Over at Gnome Stew, Patrick Benson has proposed the “Orbital Path Method of Plot Design“. I know I’ve said in the past that you should never prep a plot, but you might want to check this out because I think it has some conceptually useful stuff for node-based scenario design. Here’s the gist of it:

Using my terminology, each of those numbered dots is a node and you can follow any line from one node to another. So, for example, node 6 would have links to nodes 5, 7, and 13. Benson says that the “kicker” for the campaign should introduce several of the nodes in the outer ring and then play would proceed from there.

From a conceptual standpoint, what I find useful here is the visualization of escalation: As you move closer and closer to what Benson describes as the “root cause”, the stakes or difficulty or intensity or whatever increases.

I think this approach has a few practical problems: Like most diagrammatic approaches, it tends to artificially constrict navigational paths. The lack of backwards motion within the design scheme may tend to leave a lot of “abandoned” nodes in the players’ wake. That, combined with the seeming preference for a large number of “outer” nodes and a lower number of “inner” nodes will probably result in a lot of wasted prep.

Despite that, I thought it was a really interesting approach to visualizing the relationships between nodes. Check it out.

Tagline: Dream Pod 9’s chance to celebrate their mascot, with spectacular results.

If you’ve read any of the reviews of the Heavy Gear game you’ve probably heard a familiar theme: Sure, there are mecha… but the game isn’t about the gears. The reason you’ve heard this is because, well, it’s true. The gears are definitely cool, and they’re definitely the most realistic mecha you’ll probably ever encounter, and they are definitely eye candy without par. All that being said, however, the game is really about characters. The Gears aren’t even the “Gods of the Battlefield” the way mecha are usually portrayed. As a result, the sourcebooks tend to deal with the gears in a fairly secondary matter, focusing instead on generalized world-building. Even the vehicle compendiums offer a generalized mix.

Welcome, then, to The Duelist’s Handbook, Dream Pod 9’s chance to celebrate their mascot. And what a celebration it is.

The other heritage which The Duelist’s Handbook inherits is that of the defunct Heavy Gear Fighter card game. HGF was the first Heavy Gear product released by Dream Pod 9 and introduced the dueling concept. As Phil Boulle details in his Behind the Scenes for the book, Into the Badlands allowed the concept of dueling to be expanded from affairs of inter-regimental into the underground, competitive dueling of Khayr ad-Din. The Duelist’s Handbook, as a result of this heritage, details the ritualized rules of Gear dueling; provides a look at the stars of the dueling world; examines the lives and duties of military duelists; provides a host of new weapons and options for Gears; and, finally, serves as a sourcebook for the city of Khayr ad-Din.

Normally I wouldn’t like a book like this. Typically when a roleplaying sourcebook is primarily a technical one (i.e. the title of the book includes the technical term “duelist” rather than a location name like “Khayr ad-Din”) and then includes a setting of some sort, that setting is usually merely tacked on. It is almost never given the justice it deserved, if it deserved any justice at all (more often than not such settings are a poorly conceived set of stereotypes which apparently exists only to highlight elements found in the technical section of the book).

Would it really surprise you if I told you that Dream Pod 9 avoided falling into that trap? First off, the technical aspects of the book are handled with grace and style. Military dueling, competitive dueling, and the worlds which surround both are described in great detail. Additional weapons, gears, and detailed rules for small scale tactical combat are given. Second, the setting of Khayr ad-Din (a shadowy city built in an around a massive dumping ground) is detailed with typical craft and style of Dream Pod 9, with an eye always pointed towards providing not only a living, breathing, believable setting of incredible depth, but also a setting which provides countless adventuring possibilities. Plus there is nothing “throwaway” about Khayr ad-Din or its duelers (as anyone who has perused the latest offerings of the storyline books knows).

Beyond the quality of the material itself, Dream Pod 9 continue to demonstrate their enormous talent at putting a book together to make it not only practical, but beautiful. The Duelist’s Handbook was one of the transition products where the Pod slowly developed their lay-out skills from the earlier works which were possessed of a slight “page crowding” sensation (although still exceptional by the standards of the industry) into a cleaner feel. Again, one of those differences between being “one of the best” and “true excellence” which the Pod has demonstrated mastery of time and again. The information is always grouped in an intuitive manner and the index is detailed in all the right places. Typically, the Pod demonstrates that they are capable of “throwing away” artwork which other companies would gladly use on their front covers.

Although the Pod is apparently letting this one slip out of print for at least the moment, you should still be able to find it in stock somewhere. Grab it up, you’d be missing out on a good thing if you let this one pass you by.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Philippe R. Boulle
Company/Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Cost: $19.95
Page Count: 128
ISBN: 1-896776-07-8

Originally Posted: 1999/04/26

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

Ego Hunter is a one-shot scenario for the Eclipse Phase roleplaying game.

Eclipse Phase is a roleplaying game set on just the other side of the singularity: Earth has fallen to apocalyptic AI and most of the “survivors” only escaped by uploading their minds into machines and beaming them to our extraplanetary colonies. Many of these uploaded egos remain stored in stasis: The few who are pulled from storage and sleeved into new bodies are selected because someone on the outside has a use for them… and when they wake up, they have a debt to pay.

The scenario concept for Ego Hunter is immediately captivating:  You’re all beta forks of a single individual. In other words, you’re partial mind-clones with incomplete memories that have been “forked” from your original alpha personality in order to carry out some specific task. You return home expecting to be reintegrated with your primary personality… but instead you wake up, surprised to find that you’ve been re-sleeved into a new body. Your alpha is nowhere to be found, nothing makes any sense… and then people start getting murdered.

(click for PDF)

The scenario is great, but I found its rambling presentation and lack of organization to be significantly debilitating. So I’ve put together a rather extensive set of prep notes that I think other people interested in running the scenario will find useful. It includes stuff like:

• An easy-to-reference timeline of past events so that the GM can easily grasp the mystery being solved.
• Pulling together all of the disparate information on the “big problem” so that it can be easily referenced on a single page.
• A comprehensive revelations list to make managing the mystery on-the-fly as easy as possible (as discussed in the Three Clue Rule).
• Pulling all the stat blocks referenced from the core rulebook so that they’ll be available at your fingertips.

There are also several chunks of new material: I’ve clarified the node-structure and beefed up the investigation in a few places where it seemed a little threadbare. I’ve also fleshed out other material.

SPOILER WARNING

These prep notes also feature two major revisions to the original scenario.

First, I’ve tweaked the player characters in order to tighten the scenario’s focus on the interesting premise of “you’re all playing the same character”. Most notably, this includes redesigning Nkeka’s role in the adventure so that he pretends to be one of the beta forks in order to infiltrate the operation. Study the character briefings at the end of the prep notes to make sure you understand the dynamics of the group.

These character briefings are also designed to be given to each player. The scenario requires Nkeka Adesoji (posing as B6) and Roque Vera. Park Soon-Ok is an optional character who can be played as an NPC. (I recommend using up all five of the Achjima beta forks before assigning Park Soon-Ok to a player.)

MAPS

The other major revision to the original scenario is Air Processing Unit 13. I found very little utility in the published version of the map, so I redesigned it:

(large version / no key)

And there are also versions isolating each level. You can click each image below to get a larger version:

WHAT YOU NEED

In order to fully understand the concept and background of the scenario, you will probably need a copy of the original adventure. The original adventure also includes the pregenerated character sheets for the PCs (which can be paired to the customized character briefings found in the prep notes PDF).

You may be asking yourself: “If you had to go to all this trouble, why should I pick up the original adventure? It’s clearly horrible!” If so, I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood me. The original scenario is really great. I’ve just organized the material and added a couple of tweaks.

The Ego Hunter: Prep Notes PDF and associated maps are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

While I was at GenCon this year I played in one of the most memorable convention scenarios: Lord of the Hives by Threat Detected. It featured three gaming tables participating in a series of linked, timed tournament scenarios: The success or failure of a group during a particular round would directly impact the situations encountered by the other groups during the next round.

I was at the pilots’ table and played a young Admiral Ackbar in his pre-admiral days. There were, of course, copious outcries of, “It’s a trap!” We actually started the game playing a game of sabbac on the hangar deck, so my first line of dialogue in the game was:

Good times. Like most good gaming experiences, it featured a combination of clever scenario design and people who were fun to hang out with.

I bring this up, because Threat Detected has posted a Gallery from the event and a podcast featuring a Post-Play Round Table from the session. You can see me obliquely in the former and hear me briefly in the latter.

I just got done running the most heavily railroaded session in probably my last 15 years of gaming, including heavily forced scene transitions and huge dollops of illusionism.

(Context: It was a dream sequence being experienced by a comatose PC. They were taken through a highlight reel of their memories — both the ones they’ve experienced and the ones their amnesiac character has forgotten — with the other players jumping in to play current and former versions of themselves in a kaleidoscopic dreamscape.)

I bring this up because I think it’s given me a fresh appreciation for why combat encounters — particularly those in “delve format” adventures — have become so overwrought in the past 10 years: It’s because, in a culture of “storytelling” GMs with railroaded plots, the combat encounters are the only place where players can actually experience freedom; where their choices actually matter.

So you get a large class of players who are primarily focused on the combat encounters because that’s where they’re actually allowed to experience the true joy of roleplaying games (and, therefore, that’s where they have fun). And to cater to those desires, adventure design (and then game design) focuses more and more on making those encounters really exciting.

But then, as that cycle degrades into itself, we end up with a situation where the tail is wagging the dog: Where the railroaded plot that strings together the combat encounters becomes thinner and thinner as more and more effort is put into propping up the combat encounter tent poles.

(Insert obligatory references to the Don’t Prep Plots and Node-Based Scenario Design.)