Quick update for backers: The first batch of refunds was supposed to go out this week. That didn’t happen. The problem is that PayPal is dawdling in confirming the transfer of funds from my checking account to my PayPal account. Until the money is actually in my Paypal account, I can’t send it to you.

What they’re doing here is holding onto the money for a few extra days so that they can earn a little more interest out of it. I’d forgotten how much of a pain-in-the-ass PayPal is. In any case, PayPal is telling me that the money should clear in the next 2-3 business days. So my expectation is that the first batch of refunds will actually clear some time next week.

And if you were an L&L backer and you have no idea what I’m talking about, go here and follow the instructions.

(Note: The first half dozen or so people who responded to my e-mail have received their refunds. I sent those out using the small balance I had standing in my account.)

Exit, Pursued by a Monster – Alex Drummond

I did a series of teasers for the Art of Legends & Labyrinths awhile back at a time when I thought we were gearing up for the eminent release of the book, but it ran aground on the rocky shores of the project. I’ve still got a half dozen or so pieces that were completed but never previewed and I’m going to go ahead and roll those out now for everyone to see.

One of my goals for the art in Legends & Labyrinths was to have it representative of what actually happens at the gaming table. It’s one of the reasons that I offered an illustration based on a backer’s campaign journal as one of the reward levels for the 8-Bit funding campaign: I wanted to have the visuals of the game drawn from actual play.

This piece is one example of that. Here’s what the original art order looked like:

A cavern which has been excavated to reveal the ancient remains of a city. The surroundings have the feeling of great age; the dust of Sumerian clay. We are looking toward an ancient tower half-embedded into the cavern wall.

On the floor of the cavern in front of this tower a huge, mob-like melee is raging: Tor, Elestra, Ranthir, Tee, and Nasira (or some selection thereof) are fighting large, ogre-like creatures with ebon black skin who are being commanded by a small cadre of robed cultists. (These are the same guys Tee was about to ambush in the illustration for page 67.)

One moment ago, Agnarr leaped through the upper window of the tower – from the third floor or thereabouts; high up. It’s like a stunt out of an action movie and Agnarr looks totally cool in mid-air; like some sort of combination of Conan, James Bond, and John McClane.

What we’re looking at right now is a massive creature which has smashed through that window and large chunks of the wall around it. It looks like a sandworm from Dune except that its mouth is rimmed with needle-like teeth and it’s got two lanky arms thrusting out from its sides.

So: Tower window being smashed open; chunks of masonry hanging in the air. And a giant worm chasing Agnarr in a race to a floor which is filled with a crazy melee.

For those following along at home with the Black Book Beta, this piece was intended to appear on page 74 (replacing the photoshopped placeholder of the volcanic dragon).

Tagline: A simple vehicle construction system. An oxymoron? Not so. Big Robots, Cool Starships succeeds at the impossible.

Big Robots, Cool Starships, the first supplement for the Big Eyes, Small Mouth roleplaying game, is perhaps the most surprising gaming product I have read all year.

Did I say surprising? I meant mind-blowing… as in “mind-blowingly good”.

Why is it surprising? you ask. (We’ll get to “mind-blowing” later.) Very simple: This book should not be anywhere near as good as it is.

First off, it is a vehicle construction system for a simple game. And when I say “vehicle construction system” I mean “vehicle construction system”. BRCS doesn’t cut corners and it doesn’t fudge (any more than BESM does). It is a concrete, dynamic, flexible system with precise definitions and seemingly limitless potential. This type of thing should not exist. And yet it does. BRCS not only succeeds at being a true system, it also manages to pull it off without becoming far too complex for the basic game. We’ll get back to how this is all possible in a couple seconds.

Second, BRCS is written by David L. Pulver. I also discovered (by reading Mark C. MacKinnon’s Foreward to the book) that Pulver signed on as Associate Line Editor and Senior Staff Writer for Guardians of Order back in November of ’98. This would, of course, be the same acclaimed David L. Pulver who wrote GURPS Biotech, GURPS Mecha, GURPS Vehicles, and the forthcoming revision of GURPS Space. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that Pulver can turn out products of sterling quality. What is surprising is that Pulver is working on BESM. I can’t imagine a longer, or stranger, jump than the one taken from GURPS to Big Eyes, Small Mouth. What is even more surprising is that Pulver, one of the Founding Fathers of vehicle construction systems in my mind, could have turned out BRCS — which is unlike any VCS I’ve seen before.

Then again, maybe that isn’t so surprising either.

By this point I’ve either tantalized or bored you enough. What the heck is this Big Robots, Cool Starships thing, anyway?

THE SYSTEM

Big Robots, Cool Starships is – in its own words – “a mecha/SF supplement for Big Eyes, Small Mouth”. It expands the basic BESM system to allow for more dynamic mecha play – “mecha” being used in its more broad-based definition of “any mechanical device found in anime”. To sum up, therefore, BRCS is a vehicle construction system (plus some general campaign info) for big robots, combat cyborgs, really cool cars, cybernetic body armor, starships, fighters, tanks, and just about anything else you can think of with two gears to rub together.

Note the word “expand”, above. It’s there for a very good reason. When most games have a book described with the blurb “new rules for XXX!” what that really means is “the system in the core rulebook for XXX was so crappy that we’ve completely ripped it out and are starting over from scratch; plus we’re charging you extra for the privilege of having decent rules”.

BRCS isn’t like that at all. The system for “giant robots” and their ilk in the core BESM rulebook works just fine. BRCS is, literally, an expansion of that basic system. It doesn’t replace; it adds to.

“But wait,” you say, “If the basic system works just fine, why does it need expanding?” The answer is simple: It doesn’t need expanding. But some people might want it expanded. If you’re running mecha-oriented campaigns, then the rules in BRCS will provide you with more options, more detail, and more innate potential. Think of it like this: In first grade you learned about addition. It wasn’t until later on that they taught you multiplication. Was the system you had learned for addition incomplete because now you had this new thing called “multiplication”? Of course not. Multiplication was simply an expansion of your mathematical concepts – more useful for some things; less useful for others. Same thing applies here.

BRCS accomplishes this expansion in a five-step process: First it redefines the “Own a Big Robot” attribute from the basic BESM rulebook to include all sorts of mecha. (“Ah ha! They did change something!” Oh, calm down. Would you have preferred it if they added a whole new attribute which accomplished nothing at all? Sheesh.). Second, they made it so that both “Own a Big Robot” and “Cybernetic Body” give you a pool of “Mecha Points”. Third, they added the attribute “More Powerful Robot” to get you some additional Mecha Points. Fourth, they added the “Personal Gear” attribute to cover situations where a character has access to gear your average person probably wouldn’t (okay, this isn’t really all that important, but I wanted a “five-step” process not a “four-step” process — so sue me). Finally, they inserted a six-step mecha design process between Step Five and Step Six of character creation as described in BESM. These steps are conveniently numbered 5A through 5F.

Basic character creation in BESM is an eight-step process. Half of those had nothing to do with the system at all (they were entirely conceptual). Similarly, three of the six steps to mecha design as described in BRCS are conceptual in nature, not mechanical – Step 5A is “GM Discussion” (self-explanatory); Step 5B is “Mecha Outline” (get your concept); and Step 5F is “Mecha Background” (when all the numbers are hashed out, your write up the details to “personalize your creation”). Therefore it’s steps 5C, 5D, and 5E which are the meat of this system. Let’s take a closer look.

Step 5C: Mecha Sub-Attributes. The BRCS system for mecha creation is extremely similar to the basic BESM character creation system. Not only is BRCS an expansion to the BESM rules, it is a seamless one – the system naturally fits right into the existing character creation process, as if it had always been meant to be there. To avoid not only the “let’s replace everything” syndrome, but also the “tacked on rules” syndrome is, quite frankly, amazing (have I used that word and its synonyms often enough to make this review’s conclusion clear, yet?).

Character creation in BESM starts with the purchasing of Attributes (with five discrete levels). BRCS mecha creation starts with the purchasing of Sub-Attributes (with six discrete levels). These are things like “Super Strength”, “Space Flight”, “Artificial Intelligence”, and so on. Like BESM character creation, BRCS is very much an open-ended effects-based system – you purchase “Space Flight” in order to build intergalactic battlecruisers and 20th century spacesuits alike. The system is incredibly dynamic and resilient, although it tends to scale poorly: You can build BMW’s and intergalactic cruisers; but you can’t have them face off against each other very well. This isn’t a major issue, and can easily be worked around in the rare circumstance when it actually crops up (for example, by giving the intergalactic cruiser appropriate action resolution bonuses based on its size, etc.; or you could just GM fiat the situation out of the way, the necessary difference between the technology levels before the problem crops up being large enough that there is really only one logical conclusion in most of these situations).

Step 5D: Mecha Defects. The next step in BESM character creation is the selection of Defects – which give you Bonus Points to spend on additional Attributes. Similarly, Mecha Defects (“Exposed Occupants”, “Hanger Queen”, “Start-Up Time”) give you additional points to spend on Mecha Sub-Attributes.

Between purchasing additional levels of “Own a Big Robot” or “Cybernetic Body” (which give you big chunks of extra Mecha Points); purchasing “More Powerful Robot” (for smaller chunks of extra Mecha Points); and Mecha Defects (for very small, precise chunks of extra Mecha Points) you should be able to tweak things for your character in just the right way so that there is little or no slop in the number of Mecha Points you purchased versus the number of Mecha Points you need to build your mecha.

Step 5E: Mecha Derived Values. Finally you figure out the mecha’s “Armour”, “Health Points”, “Energy Points”, and “Combat Value” based on its attributes. Action resolution proceeds normally.

As I said with character creation in BESM: It don’t get much easier than this.

OTHER STUFF

So Big Robots, Cool Starships is a vehicle construction system, focusing on mecha. Right? Right.

But wait… there’s more! The book also contains:

1. A brief, two page overview of the history of mecha in Japanese anime. It is surprisingly detailed considering its short length (particularly considering the broad definition of “mecha” with which the supplement is working). Noticeable oversights (at least to me) included Bubblegum Crisis and Armored Trooper Votoms. Plus, Pulver tends to ignore manga entirely (even when the series he is talking about was manga before it was anime). I was also upset that he referred to Robotech as the English translation for Super Dimensional Fortress Macross — if you don’t have the space to detail the controversy regarding the relationship between those two pieces of animation, then please don’t mention them at all.

2. A chapter on “Mecha Combat and Other Actions”. You might be thinking “new rules”, but you’d be wrong. With the exception of a couple of charts on “Falling Damage” and “Crash Damage”, health points for buildings, and a list of suggested mecha-related resolution modifiers the section is pretty much ruleless. This is for the best: The basic BESM resolution mechanics are more than capable of handling mecha. This is a testament not only to the strength of BESM’s mechanics, but also the strength of Pulver’s design system (insofar as it remains completely compatible). So what is in this section? Guidelines. Stuff you might not think of, but which Pulver takes the time to mention and bring to your attention. Excellent stuff. With a system like BESM I don’t need a rule for every occasion, and by simply bringing the stuff to my attention Pulver has done more than enough. Kudos for this restraint, which leads to a far better product than if these twenty pages had been packed full of useless rules (which would have ruined the simple elegance of BESM).

3. And we’re still not done. Pulver includes a short section on potential mecha campaign settings (from Ancient Japan to High Fantasy to Modern Day to Far Future); a game seed for each of those campaign settings; and a sample adventure.

4. Finally, I just want to make note that with this product Guardians of Order has moved up my list from “company which produces interesting stuff” to “company whose stuff you should buy”. The minor quibbles I had with their production values in their first publication (the core BESM rules) have evaporated; their general art quality has improved tremendously (although I’m still spoiled by the folks over at Dream Pod 9, so I’ll say they could be even better); their writing remains spotless (particularly with Pulver at the helm); their product conception is elegant; and their future plans look bright (with Dominion Tank Police and Demon City Shinjuku RPGs in the future as well as additional supplements for BESM).

5. To end on a weird note: BRCS has a two-page index with an entry for just about every major concept in the book. This is great, right? Wrong. Every single entry has exactly one (and only one) referenced page number. According to this index, for example, “Big Eyes, Small Mouth” is referenced only once: On page six. Not only is this, of course, inaccurate, it’s actually mentioned on page five and page seven as well. This is completely bizarre. Out of curiosity I went back and checked the core BESM manual. It’s the same damn thing! I don’t get it. This is not how indexes work!

CONCLUSION

Big Robots, Cool Starships is, in my estimation, one of the best supplements of its type I have ever read. I’ve never seen a rules-based supplement mesh so seamlessly and effortlessly with its mother product. BRCS doesn’t leave you feeling as if you were ripped off by the mecha rules in BESM; yet at the same time once you own it you know you wouldn’t want to play without it. On top of it all, Pulver has thrown in campaign seeds and a fairly interesting adventure.

When I need a simple system which is, nonetheless, a solid game engine (so that I don’t have to fudge a lot of different things to make it work) BESM has become the game I look to. BESM is the best game of its type I have encountered. The same holds true, now, for BRCS — even if I’m not sure there is another product like BRCS out there.

In short, Big Robots, Cool Starships is not only an excellent product, it is a solid product. You won’t be disappointed.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: David L. Pulver
Company/Publisher: Guardians of Order
Cost: $15.95
Page count: 110
ISBN: 0-9682431-3-4

Originally Posted: 1999/08/06

As I mentioned in my review of Big Eyes, Small Mouth, the second edition of the game remains a go-to system for me. And BRCS remains one of the best vehicle construction systems I’ve ever used (although it has been awhile since I had cause to actually pull it out and play around with it).

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

Go to Part 1

Once you start skipping empty time it becomes necessary to frame the scene you’re skipping to: The continuous and relatively steady flow of events experienced in a classic dungeoncrawl is replaced with something inconsistent, noncontiguous, and possibly even non-sequential.

In HeroQuest, Robin D. Laws defines three different types of “time” in a roleplaying game – abstract time, now time, and slow time. These can be useful ways to think about the pacing of your session and to them I’ll also add the concept of a sharp cut.

SLOW TIME: According to Laws, this is where critical events and extended contests happen. It’s the place where people want to fine-tune their intentions and their actions, and as a result it’s a place where either more rules or more attention (or both) gets applied. The narration of events in slow time generally takes more time to resolve in real time than it does for the characters to experience it. (The D&D combat system is an example of slow time.)

NOW TIME: We could also refer to this as being “in the scene”. This is typically where the majority of our playing time is spent: The players are making every decision for their characters and there isn’t any empty time being skipped over.

ABSTRACT TIME: Abstract time is a soft method of moving over empty time. It generally takes the form of what I think of as “eliding narration”: “Several days pass as you cross the Great Plain…” or “You leave the Docks and head across town…” (This is the method I most often use for moving between scenes, largely because it never fully disengages from the players: With practice it becomes easy to read a table’s reaction to eliding narration and “know” when you need to drop out of it and back into a scene. I also find it very conducive for the sort of non-linear scenario structures I use, because it allows the players to continue providing input even as we move rapidly through the game world’s clock.)

SHARP CUT: Finally we have the sharp cut. Here we jump directly from the end of one action to the beginning of a different action without explaining the transition or relationship between them. For example:

Player: Okay. I head to bed.

GM: You fall asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow. And we cut to – the sharp pain of the goblin’s sword biting through your chain and deep into your arm.

Obviously a lot of scene transitions are going to take the form of either sharp cuts or the eliding narration of abstract time. But even if there’s a relative consistency of “now time” between sequences, you may still find it useful to conceptually break the action into scenes and use scene-framing techniques to structure them.

Whatever the case may be, however, you will need an understanding of both how to open a scene and how to close a scene.

THE AGENDA

Flipping the pages of a diary. Fast-fowarding through a video. Cutting sharply to a fresh moment. How do we decide when to stop flipping? Or push the play button? Or what to cut to? How do we decide when a new a scene begins?

There are several ways that you can think about what it means to “open” a scene, but I generally think of it in terms of rapidly establishing the moment (the who, what, where, and when) and then applying a sharp impetus which creates action.

(I say “rapidly” because if the entire idea is to skip the empty time between meaningful decisions, then you should be trying to eliminate as much of that empty time — to cut as close to the next meaningful choice — as possible. You also generally can’t go too far wrong by keeping the focus on your players; by engaging them constantly in the process of making meaningful choices.)

First, identify the agenda of the scene. Why are we here? Why is this moment important? Agendas don’t have to be portentous, but if you’re cutting into a scene there must have been a reason why you’re doing it.

(Let’s take a moment to imagine a scene without an agenda. Remember that sequence from Vampire: The Masquerade where a PC decides to drive downtown? Okay. The GM cuts away from the house and decides to open the next scene.

GM: You’re sitting at a red light on the corner of Chicago and Franklin. What are you doing?

Player: I wait for the light to turn green.

GM: The light turns green. You continue driving downtown.

End of scene. Without an agenda – without some reason for focusing on the events at Chicago and Franklin – that was clearly a pointless waste of time. Fortunately, this GM at least had the common sense to cut the scene off and move on. Sometimes you’ll see neophyte GMs continue to linger in these sorts of pointless exchanges for painfully long periods of time.)

The types of agendas that are prioritized, the methods used to select them, and the way they’re presented is another place where the motivations and techniques of an individual GM are strongly expressed. But, in general, I find it useful to think of the agenda in terms of the question which is being answered by the scene. Another way to think of this is in terms of the scene’s stakes. (Literally, what’s at stake in the scene.)

For example, if we’re dealing with a standard dungeon crawl we might think of each room as a separate scene. Let’s say that one of these rooms contains an ogre. We might say that the agenda of this scene is to answer the question, “Can the PCs kill the ogre?” (At stake are the lives of the PCs and the life of the ogre.) But you could also radically alter the character of this scene by asking a different question: “How are the PCs going to get past the ogre?” makes the scene more open-ended. “Can the ogre convince the PCs to help him fight the goblins?”, on the other hand, would change the scene entirely.

Non-dungeon examples might include things like: Will Billy take the heroin? Can Sherlock find the bloody handprint? Will Gunther betray the Jewish family living in his secret attic? And so forth.

(If you’re railroading, then you may have already predetermined the answers to these questions, but the questions are still being asked. If you’re not railroading, then it’s very likely that you’ll find the agenda of a scene changing after it’s begun. But there’ll still have been some initial or intended agenda that made you frame the scene in the first place, and that’s what we’re interested in at the moment.)

THE BANG

Now that you’ve framed the agenda, you need to actually start the scene by zooming in or refocusing or painting a verbal sketch (or whatever other procedural descriptor seems most appropriate to you).

What you’re looking for here is the bang.

The bang is the thing which forces the PCs to make one or more meaningful choices (or at least provokes them with the opportunity to do so). It’s the explosive force which launches the scene and propels it forward.

Let’s keep it simple for the moment by looking back at our dungeon scene with the ogre. Assume the PCs have failed their Stealth check. Does the scene start when the ogre jumps out and snarls in their face? Or does it start when they’re still approaching its chamber and they can hear the crunching of bones? Or when they see a goblin strung up on a rack with its intestines hanging around its ankles… and then the deep thudding of heavy footsteps fills the corridor behind them as the ogre returns for its meal?

Each of these is a different bang, and you can see how changing the bang can dramatically shift the nature of the ensuing scene (even if all the other elements of that scene remain the same). Choosing the “right” bang is usually more art than science.

Outside of the dungeon, bangs might look like this:

“Cut to Thursday afternoon. You’re cleaning your son’s room. You’re shifting around a couple of his well-read comic books when you find a syringe. A used syringe.”

“You’re only about halfway back to town when the full moon fully crests the Blue Hills. Sharp lances of pain dance down your limbs and arc across your back as fur erupts from your skin.”

“The cop hauls himself out of the patrol car. He’s wearing a food-stained sheriff’s uniform. He’s got a ring on a chain around his neck. You recognize your wife’s wedding band.”

You’ll often find that bangs require contextualization. (In other words, you might need to start a scene a little before the bang in order to properly set up the information necessary to understand the bang.) You may also find it useful to multiply or escalate the stakes of a scene by using a sequence of multiple bangs.

For example, consider the scene featuring the “wedding band” bang above. You might open that scene by saying something like:

“You’ve been on the road to San Antonio for the better part of four hours. Heat is glimmering off the endless stretch of tar in front of you and the air conditioner is straining to keep up with it. Your gas gauge has dipped below a quarter tank now and you’re keeping a sharp outlook for any sort of service station to top it back up.”

(This is all context. Or exposition. It’s establishing some key facts about the scene that’s about to happen: The character is in the middle of nowhere. They’re low on gas. Et cetera.)

“You’re pulling past the long-faded billboard for a bait shop when the red-and-whites of some country cop blossom like a cherry tree behind you.”

(This is the first bang of the scene: Bam! There’s a cop. Do you pull over? Or do you try to outrun him? If the PC has nothing to hide from the cops this is probably a pretty weak bang. But if there’s a body hidden in the trunk, for example, then it’s got some potential.)

In this case we’ll assume that the PC decides to pull over. And that’s when we deliver the second bang (featuring the wedding band) which escalates the scene.

In conclusion, it’s time for a personal value judgment on my part: Generally speaking, the shorter the contextualization and the larger the number of interesting choices that can be made in response to a bang the better the bang is.

You don’t always need rich, complicated scenes, of course. Sometimes you want the short, brutal simplicity of someone swinging an axe at James Bond’s head. (That sort of change-up with a clear-cut choice can be vitally refreshing in a campaign mired with complex dilemmas.) But nine times out of ten, you’ll make your campaign richer and more rewarding if you make your bangs more evocative.

Go to Part 3: Filling the Frame

(A final note: The term “bang” was coined by Ron Edwards with a very narrow definition that applied it only to Edwards’ preferred style of “narrativism”. I’m very deliberately genericizing the term so that it applies to any style.)

I’m recommending that you take a peek at the Bundle of Holding. It’s the storytelling game equivalent of the Humble Bundle and right now it’s featuring six games: How We Came to Live Here, Witch: The Road to Lindisfarne, Psi*Run, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, Monster of the Week, and ViewScream.

Since I’ve only just purchased the bundle, I haven’t really had any time to digest the games they’re offering. But I’ve got some friends who said some really nice things about Psi*Run after playing it at Origins this year and I really regretted not being able to back the kickstarter for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Empire.

So whether you’re like me and this is a great time to pick up a couple games you’ve been eying for awhile or if you just want to grab some great deals at a bargain price, check this out.