Last year I posted a thought of the day concerning “Disarming Magical Traps”. Although this particular thought of the day was most specifically and immediately prompted by Numenera, it’s also something of a sequel to that earlier thought and equally applicable to magic items in a typical fantasy campaign.

As I mentioned in that earlier thought, I think it’s important that a GM not allow any interaction at the table to become purely mechanical. Partly this is just an aesthetic preference on my part (it keeps things interesting), partly it’s ideological (rules are associated for a reason), and partly it’s because specificity and detail usually leads to creative gameplay.

In Numenera, as the title suggests, a great emphasis is put upon the leftovers of the older (and almost incomprehensible) civilizations that predated the Ninth World: “The devices, the vast machine complexes, the altered landscapes, the changes wrought upon living creatures by ancient energies, the invisible nano-spirits hovering in then air in clouds called the Iron Wind, the information transmitted into the so-called datasphere, and the remnants of visitors from other dimensions and alien planets—they call these things the numenera.”

Particular significance is given to the cyphers: Single use items that function according to forgotten sciences, proliferate throughout the Ninth World, and (from a purely mechanical perspective) serve to constantly vary and refresh the abilities available to PCs.

Before cyphers can be used, however, they have to be identified. Mechanically speaking this is straightforward: The character attempting to identify the cypher attempts an Intellect task with a low difficulty. If they succeed, they now know what the device does and how it can be used.

It can be difficult, however, to visualize or describe how this process of identification takes place: Consider the example of a pill you can swallow which will then allow you to teleport to any location you can clearly visualize with your mind. There’s no self-evident way to “experiment” with the pill short of swallowing it; and if you do that, it would be consumed and gone. So what does the mechanical resolution of the identification task look like in the game world?

Ultimately, it’s a combination of lore and/or limited experimentation. In the case of the teleporter pill, for example, options might include:

• There’s a sigil on the side of the pill. You recognize that as a sign associated with teleportation in other artifacts that you’ve used.
• Or you cross-reference the sigil using a lore book and discover that the armies of Salla Izirul once discovered a cache containing millions of these pills and used them to teleport entire legions behind defensive lines before his supply ran out.
• You scrape a little bit off the side of the pill and feed it to a mouse. The mouse vanishes and reappears next to a piece of cheese on the far side of the room. Guess it’s a teleporter.
• Yes, it’s a pill. But there’s a small metallic nodule attached to one end of it. And, yup, that’s definitely a transdimensional regulator. The only reason you’d be swallowing one of those is if this thing was going to teleport you.
• You’re a nano and you’re using a low-powered Scan to determine the energy signatures locked inside the physical matrix of the “pill”.
• The pill is actually encoded with a psychic memetic mesh. If you can just manipulate the articulated junctures of the pill correctly, it will basically download an instruction manual into your brain.

And so forth. My point is that there’s not a single or precise method that the character can use to identify the object, so you should feel free to get creative.

FAILURE

 Conversely, a failure on the roll might indicate that:

• There is no way to identify this featureless pill: All they can do is swallow it and see what happens.
• They’ve misidentified what the pill does.
• They’ve misidentified how powerful it is.

 PARTIAL SUCCESS

A partial success (perhaps succeeding at a difficulty one-half the required difficulty to fully identify the object) might yield some useful information:

• How to activate the device, but not necessarily what the device will do. (This would obviously be more applicable to cyphers that aren’t self-evidently pills. Although maybe this “pill” only works if it’s a suppository or stuck up your nose or surgically placed under the skin or ground up into the user’s eye.)
• A general sense of what the item does, but not its specific function. (“It has something to do with non-Euclidean travel” instead of specifically indicating that “it will teleport you X distance”.

My point with all this is that you shouldn’t be afraid to discover (or define) features of the world as the world is being explored.

 ARTIFACTS

More powerful technologies of the old world in Numenera are referred to as artifacts. These devices can be used multiple times (although there’s a risk that any given usage will be the object’s last) and it’s far more likely that the PCs are just using one of the many possible utilities the original device had. (The other functions may be inexplicable, irrelevant in this dimensional space, broken, only intermittently available, more likely to deplete the device, or dangerous to the user.)

On page 299 of Numenera you’ll find a really fantastic random chart for determining random quirks for an artifact: I recommend taking it to heart.

The Ninth World of Numenera exists a billion years in the future: Eight civilizations of galactic prowess, capable of restructuring the laws of physics and engaging in mega-construction projects of staggering scope, have risen and fell. The modern inhabitants of Earth live in the shattered ruins of the masterpieces: Vast features of the landscape (on a scale larger than the tallest mountains) are utterly artificial extrusions from the dim recesses of a forgotten prehistory. Even the dirt beneath our feet is, in fact, artificial — particles of plastic and metal and biotechnical growths which have been eroded by incomprehensible aeons; each bucket of soil filled not with stone arrowheads, but with compact power supplies and the cracked crystals of ancient data storage devices.

One thing the Numenera rulebook doesn’t talk much about, however, is the moon. Mercury is missing (some prior civilization stole it away or pounded it apart), but we know the moon is still up there: Slightly smaller than we’re accustomed to (because it’s a little farther away), but still possessed of its familiar phases. But does it look the same? Earth has been utterly transformed. What do the men and women of the Ninth World see when they look up into the night sky?

The answer I came up with is a little different.

MOON OF GREEN

First, it should be noted that the moon is no longer tidally locked. It rotates.The idea of the “dark side of the moon” is, literally, a thing of the past.

One side of the moon is green and verdant: It has apparently been terraformed and is now covered by vast forests. A huge, silver-blue ocean formed from two overlying circles (possibly ancient craters) lies in the middle of the northern hemisphere. (This ocean is known by a number of names: The Mare Sea, the Spider’s Eyes, the Infinity Brow, the Babe in the Moon, and so forth.) Those possessed with the proper telescopic tools or numenera have observed citadels poking up through the canopy here and there, although it’s unclear if there are any signs of life.

And then, from time to time and on no regular schedule that anyone has been able to ascertain, this happens:

No one truly knows what it means, although scholars have noted that many of the fractal mandala circles have been fading over time. Some mandala constellations appear to have gone out completely.

SHEEN OF SILVER

The other side of the moon is a desert of pale, silver sand.

In other words, it looks much like the moon does today: Was it restored to a “pristine” condition? Never touched by the terraforming? Is the terraforming nothing more than an illusion? Or is the “untouched” side of the moon the true illusion?

The key point is that the light you see the Ninth World by depends on the turning of the moon: There are nights of green and there are nights of silver.

And there are also nights of red.

NIGHT OF RED

Between the green side of the moon and the silver side of the moon, there is a desert of red. Telescopic examination of this portion of the moon reveals vast, ruined cities which are constantly being buried, revealed, and buried again by the shifting lunar winds. This red desert often provides no more than a lurid, backlit glow to the green or silver moons. But upon occasion the lunar phases and rotation will turn right and a violent, crimson scar will hang above the Ninth World.

The red nights, when the world is viewed through a haze of blood, are times of ill luck and foul fortunes.

Tagline: A beautiful product, suitable for framing or reference.

I’ve read a couple of reviews of these blueprint files previously, and they all have contained a similar comment: “This isn’t what I expected at all!”

Which is odd because, folks, there’s nothing to be surprised at here. The Jovian Fleet Blueprint File comes packaged in an 8.5” x 11” white envelope. On the front of the envelope is the title and a sort of “table of contents” – which tells you that there are eight 19” x 15” blueprints folded inside the envelope, and that these blueprints are of: A Javelin-class missile cruiser; a Thunderbolt-class cruiser; an Athena-class destroyer; a Godsfire-class supercarrier; a Pathfinder Alpha (exo-armor); and a Valiant-class Strike Carrier (Block II Design, Cutaway View, and the Main Bridge).

On either side of this table contents are eight miniature versions of the blueprints. You were wondering what these blueprints are? Look on the cover. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Each blueprint comes with some background text on the design, plus various specifications and explanatory passages. They are elegantly suitable for either framing or for reference to these crafts.

There are some weak points to these blueprints: First, the verbiage for the Pathfinder Alpha is copied straight out of the core rulebook. Uh, guys at the Pod? If I bought this, it’s a good bet I already own the core book.

Second, there were a couple of editorial errors. A product of this length just shouldn’t have any errors in it.

Finally, the ships are not too useful.

The particular strength of all this are the cut-aways for the Valiant-class strike carrier. It’s a useful reference for anyone using the mini-campaign in the core rulebook, and I also enjoyed the three-dimensional holographic bridge design shown and described on one of the blueprints.

In short: Take a look at the cover in the store. If it looks like the type of product you’re going to get some use out of, pick it up. If not, don’t. You’re not going to be missing anything.

Style: 5
Substance: 4

Author: n/a
Company/Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Cost: $9.95
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 1999/08/24

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Roles, Rules, and Rolls has a really great Matrix of Precious Stones — complete with pictures! I don’t know about y’all, but my treasure hordes tend to be disproportionately filled with a half dozen or so “common suspects” of questionable interest. I’d much rather have the scepter of the mummy king topped with a fluted facet of snake skin jasper rather than generic emerald #191.

Roger’s post is also a great example of how you can find all kinds of gaming resources by just scrounging through your every day life (often with little or no effort required to alter it).

Tagline: I like it. Damn.

Awhile back I wrote a review of Heavy Gear’s Character Compendium. In that review I commented upon the fact that, as a general, rule I hated character compendiums, and that I generally found them to be wasted efforts.

I also commented upon the fact that Dream Pod 9 had defied the odds and produced, in Character Compendium 1, not only one the best character compendium I had ever read, but also one of the best supplements I had read.

Because I had recently been reviewing so many Heavy Gear products with almost unreserved praise, I jokingly commented at the end of this review that I had almost given up hope that I would find a bad Dream Pod 9 product in the form of a character compendium. However: “Maybe if I take a look at GM screens, the single largest excuse to waste cardboard the world has ever produced. Maybe…”

Well, I’ve finally taken a look at a GM screen… and I’ll be damned if I don’t love what the Pod has done here.

THE SCREEN

First things first: A screen comes with two components – the artwork on the player’s side and the reference material on the GM’s side.

For anyone familiar with Dream Pod 9’s previous work, it shouldn’t take brain surgery to figure out that the artwork they’ve produced here is stunning. It depicts a convoy of JAF ships – several disappearing off the edges of the screen, a Javelin-class missile cruiser on the left side, and the JSS Valiant screaming right out of the center panel. The convoy is surrounded by an exo-armor escort.

If you look at the artwork it is, as noted, fantastic and more than pleasing to the eye. On the other hand, the Pod has also selected a coloring scheme which allows your eye to easily slide past the depicted scene. Several screens I’ve seen are so gaudy that they distract and detract from the game session – this one can only add to the experience.

On the other side you have some reference tables: Roleplaying Game Tables on the left panel, Tactical Game Tables on the right panel, and Non-Player Characters on the center panel.

The roleplaying panel is unquestionably well done. They provide a threshold reference, attack and defense modifiers, movement speeds, as well as the tables of dealing with fires and electrical damage. They also include a master skill list, which is always useful for remembering which attribute goes with which skill. Finally they include the “Skill Improvement Costs” table, which is completely worthless. Character creation and/or advancement information does not need to go on a GM screen, because it does not need to be commonly referenced during gameplay.

The tactical game tables are quite suitable as well, but I have to question the inclusion of this panel at all. Even in a campaign with an integrated tactical campaign, I’m not commonly going to be sitting behind my GM screen while doing so. I would have been happy with a simple, separate cardstock reference sheet.

But my biggest beef with the inclusion of the tactical game tables is that there are several roleplaying tables which are, as a result, left off, which should have been included: Secondary Trait Formulas (I know what I said about character creation info, but the data on generating UD, AD, and wounding scores is useful info for improvised NPCs during combat); an equipment (or at least weapon) reference; atmosphere loss; rad contamination values; irradiation table. Why, for example, are the fire and electrical tables included, but not the radiation tables? And, quite frankly, weapon statistics are one of the primary things I need to reference during a game. The Pod should have seriously considered dropping the tactical tables, or included a fourth panel like the Storyteller screens.

The Non-Player Character panel was originally of questionable value to me, but I quickly realized it’s value: The archetypes are laid out in a table format which allows me not only to quickly reference them, but also to modify them in minor ways. This is incredibly useful when your players suddenly go off on a tangent and you find yourself with a need to improvise a bunch of NPCs very rapidly.

All in all, the screen is good, but not great, with some noticeable areas which are lacking.

THE BOOK

Where the product makes up for the flaws of the screen, however, is the book which comes with it — Gamemastering Made Easy. This is a bit of inversion over the laws of the natural universe as I have previously observed them: I always believed having the dorky little booklets included with GM screens be of high quality violated some galactic law. This, more than anything else is what usually kills my interest in GM screens – even if the screen was of mind-blowing quality, there’s no way it’s worth $15 or $20 in its own right (and the book never even justified why a tree was killed for its existence).

A lot of these little booklets purport to be “GM guides” of one variety or another, and this one is no exception. The difference lies entirely in the fact that reading through this book you are struck not only by the amount and depth of advice provided, but also its genuine usefulness. I’ve been GMing for a decade now, and there were still some approaches and techniques discussed in this text which took me by surprise.

The book opens with a general overview of what GMing entails. This takes about three pages and discusses the basic tools of the GM trade; what defines the job; how to balance the GM’s roles as referee, opponent, and god; game balance; impartiality; and a few tips on good recordkeeping. The book then goes on to detail how GM’s need to interact with players (highlights being how to find players and various types of players). Move along to the player characters (how to design them, how to fit them into a campaign, how to make a campaign fit the characters, how to motivate them, and some other stuff). Notable in this section are the suggestions for the pre-designed “character story”, which provides a rough guideline of where a character is where he’s going in dramatic terms. Also, the guidelines on how to construct an effective death scene for a PC is interesting.

Progressing along quite naturally we encounter NPCs, which provides the GM with tips on how to improvise NPCs on the run, as well as how to use NPCs effectively (with additional guidelines for effective playing of villains).

Then we come to a section on the rules, where the philosophy for following (and breaking) the rules is discussed, along with improvisation.

The GM is then treated to a discussion of plots and subplots (including how to make an exciting concept, how to incorporate effective subplots, coming up with ideas). One nice feature here are the “plot movers” – a two page list of things such as “assassins” and “beat the clock” which can be used by the GM to, well, move the plot.

Guidelines for fumbles are detailed (for a number of various common activities), combat is given an overview (including useful tactics, different types of combat scenes you can use, and how to use combat effectively in a campaign).

In my review of the Jovian Chronicles rulebook I mentioned that there were several different options for using the tactical system, depending on the level of detail, accuracy, and complexity you were looking for. Another one is added here in the form of the “Dramatic Tactical System”, which does a really great job of providing an effective map-less tactical option.

We then proceed into the world section – techniques for describing the world, dramatic settings, etc. Finally, we get several pages of work and reference sheets. These include an event tracking sheet, a campaign checklist, a PC personality worksheet, a quick character generation reference, a quick mechanical design reference sheet, a reference for perks and flaws, and a system design quick reference sheet. Most notable among these references, however, are the “Planetary Ephemerides” for 2210-2212 – these provide the distances between all of the major planets for those three years and, naturally, are a very good resource for any roleplaying campaign. Extreme kudos for Dream Pod 9 for including them.

In short, the book provides a broad range of tools which you can use as you want and totally at your discretion. Its advice is solid and useful. Its utility is constant. This isn’t throwaway fluff – it’s a seriously useful addition to you Jovian Chronicles campaign.

The package is marred with a few flaws:

First, never recycle cover art. There is a lot of original artwork in this book, but for some reason one or two of their images are recycled from the covers of other Jovian Chronicles supplements. The problem with this is that the covers are memorable because, well, they’re covers. TSR used to do this from time to time and it never worked. If you must recycle a piece of artwork, use one from a book’s interior.

Second, never repeat text from the core rulebook in a supplement. It is completely gratuitous. They only do this in one short passage on pg. 19, but I found it incredibly annoying. It was, admittedly, natural to re-cover the same ground found in the core rulebook (because they were about to expand on the ideas found there), but they could have rephrased the passage.

Finally, they had a couple of incongruous comments regarding method acting – one was negative (in describing people who go over the top in their roleplaying to the detriment of the game as “method actors”) and one was positive (in referring, if I recall correctly, to roleplaying as basically being a derivative of method acting). Neither is quite correct (although the negative is certainly farther off the mark than the positive). If you must use technical terms (which “method acting” is), make sure you’re using them correctly.

CONCLUSION

I can’t say that this is quite worth the $20 the Pod wants for it (I’d be happier in the $15-18 range), but I will offer a suggestion that you track down a copy – particularly if you’re someone who typically likes GM screens more than myself. The book alone is a valuable, repeatably usable, resource that you should definitely take a look at if you get a chance.

Style: 5
Substance: 4

Author: Jean Carrieres, Marc A. Vezina, Philippe R. Boulle
Company/Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Cost: $19.95
Page Count: 50
ISBN: 1-896776-35-3

Originally Posted: 1999/08/24

As I mentioned in commentary on my review of the Heavy Gear: Character Compendium, my opinion of character compendiums have not improved over the last thirteen years, but my opinion of properly executed GM screens is much higher. (Unfortunately, most GM screens are still fairly horrid in their execution.)

At the time I was writing this review, I was going through a rather horrid educational experience in which a theatrical curriculum supposedly featuring “Stanislavski technique” (from which “Method acting” is derived) was actually teaching something significantly different. It didn’t make much difference to me (who had previously trained in actual Stanislavski technique and even taught workshops on it), but I was watching the theatrical equivalent of a bunch of kids being taught Creation “Science” before being sent off to college to be rudely awoken when they discover that they have been miseducated. As a a result, I was extremely sensitive to acting terminology being misused. I have not revisited this book recently, but I rather suspect that my reaction to its discussion of Method acting is almost certainly disproportionate.

You can never really know what biases a reviewer is bringing them (either consciously or unconsciously). All you can really hope is that they have done their job in providing an adequate factual platform for their opinions that you are also free to draw opinions of your own.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.