I woke up this morning with a cool idea for how to handle hydras in D&D. A quick check of the 5^th Edition Monster Manual, however, alerted me to the fact that 5^th Edition basically already did it that way.

Well played, 5^th Edition.

Upon further investigation, it became clear that my subconscious had dredged up a goulash of 3^rd Edition, 2^nd Edition, and OD&D mechanics and then regurgitated them.

Which, upon further consideration is a pretty good summary of the design methodology of 5^th Edition. (This is not a critique.)

Hydras, in D&D 5^th Edition, work like this:

Multiple Heads. The hydra has five heads. While it has more than one head, the hydra has advantage on saving throws against being blinded, charmed, deafened, frightened, stunned, and knocked unconscious.

Whenever the hydra takes 25 or more damage in a single turn, one of its heads dies. If all of its heads die, the hydra dies.

At the end of its turn, it grows two heads for each of its heads that died since its last turn, unless it has taken fire damage since its last turn. The hydra regains 10 hit points for each head regrown in this way.

The heads give a couple other advantages (extra opportunity attacks, it can sleep while still having one head awake to keep watch), but that’s the fundamental mechanic that models the classic hydra.

There are a couple of changes to this approach that I’d like to experiment with:

1. Eliminate the concept of “total hit points” entirely. You can’t kill a hydra unless you chop off all of its heads.
2. Tweak the mechanic so that you can eliminate more than one head per turn.

So if a fighter gets in there and deals 50 points of damage, his flurrying blades will have hacked off a couple of heads at once. Then maybe the rogue leaps onto its back, deals another 25 points of damage, and hacks off a third head. On the hydra’s turn, it will grow back six heads (two for each severed head).

REVISING THE HYDRA

Thus we can say that a hydra should be mechanically defined as:

• # of heads
• A damage threshold at which it loses a head
• At the end of its next turn or after X rounds it can regrow two heads if it has a severed head
• A sealing condition (usually a type of damage) that prevents
• Dies when it runs out heads.

The “Hit Points” entry of their stat block would be listed as “Special”: They only die if they run out of heads.

Here’s what our revised hydra special abilities would look like:

Hydroid. The hydra has five heads. For every 25 points of damage the hydra suffers, one of its heads dies. If all of its heads die, the hydra dies.

At the end of its turn, the hydra grows two heads for each of its severed heads, unless it has taken fire damage since the head was severed.

Multiple Heads. While the hydra has more than one head, it has advantage on saving throws against being blinded, charmed, deafened, frightened, stunned, and knocked unconscious.

For each additional head beyond one, it gets an extra reaction that can be used only for opportunity attacks.

While the hydra sleeps, at least one of its heads is awake.

CREATING HYDROID CREATURES

These mechanics can be used as the basis for other hydroid creatures. Here are some proposed guidelines for doing so.

Damage Threshold. This is the number of hit points required to chop off one of the hydroid appendages. These numbers are loosely based around the idea that a character of the appropriate level should be roughly capable of taking out one head per turn.

I’d recommend halving this value if the sealing damage type or other condition is an unusual one. (This would mean that the killing the monster would typically require killing the heads faster than they can grow back.)

# of Heads. Using the Creating Quick Monster Stats table on p. 274 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, multiply the minimum hit points for your selected CR by 0.75 and then divide by the damage threshold listed above for its CR.

For example, a CR 10 creature would have 206 hp using the table above, so multiply by 0.75 (154) and then divide by 25 (per the damage threshold table above) to determine that your monster should have six heads.

(This is based strictly on reverse-engineering the existing hydra stat block and it’s unclear if it holds up in practice. It seems to pretty reliably give you 4-8 heads, so you could also probably just get away with slotting in 5-6 heads and not worrying about it.)

You can also use this method to very quickly adapt existing stat blocks. For example, if you wanted to have a hydroid warg (CR ½) you’d take the warg’s current hit point total of 26, multiple by 0.75 (19.5), and then divide by 10. The hydroid warg would start with two heads.

Variant: Maximum Number of Heads. In 2^nd Edition, Lernaen hydras could grow maximum of 12 heads. In 3^rd Edition, they were limited to no more than twice its original number of heads. You might consider doing the same for some hydroid creatures.

DESIGN NOTES

Hydras have a well-known gimmick: They regrow their heads unless you cauterize the stumps with fire. It’s a fun gimmick the can create an encounter which mechanically feels different from other encounters. The only problem is that, because the hydra still has a hit points that’s easier to wipe out than its heads, the mechanical gimmick is irrelevant: There’s often little or no advantage to pursuing it, so parties will just bypass it.

This is boring.

So we fix it by eliminating the bypass. Just like you can’t bypass a troll’s regeneration by just dealing lots of hit point damage to it, you can’t bypass a hydra’s heads.

And, just as regeneration mechanics were created for trolls and now underlie a whole bunch of creatures, these hydroid mechanics can also be used for all kinds of things. We’ll take a look at several examples of this tomorrow.

Go to Part 2

The much delayed Welcome to the Island, a collection of four scenarios for Over the Edge, will be releasing later this month. If you’re looking for scenarios that embody the design principles I talk about here on the Alexandrian, then this is the book you’ve been waiting for. Jonathan Tweet and I have collaborated on a scenario built around the party-planning game structure. The rest of the team, many of whom I originally recruited for Infinity, have created some really fantastic adventures featuring revelation lists, node-based scenario design, and a lot more cool stuff.

Welcome to the Island also features a small selection of what I now refer to as “scenario tools.” I first started developing these back around 2000 or 2001, early in my freelancing career, and have been slowly refining and adding to them ever since. If you’re just prepping notes for your home campaign, these are not things that you’d need (or want) to include. But published scenarios, they help bridge the gap between the author’s imagination and your gaming table. This often takes the form of giving you the tools to integrate a published scenario into your campaign: As writers there’s nothing we can do to avoid making a published adventure generic, but we can make it easier for you to take our generic plug-‘n-play module and make it a seamless part of what you and your players are creating.

These tools usually appear in sidebars. This intentionally segregates them from the main text of the scenario so that they don’t muddy up the presentation of the essential information you need at the table.

GROUNDWORK

Groundwork sidebars are used in scenarios to give examples of how a GM can incorporate elements of the scenario into their campaign prior to running the scenario. The idea is that you can make the scenario feel like an organic part of your campaign by properly laying the Groundwork for it.

We tend not to include anything that’s blatantly obvious. For example, you don’t need us to say something like, “This adventure features NPCs. You could have one of them show up before the adventure begins!” (Unless we have a particularly clever or relevant example of how that might work.)

SCENARIO THREADS

Scenario threads are the mirror image of Groundwork sidebars, suggesting ways in which elements of the scenario could be revisited in later scenarios.

In your home campaign, of course, this is something you should be doing organically: Pay attention to the people or places that particularly resonated with your players. If something interests them or is clicking for them, finding ways to reincorporate it into the campaign is an almost guaranteed success.

PLAYTEST TIP

By the time you’ve finished running a scenario, you’ll often have learned a lot about how you could have used it better. Some of these lessons can be applied in future scenarios, but it’s rare for a GM to have an opportunity to run the same scenario a second time. In published scenarios, though, we have the opportunity to share the insights we’ve gained during out playtests. These Playtest Tips are the “best practices” and offer suggestions for how particular encounters can be handled, alert you to potential problem areas, and try to provide other insights gleaned from our playtesting.

INTERSECTION

This is the newest addition my scenario toolkit and one that I picked up from previous editions of Over the Edge. Intersections reference other published scenarios and suggest how the material in that scenario could be tied to the material in this one. (For example, there’s a strange paranormal gadget in one scenario and a mad scientist in another scenario. When describing the mad scientist’s laboratory, we might include an Intersection that points out you could include a prototype or design notes for the paranormal gadget here, suggesting that this mad scientist was the one who developed it in the first place.)

For Welcome to the Island, these Intersections are limited to other scenarios in the same book. But future anthologies can include references between books, too.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The description of scenario tools in Welcome to the Island also includes revelation lists, which have been discussed here on the Alexandrian as part of the Three Clue Rule. I’d have included adversary rosters, too, but they aren’t used for any of the scenarios in this book. This material, along with the other tools described above, will be repeated in future adventure anthologies for Over the Edge because they weren’t included in the core rulebook. You can contrast this approach with Infinity, where I made sure these tools were described in the core rulebook specifically so that I wouldn’t have to explain them in every adventure we wanted to use them in.

(Which would be all of them, because they’re useful tools.)

I encourage other authors and publishers to also make use of these tools when writing scenarios for publication. They’re incredibly useful and I don’t feel like they should be put in a lockbox.

And if you have any suggestions for other useful tools I could be including in my published scenarios that would make them more useful for you to use at home, please let me know!

SPOILERS AHOY!

Insofar as it is possible for a movie to be objectively bad (in terms of internal logic, continuity, and so forth), this movie is objectively bad.

Insofar as it is possible for a movie to be subjectively awful, for me this movie is awful. Almost unremittingly terrible. Total garbage.

As I wrote in my reaction to The Last Jedi, the sequel trilogy — as a result of the foundation thoughtlessly laid by J.J. Abrams in The Force Awakens — is fundamentally built on a nihilistic foundation that diminishes the original films instead of building on them: “If you accept the sequel trilogy as canon while watching the original trilogy, it makes the original trilogy films weaker and less powerful. And that’s really not okay, in my opinion.”

Impressively, with The Rise of Skywalker, Abrams has done it again. Not only does the film make the original trilogy exponentially worse if you accept it as canon, it manages to ALSO make The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi retroactively worse films if you accept it as canon.

We could talk almost endlessly about the myriad ways in which this is true — the incompetent damage done to the mythic arcs of Anakin and Luke by bringing Palpatine back; the retroactively neutered character arcs; the thematic incoherence; and on and on and on — but it’s largely pointless because the film is so godawfully bad that it just doesn’t matter.

Trying to analyze all the ways in which this movie is terrible is actually a fractal exercise in madness. You can talk for hours and not exhaust all the ways in which the film is bad, because the closer you look at the film the more flaws you discover. So rather than trying to do that, I will instead look at two significant ways in which the film is terrible and hope they will serve as exemplars of all the other ways in which the film is terrible.

PALPATINE’S FLEET

One of the film’s major problems is that it’s filled with nonsense. Palpatine’s fleet is a good example of this because every time the film mentions them, it seems really committed to making them even more ridiculous.

First, the ships were apparently buried and erupt out of the earth. This makes no sense. They aren’t designed to land. It doesn’t make sense that you bury them.

Second, they show a comically large number of them on screen. It seems as if the image is meant to be threatening, but it misses the mark and ends up in the comedic absurdity of a five-year-old who has just learned how to copy and paste in Photoshop.

Third, we discover that “his followers have been building [the fleet] for years.”  But… how? Where did the supplies come from?

Fourth, we’re told that in 16 hours “attacks on all free worlds begin.” This is an almost comically short amount of time for them to even pretend to deal with the problem, but don’t worry: The film will shortly make it clear that this is impossible.

Fifth, we’re told that the fleet will increase the First Order’s resources “10,000 fold.” Assume that the First Order has as few as 100 ships currently. We’re being told that Palpatine has one million Star Destroyers. The visual was comedically inept before; the dialogue makes it even more absurd.

And where are the crews for these ships going to come from? This scene also features First Order leaders declaring, “We’ll need to increase recruitments. Harvest more of the galaxy’s young.” Okay, great. Let’s say a star destroyer only needs a crew of a hundred people. So you immediately kidnap a hundred million kids and instantaneously have the infrastructure to indoctrinate and train them. Great. Your fleet will be ready to go in, I dunno, let’s say 10 years?

This is, of course, the fleet that’s supposed to be launching attacks in less than a day.

Sixth, it’s revealed that every single star destroyer has a Death Star laser strapped to its belly.

… no comment.

Seventh, we’re told that the ships can only leave Exegol one at a time by following the signal from a navigation beacon. This is, prima facie, stupid. The film will also contradict this claim multiple times. But whatever, let’s accept the conceit that you can trap the fleet on Exegol by destroying the navigation beacon.

But if this is such essential infrastructure, why would you only build one tower? And why is it completely undefended and unshielded? And given that it’s completely undefended and unshielded, why do the good guys need to land a ground assault team?

Seventh, ha ha ha. Just kidding. The star destroyers can totally have navigation beacons built into them that will allow them to leave Exegol without a ground-based navigation beacon. They just turn that ground-based beacon off and use the ship-based one instead!

But only one ship has it! Because why would you include “able to leave drydock” technology into more than one ship?

Okay. Fine. It’s a very super-special navigational tower and it’s super-expensive and they can’t include it on every ship. Or even more than one ship. Sure. I mean, we’ll ignore the fact that the Rebels didn’t require one of these super-special navigational towers and Rey broadcast the navigation signal across hyperspace from an X-wing, but, sure, those are the “rules” and that’s just—

Eighth, GOTCHA! They blow up the super-special navigation tower, but the star destroyer can still send out the navigation signal! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Any star destroyer could do it, in fact!

Ninth, so they blow up the whole star destroyer! And that’s it! No way out now! Hee hee tee hee.

What’s that, you say? The ground-based navigation tower was never destroyed and could just be flipped back on? And then none of it matters anyway because they just blow all the star destroyers up?

Ho ho hee ha ha ha ho ha.

To be clear: The whole movie is like this.

Take virtually any element of the film and you will find nothing but nonsense. (Think about the Sith dagger for a moment if you’d like to see what I mean. Really think about it: Where did it come from? Why does it exist? What function was it supposed to serve? And how lucky was Rey when she walked up to that one specific, unmarked spot on the coast?) And many of these separate areas of fractal nonsense end up overlapping with each other, which serves to exponentially increase the stupidity.

ROSE

Beyond the nonsense, the other pervasive element in The Rise of Skywalker is the unrelenting retconning of The Last Jedi. It is not merely that the instances of this are so numerous as to be beyond easy cataloguing, it’s that they’re all so… pointless. For example, rolling back Poe’s entire character arc so that he’s once again not ready to assume the mantle of leadership doesn’t lead the character anywhere interesting, it just puts him in a stunted cul-de-sac. Kylo Ren reforging his helmet similarly doesn’t go anywhere; he wears it a couple of times, takes it off largely inconsequentially in the middle of a random scene, and then we just never see it again.

But perhaps the best example of this is how Chris Terrio & J.J. Abrams did Rose dirty.

Rose, of course, was the new major character in The Last Jedi who became an important mentor and friend to Finn before eventually falling in love with him.

And in The Rise of Skywalker, she is basically nonexistent: She pops up here and there to deliver lines as Generic Rebel Person, and is never given a single meaningful contribution or interaction with the other cast members.

Okay. That’s unfortunate. But maybe it’s just unavoidable? There’s already a lot of stuff going on in this movie and it’s possible there just literally wasn’t time to include more material for Rose.

Except, no. Because the movie goes out of its way to create a different female sidekick for Finn who can hang out with him for the final mission. It’s painfully clear that it would have taken literally zero effort for Rose Tico to fill that role. The only reason not to do this is because you’re deliberately attempting to erase The Last Jedi.

But just ignoring Rose isn’t enough. They even include a little scene where Finn says, “I’m going to sacrifice myself,” just so Rose can say, “Okay,” and contradict herself from the last film. (And then somebody else gets to rescue him anyway.)

Is it just sheer pettiness? An abject cowardice that waves the white flag to the most disgusting, misogynist, racist trolls in Star Wars fandom? It ultimately doesn’t matter. It’s a travesty.

To be clear here: It doesn’t matter whether you liked The Last Jedi or if you hated it. Expending all of this narrative energy in order to retcon the previous installments in a series for no other reason than to “fix” some abstract point of continuity that you consider to be “broken” is not how you make a good film. It’s not that continuity isn’t important; it’s that when you focus on continuity-for-the-sake-of-continuity, you are failing to do literally everything that goes into telling a great story.

There are whole scenes in this movie that exist for no other purpose than to say, “Remember this thing that happened in The Last Jedi? WELL, IT NEVER HAPPENED.” These suck the oxygen out of the room. They do not further plot or character or theme. They take up space and time that could be better focused on virtually anything else, disrupting effective pacing and structure.

CONCLUSION

There’s other stuff we could talk about here. Like how the film not once, but twice pretends to kill off a legacy character only to bring them back and then have them do literally nothing else of consequence for the rest of the movie. Or how the movie lacks any subtext, even going so far as to introduce a new droid whose entire job is to announce what emotion you’re supposed to be feeling at any given moment. Or that the movie is trying to cram about three or four times more content into it than the filmmakers are capable of integrating. Or some of the truly baffling editing choices that cut away from the action for no discernible purpose. But it’s all just variations on a theme.

And that theme is:

This movie is total garbage.

There are a handful of moments that are legitimately beautiful or clever or poignant. But I mean that literally: I can count them on one hand. And they are fleeting and largely inconsequential to the whole.

I am certain that I will not dissuade anyone who was planning to see this film from doing so. But I honestly wish that I had not seen it myself.

Imagine The Da Vinci Code except (a) the writing is exceptional and (b) it takes place 9,000 years in the future. Or National Treasure if the American Revolution was a space opera. Or Indiana Jones as a Star Wars movie.

A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt is one of the best books I’ve ever read. So good, in fact, that after I finished it, I immediately flipped back to the first page and read it cover-to-cover a second time.

PREMISE & EXECUTION

Alex Benedict is an antiques dealer. He was raised by his uncle, an archaeologist, but they have become estranged due to his uncle’s disapproval of his “tomb robbing.” Nevertheless, when the passenger ship carrying his uncle disappears into hyperspace and never returns, Alex receives an enigmatic message from his uncle, delivered in the event of his death and describing an incredibly historic find, the details of which are too sensitive to trust to the message and have instead been left as an encrypted file at his uncle’s house. By the time Alex returns home, however, the file has been stolen and he is left with nothing but a few breadcrumbs and a tantalizing mystery to pursue.

A Talent for War is, of course, Benedict’s pursuit of that mystery.

The book opens with the loss of the passenger ship Alex’s uncle was on:

On the night we heard that the Capella had slipped into oblivion, I was haggling with a wealthy client over a collection of four-thousand-year-old ceramic pots. We stopped to watch the reports. There was little to say, really, other than that the Capella had not re-entered linear space as expected, that the delay was now considerable, and an announcement declaring the ship officially lost was expected momentarily.

Over the next few pages you get a taste – just a little sampling! – of both the rich, layered complexity of the novel and its melancholic-yet-epic scope.

You can see here that McDevitt has introduced the tragedy of the Capella in a completely personal-yet-irrelevant manner: The main character receives it as a bit of trivia on a news broadcast playing in the background; the way in which we so often learn of the myriad tragedies that afflict our world. From this simple point McDevitt builds outwards, step by step:

It’s happened before. But never to anything so big. And with so many people. Almost immediately, we had a hit song. And theories.

We delve into the people onboard who were famous and then into those who become famous because they were onboard. And the narrative moves from how the news was reported to how the event becomes history and even, to a certain extent, legend and myth.

And then, abruptly:

About ten days after the loss, I received a transmission from a cousin on Rimway with whom I’d had no communication in years. In case you haven’t heard, he said. Gabe was on the Capella. I’m sorry. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.

Tragedy and news and history and epic are all abruptly collapsed back onto our protagonist; the abstract weight of it all collapsing into something personal and painful and immediate.

This, by itself, is pretty great storytelling. But that’s not all that happens here. Through the lens of the Capella tragedy, McDevitt encodes a ton of essential world-building: how space travel works, how the human polity is organized into a confederation of colonies, how media and information technologies work, etc. And he’s also subtly establishing some of the major themes that will guide the entire book.

In just eight triumphant pages, McDevitt has completely drawn you into his world, his story, and his main character.

This short sequence, however, also demonstrates the difficulty of explaining what makes A Talent for War so great, because to at least some degree I have now spoiled the effect. One of McDevitt’s primary tools in the novel — and one which perfectly suits the nature of its narrative — is the masterful pacing, structure, and shaping of the revelation of knowledge. Thus, the more I discuss, the more I am robbing the book of some of its power.

So I will do my best at this point to speak in generalities.

At the time of his disappearance, Alex’s uncle was on the trail of a major archaeological find. The loss of his original notes forces Alex to dive in, partly following in his uncle’s footsteps and partly charting his own course. In its most basic form, therefore, A Talent for War is a mystery. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as an interplanetary thriller.) What elevates this narrative, however, is the beautiful, multilayered texture that McDevitt lends it.

First, as we follow Alex in his investigation we become invested not only in the story of his life and the characters around him, but also in the historical story and personages he’s investigating.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, that historical story is constantly shifting. Each new piece of information that we (and Alex) learn not only adds to that story, it also transforms our understanding of what we already knew. Thus the narrative is not linear; it is instead a holographic patchwork, the parts of which are in a constant state of overlapping flux. It is not one story, it is many stories; it is a myth told and retold not only on the page, but in our own imagination. The effect is electric, forcing us not only to deeply engage with the narrative, but also to immersively walk the same investigatory path that Alex does. We are Alex Benedict, uncovering the lost secrets of cosmic history, sharing in the satisfaction – and frustration! – of watching the puzzle pieces click into place.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of A Talent for War is that we do, in fact, care — and care passionately — about the fictional history that Alex is delving into. It’s comparatively easy for Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, to make us care about the Lost Ark or for The Da Vinci Code to make us care about the holy grail because we are already living in the modern world, hate Nazis, and know the importance of Christianity and its lore. McDevitt has none of those advantages and must instead establish all of that from scratch. Impressively, he does it so seamlessly that you don’t even really notice it happening; you simply arrive at the end of the novel and discover that you are intensely invested in the outcome. Partly this is because McDevitt makes us care about the “historical” characters that are living the history that Alex is uncovering, but it’s also because he makes it intrinsically clear that the history is important to the “modern” world Alex lives in, and we see that reflected in every aspect of the world — politics, characters, architecture, culture. Everything.

And perhaps the most daring thing McDevitt does is to NOT provide an authoritative answer to every question. Thus we are forced to become active readers, piecing information together for ourselves and reaching conclusions that the narrative doesn’t deliver to us on a platter. In some cases, however, there is simply… enigma. Mysteries for which there is no solution. It is these little patches of uncertainty which lend the final patina of reality to Alex Benedict’s world and the immense depth of history which lies beneath it, for certainty and absolute truth can only be found in that which is artificially constructed.

As with the beginning of the novel, so at the end we find ourselves standing atop a pinnacle of myriad, kaleidoscopic complexity. One which is thrilling and epic, while simultaneously being melancholic and intensely personal. The personal is reflected into the epic, giving it humanity and truth; the epic is reflected into the personal, making it grand and true. Thus, like a house of mirrors, the totality somehow eludes your grasp.

Which is why you, too, might find yourself immediately flipping back to the beginning of the book and reading it once again.

If you do, what is most remarkable is that you will find yourself somehow reading a completely different book than the one you just finished. Everything which you have learned in your first journey along this road will cast a fresh light on each step of the story, utterly transforming your understanding of it. Even as you once again approach the end, the totality of what you have learned on your second reading will change your perception of what you thought you knew before.

And that is the mark of greatness.

GRADE: A+

A WORD ABOUT THE SEQUELS

Fifteen years after A Talent for War was published, Jack McDevitt returned to Alex Benedict and began writing sequels (starting with Polaris in 2004).

These are good books. They’re fun books. There are not infrequent moments when you’ll find yourself caught up in both the action and the enigma, unable to put the book down and staying up far later than you’d intended to compulsively turning the pages.

But sadly (and I say this mostly so that you can prepare yourself) they pale in comparison to A Talent for War.

First, they lack the incredibly beautiful, multilayered texture of the original. They are far more linear in their construction, with one revelation following another but never truly forcing you to revisit that which you already knew.

Second, they become increasingly formulaic in both their plots and prose.

Third, and perhaps least forgivably, they become lazy.

Where A Talent for War delves deep into the historical material being researched, allowing you to compellingly follow in Benedict’s footsteps as he pieces together the lost secrets of the past, the sequels generally just provide a rough summary of findings. Not only is this less thrilling, but it also means that the sequels lack the double narrative of A Talent for War: Where the original not only invested you in the story of Benedict but also the story of those historical personas he was pursuing in his research, the sequels lose that extra dimension and become lesser works as a result.

Most frustrating, however, is a complete lack of care for continuity. Contradictions abound, sometimes within books, but even more frequently between books in the series. For example, one book (Firebird) ends with a character stating that such-and-such an event will happen four years from now. The next book, Coming Home, is dated one year later, but the event has already inexplicably taken place. At another point in the series, the characters all appear to simply forget that the epochal events of Echo (the fifth book in the series) happened. The conclusion of A Talent for War, in fact, is apparently retconned out of existence, although it remains completely unclear to me whether this was an intentional choice or just another glitch. There even comes a point where one of the characters says, “How could we have missed this?!” while ignoring the fact that they literally discussed this very thing just fifty pages earlier.

This becomes a constant, frustrating grind on the series, in large part because it is not just a matter of trivia; these continuity errors cluster around the major events of the plot, sapping credibility and the suspension of disbelief from the characters, world-building, and narrative.

I do not, however, want to leave you with a completely (or even predominantly) negative impression of these books. Like I said, they’re fun. I enjoyed them. You’ll likely enjoy them, too. But they ultimately do not live up to the astonishing triumph of A Talent for War.

A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.

Momentum in 2d20 is generated when you roll more successes on an action test than required by the difficulty of the check. These points of Momentum can be spent to either immediately improve the result of the current check or saved to be used in the future, allowing you to build Momentum over the course of several lesser actions until you can accomplish big things.

Momentum can be spent to do stuff like:

• Add +1d20 to future skill tests
• Create obstacles for opponents (generally increasing the difficulty of their skill tests)
• Improve the quality of success
• Increase the scope of success
• Reduce the time required to accomplish a task
• Perform a normally noisy action stealthily
• Take an extra action in an action scene
• Boost damage on an attack
• Get a called shot
• Trigger program effects in Infowar

And so forth.

In Infinity we also specifically emphasized that Momentum is best seen as a creative tool for empowering the players. The GM is also given several structures for making complex rulings around Momentum (see p. 407 of the core rulebook).

One of these is using Momentum to model preparation. If the PCs want to take one action to set up or create advantage on another, the GM can call for a test on the first action (even if it normally wouldn’t require an action test) and then any Momentum generated on that test represents the advantage gained on the primary task.

One of the limitations to this approach, however, is that Momentum ablates over time. At the end of each scene, the team’s pool of saved Momentum is decreased by one. This means that if you want to set up an advantage in one scene that will benefit you for the next scene, it’s difficult to do that.

This problem can be solved by adapting a cool mechanic from Trail of Cthulhu: dedicated pools.

DEDICATED MOMENTUM POOLS

A dedicated Momentum pool can only be used in a given circumstance or in relation to a given subject. For example, you might hack the security cameras in a megacorp’s headquarters, creating a pool of Momentum that can be spent on things like Stealth and Observation tests when the PCs go to infiltrate the HQ.

GMs might also rule that certain resources simply grant a pool of dedicated Momentum. (Perhaps the patron who hired the PCs to steal the megacorp’s new research into captured Tohaa technology simply hands them the access codes to the security cameras as part of their briefing packet. They get the same dedicated Momentum pool even though they didn’t make any skill tests to obtain it.)

There are two advantages to a dedicated Momentum pool.

First, the dedicated Momentum pool does not ablate. The dedicated Momentum pool is separate from other saved Momentum and does not decrease at the end of each scene. This makes a dedicated Momentum pool a great model for preparations that play out over multiple scenes or which are made long before their intended use: The PCs lose some of the utility of the Momentum (since it has to be used for a specific purpose), but in exchange the Momentum becomes more durable.

Second, the dedicated Momentum pool can also create unique vectors that allow the PCs to take actions that they otherwise couldn’t. If you have access to the security feeds, for example, you can check them for activity in other areas of the building. If you have a copy of the religious text of an extremist Morat cult, you can reference it for information about their rituals that you would otherwise have no way of knowing.

These vectors can cut both ways, though! When the Momentum from the security camera pool runs out for example, it could easily justify the GM spending Heat to generate a complication in the form of the megacorp’s hackers realizing their system has been compromised and launching an Infowar attack on the PCs.