities' bodies and charisma. The market was always there, but until Haas Industrie entered the scene, it was dry and unanswered.

Android Setting: Weyland Consortium

Mood Music 

"I'd like to remind the ladies and gentlemen of the press that several of the buildings damaged in the blast were owned by Weyland Consortium subsidiaries… I'd say it's nothing personal, but corporations are people, too." 

Jack Weyland was a university boy who attended Ivy Consolidated given his parents' combined wealth in private venture. They wanted him to become a businessman. He decided to become an engineer, instead, until he dropped out and founded his own research lab where the science-fiction of nanoferrules became reality. Several investments and a half-baked marriage later, Weyland-Osman Materials was born, and with it, the grant money and government contracts that allowed for the full realization of its next phase, Weyland Constortium. Investing across a multi-layered portfolio of business interests, Weyland Consortium turned its full attention to constructing the Beanstalk, the beyond-ambitious space elevator of Jack's engineering dreams. In ten years and the substantial pooling of much of the world's government wealth, the Beanstalk was a reality. Jack immediately turned his attention to next tackling more efficient space travel, off-world colonization, and fusion refinement, but the Weyland board of directors deemed him too fast and forward-thinking. Wanting to protect their massive investment capital for the Beanstalk project, they ousted Jack Weyland from his own corporation.

Weyland, himself, left to fund many of his own projects, and remains an enigmatic visionary amidst a system which became far larger than he intended, and one which is utterly corrupt in his absence.

Hacking Globalsec from New Angeles: A Quick Android Setting Primer

Mood Music

The Android setting by Fantasy Flight Games is huge. It began in the late 2000s with an eponymous board game which was more like a cyberpunk noir film generator than a murder mystery game. It was brilliant, and remains a personal favorite for just how existential it is. Later, FFG got the rights for Richard Garfield's old Netrunner CCG and released Android: Netrunner, where the lore exploded across all of the card sets. I've indulged a lot of cyberpunk over the years, be it through the classic novels and stories, Bladerunner and its adjacents, or board and roleplaying games alike. My favorite take on the genre remains Android, and as I mull over running a diceless cyberpunk game, I decided I'd dust off the beautiful (and huge) Worlds of Android artbook/lorebook that FFG released several years ago. 

So, for any of you who are already familiar with Android, whether through the board game, the brilliant asymmetric card game, or the "official" adaptation through FFG's Genesys system, none of this is new. For the rest, I want to introduce you briefly to the setting, and put out another few posts about quick-hits for lore touchpoints for megacorps, factions, groups of runners and hackers, and the like. Nothing crunchy. Few, if any numbers. Just tasty bits to break off and insert into your various cyberpunk-adjacent games. If you have Worlds of Android, great, it's fantastic, but it's also a tome, and no one wants to quickly gloss a tome when you only need a few hand-holds into the setting.

Why do I prefer Android over other, more recognized cyberpunk settings? Perhaps because it came about more recently and affords a more accurate projection of our actual society into the near future. Perhaps because not every story within is about nihilist anarchism raging against the machine (featuring soccer moms-turned-hackers like Sunny Lebeau, everyday transhumans like teenaged Kit Peddler, or a remnant AI from before the big war, slowly evolving in the darkest corners of the internet, like APEX). Perhaps because there is limited stellar sci-fi, with a giant space elevator in Ecuador, fusion reactors on the moon, and colonies on Mars. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't have anything to do with the net wünderkind, Chaos Theory, and her computer console, Dinosaurus.

"When I said I could hack in my sleep, did you think I was joking?"

The Conceptual Beats of Weird North

Okay, so Ray Otus' throught-provoking Gygax 75 came out in April of this year. I was very intrigued by it, but didn't really have the time to commit. Now, with a bit more breathing room, I'm going to go for it week-by-week as a think-out-loud process of expanding the implied setting of my own Weird North. The world is assumed to be ancient, strange, and filled with layered mystery. 

1. Get/create a notebook. 

• I'm using this blog for this purpose. Yes, I have and enjoy many moleskine journals, but when I write creative notes on paper they tend to disappear, get ripped in half, or outright eaten by toddlers.

2. Develop your pitch. 

• The world is very, very old 
  The planet itself is ancient. Dozens of world-spanning civilizations have come and gone. The current populace mostly doesn't realize it's number X in a long line of successful occupants of the world. Bizarre and inscrutable relics from past eras are buried in the earth, or stick out of hills at random. Magic and technology are cruel and indistinguishable.
• Many realms have links to the land
  Portals abound. Whether magical, mechanical, or entirely inscrutable, the landscape is perpetually connected to out-world, demiplanes, extant planets, and spiritual realities. Portals might be obvious (blazing gateways in plain sight) or obscured (crawl into that tree root and take a left).
• Human power centers are not alone
  Many human outposts and lesser kingdoms have scratched out a living in and on the world's surface levels, but cabals of snakepeople, demon overseers, and eldritch abominations hold sway over the greater politics of the landscape whether by obvious or covert means. Every local plot tugs on strings leading into the shadows.
• Magic is corrupting 
  There wasn't always arcana in the world. It came from outside. As the eons churned, more and more strange energy seeped into the planet itself, whether by portal, occult influence, or mechanical summons. There are extant masters of magic, but not one of them is human. Humans can't handle much magic before they begin to lose their humanity.
• Mercenary ambition is the norm
  With apocalyptic events having peppered the world several times over, no one makes many lasting plans. Kingdoms are small or nomadic. Villages are transient. Artifacts, outsiders, and the planet itself are armed, dangerous, and paradigm-shifting. Everyone survives, no one thrives.