Tagline: Two words: Bizarre. No wait, that’s only one word. Uhhh… Okay: Really bizarre. How’s that? Good? Good. Great. Okay.

CONCEPT

Government-Funded Robot Assassins from Hell – Mission One: Kill All Evil Game Designers (henceforth, for obvious reasons, referred to merely as Government-Funded Robot Assassins) is a card game dating back to 1995.

Basically it combines a tongue-in-cheek presentation of “government-funded robot assassins from hell” with a satiric look at the gaming industry. Hence you get cards like:

Steve Jackson. He has his own game company! Creator of gaming chaos, this man is wanted by not only the Pentagon, but also the Secret Service! KILL HIM NOW!

And:

Favorable Review. Everyone loves it! It could be because the game is good or maybe the designer slipped the reviewer some cold, hard cash.

(Note: Any game designers wishing to slip me cold hard cash should contact me via e-mail to obtain my snail mail address. I have no scruples. None at all. Honest.)

THE RULES

You win the game by earning a hundred points. Points are earned by carrying out a successful assassination – your targets being various game designers (each of whom are worth varying amounts).

Basically each player starts with a Plain Bot (a really basic model of robot assassin) and a hand of seven cards. You roll 4d6 to determine who plays first (why 4d6? I don’t know). Each player then draws a card and places a target on the table. Then he plays a card (which modifies the score of either his robot or a target, depending on the type of card). Everyone does the same thing.

When play returns to the first player he may now place a second card and then he needs to attack his target (the card he played back on his first turn). To carry out the assassination attempt he adds up his Assassinate score (his ‘bot plus its modifiers) and adds 4d6. If the total is higher than the defense of his target, then the target is dead and the player collects the points. Play out a new target.

Repeat until someone wins.

SUMMARY

I ended up picking up Government-Funded Robot Assassins because I was ordering a number of products from Propaganda Publishing and my eye caught the title (which is very catchy, you have to admit). Since it was only six bucks I added it to my figurative cart. I’m very disappointed by it.

Basically I would sum the game up by its major problems:

First, the production values are very low. Hand-scribbled lettering in the graphics, which are generally low quality anyway. The game as a whole shows up as a set of cardstock pages (the cards, which you have to cut up yourself) folded into a large sheet of xeroxed instructions. This isn’t too bad, overall, since the whole product is basically one large in-joke – so you’re hardly going to expect laminated perfection — but it’s still a knock.

Second, the game – by it’s very nature – ends up being very topical. And the topic is now half a decade old. To put that in perspective, realize that Magic: The Gathering was new, TSR was still independent, and SHADIS still existed. It’s not a knock against the game as it was originally conceived, but it is a knock against purchasing it today.

Third, the rules are presented in a rather sloppy manner in a couple of places. A far larger problem with the rules, however, is that they just aren’t that effective or fun. Your average assassination almost always succeeds, particularly once you start building your robot up (you can move your assassinate score up, but not down – while you are able to modify defensive scores in both directions).

Finally, the jokes were never that funny to begin with. I picked a couple of the more humorous ones, above, but most of them are just yawners. For example:

Wizards of the Coast. The publishers of a hot new card game. Though they have money, they aren’t exactly in the same league as TSR. If they survive Magic, look out!

(Okay, that’s a little funny now — in an ironic sort of way.)

At the end of the day, this just isn’t worth your time or your money. It has a note of pleasant nostalgia to it for “old timers”, like myself, who happened to be kicking around when the events discussed on these cards were unfolding. But that’s not reason enough to pick it up.

Style: 2
Substance: 2

Author: Philip J. Reed, Jr.
Company/Publisher: Propaganda Publishing
Cost: $6.00
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 2000/03/12

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

Now we have a basic framework for the urbancrawl: A map divided into districts. Content keyed to each district.

What we need now is a default action that will allow the PCs to engage with that keyed content. In dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls, that action is geographic movement. In the urbancrawl, it’s the investigation action.

In my discussion of hexcrawls, I advocated for the “hidden hex”: The hex is an abstraction that’s useful to the GM for keying and managing content, but which has no meaning for the PCs. In the urbancrawl, however, I believe that you will generally be keying content to districts that are meaningful to the PCs: They know where that ward or neighborhood or landmark or street is located.

So the basic investigation action ends up being pretty simple and very transparent: The player points to a neighborhood and says, “I want to investigate there.” The GM looks at their key and tells them what they’ve found. (If the GM is using multiple urbancrawl layers, then they can randomize which layer has been discovered with this investigation action.)

GENERIC vs. SPECIFIC INVESTIGATION

In actual practice, though, you’re quickly going to want to add additional utility to this basic action.

The first thing you’ll need is the ability to distinguish between generic investigations and specific investigations.

In a generic investigation, the PCs are just looking for anything interesting without any particular agenda. This generic investigation is identical to our basic interaction above.

In a specific investigation, on the other hand, the PCs are poking around with a particular goal in mind. This is where the urbancrawl layers become significant: They’re not just looking for anything of interest, they’re specifically looking for a patron. So instead of randomly selecting content from your available layers, you’ll key the specific content tied to the patron level of your urbancrawl.

(You might also include a chance of them finding something other than what they were looking for. For example, you might roll 1d6 and on a roll of 1 they get information from an urbancrawl layer other than the one they intended.)

I’ll also argue that this is the point where you should start hiding the abstraction again: You’ve arranged the content of your city into urbancrawl layers because that’s a convenient way of organizing it and interacting with it as a GM, but those layers don’t really have “meaning” in the game world. The players shouldn’t be saying things like, “I’d like some content from the Heist urbancrawl layer, please.” You want them to be saying, “We need another big score real bad. I’m going to go hit up my contacts in Oldtown and see if I can find something lucrative.”

(At that point you might look at your key and note not only the Tablets of Shandrala that are being held by the local Sheriff of Taxes (as keyed to the Heist layer of your urbancrawl), but also that Count Ormu on the Vampire layer of your urbancrawl in the same district holds the onyx crown jewels of the Lich Queen of Rasang.)

At this point, you might also be thinking about prepping a random table for selecting specific districts if the PCs attempt city-wide investigations. That’s certainly an option and I’m not going to say thee nay, but I suspect you’ll lose some feeling of the ‘crawl if you do that: Instead of crawling to a specific part of town and poking around (exploring the town and everything it has to offer as they do so), the players are just kind of generically asking for a content handout.

(For similar reasons, I wouldn’t run a dungeoncrawl by randomizing which room they explored next. This is why I think making the district structure of the urbancrawl explicit is the right way to go: It encourages that specific engagement with the geography of the city and requires that meaningful exploration choices are being made. On the other hand, I could certainly be completely wrong about this.)

MECHANICS OF THE INVESTIGATION ACTION

Instead of having the investigation action result in an automatic success, you might want to resolve it mechanically. Obviously the exact nature of the mechanic will depend on the system you’re using, but for the sake of argument let’s assume we’re using D&D 3.5.

The most obvious mechanic here would be a Gather Information check. You could set a universal DC for the check (DC 15 to perform an urbancrawl investigation); or you could vary it by city (DC 15 in the City-State of the Invincible Overlord, but DC 20 in the more tight-lipped City-State of the World Emperor); or you could vary it by urbancrawl layer (DC 10 for the Random Encounter layer, DC 20 for the Vampire layer); or you could define it for each key entry (DC 15 to find the blood den in Midtown, but DC 22 to find the den in the Nobles’ Quarter).

You could also allow for exceptional successes to generate additional information. If you were using a One Roll Engine system like Better Angels or Reign, for example, you might generate “soft rumors” for each additional set after the first. These soft rumors wouldn’t give the PCs a specific hook, but they would tell them about general areas of interest that are available in the local urbancrawl. (For example, you might tell them about rumors circulating through the Temple District about people showing up with puncture marks on their necks. They won’t find a specific blood den that way, but it might prompt them to go looking for it.)

You could similarly use the height of an ORE set to determine if the PCs get additional pieces of actionable intelligence. For example, any simple success tells them where the vampire blood den is. But if they score additional dice in the set you might tell them how many vampires are nesting there or give them a floorplan. (This could also just translate into additional rolls on an old school rumor table about the location.)

CONTEXTUALIZING

Starting off with generic Gather Information checks is probably a good starting point, but I’m guessing it won’t take long for the PCs to start attempting investigatory actions that would be handled better through alternative skill checks.

If we think back to our survey of old school city supplements, we might recall that Pavis had some interesting guidelines for PCs researching information in the city.

Gather Information checks can be used to handle the collection of gossips and rumors from taverns and markets.

Knowledge skills could be used when searching through records and the like. Pavis suggests the records of cults and guilds (diaries, receipts, letters, ledgers). It might also represent tax records or newssheets or libraries or any number of other things depending on the particular setting. Gaining access to these records might require Bluff, Diplomacy, and/or the paying of a fee or bribe.

Knowledge (Local) could be used to generate “soft rumors” like the ones discussed above (suggesting potential avenues of investigation).

Specific types of urbancrawl layers might also suggest other skills. For example, maybe an Appraise check would make the best fit for the hypothetical Heist layer I keep using for examples. Players are also likely to suggest all kinds of specific hijinks that could trigger other skill checks (like a Forgery check to gain access to property records or a Decipher Script check to figure out the graffiti patterns the local gangs are using).

The point here is that, like any action resolution, you want to contextualize the investigation action and you also want to respond to the contextualization provided by your players: Don’t just tell them “the vampire den is on Highborn Street”, tell them how they learned that piece of information.

A good technique for this is to make the skill check and then (assuming success) frame the scene just before the information is acquired. For example, if they make a Gather Information check to figure out where Don Carlo is holed up don’t just tell them, “You talk to Don Carlo’s driver and he tells you that he’s got safehouse on the east side.” Instead, cut to the point where they walk into a seedy bar and find the driver half drunk. That lets you play through the moment, which can set the mood, allow for memorable roleplaying opportunities, or lead the investigation in unexpected directions.

Go to Part 12: Exploring the Advanced Urbancrawl

Since we’re talking about urbancrawls lately, my attention was immediately arrested when I saw a couple of pretty amazing city generators over at Last Gasp.

Both of them are dice-drop generators, which reminds me of the fun you can have with Vornheim, but they’re integrated with prodigious random tables. The first is a generator for small, Lovecraftian-style fantasy towns: The dice drop generates a layout for the buildings and the faces of the dice are used iteratively to form factions, feuds, leadership… It’s fantastic. Check it out here.

The other generator creates a particular iteration of the ever-shifting magical city of Cörpathium, which draws its inspiration from M. John Harrison’s Viriconium. The dice drop in this generator determines the relative locations of city districts and then (this is the cool part) generates a whole bunch of conditionals based on which districts are present and how they relate to each other. You can find it here.

Go to Part 1

The pair of questions I keep coming back to are: Why are the PCs urbancrawling? And what are they actually doing when they “crawl”?

And I think the reason I’m struggling with those questions is because, in an urban environment, their answers are very dependent on the specific context of the PCs’ actions.

This dependence is the result of the city being an extremely dynamic place: In a dungeon there’s generally just one interesting thing happening in a room. In the wilderness the interesting thing is separated from other interesting things by miles or leagues of scenery. But in the city there’s so much activity so densely packed that any given block (or even building) will often have dozens of different things happening in it. The question of which of those things you’ll end up engaging with is highly dependent on the experiences that you choose to seek out.

Having recognized this Gordian knot, we now have to seek the sword that can slice through it. And I think the key here is to stop thinking of the city as a monolithic entity and start thinking of it as being made up of diverse parts. We need to manage the dynamic nature of the city by breaking it apart into distinct layers. The city is not a single urbancrawl, but rather a multitude of urbancrawls that lie on top of each other in a simultaneous coexistence.

LAYER 0: THE GAZETTEER AND THE MAP

Let’s start with the base of the city: The gazetteer. This is the Baedaeker’s travel guide version of the city. It’s the list of useful shops, taverns, inns, and Important Public Locations.

The gazetteer isn’t an urbancrawl. Although it might be interesting to build some of this stuff into an “Explore the City” urbancrawl layer for those completely new to the city, the stuff in the gazetteer constitutes the elements of the city that will generally be visited through targeted travel. For ease of reference, putting these locations in a gazetteer format makes the most sense.

The other thing you’re going to want forming the foundation of your city is the map. And you’re going to want to split that map up into naturalistic divisions. For ease of reference, I’ll refer to them as districts, but in the game world they could be anything: Neighborhoods, wards, sectors, gang territory, streets, or whatever. You’re aiming for districts that make sense to the characters actually living in the city (they’re labels or divisions that they would recognize and talk about). But you’re also aiming for a districting concept that scales to the amount of material you’re planning to include in each layer of the urbancrawl. (This is just like a hexcrawl: If you find yourself frequently keying multiple entries into a single district, your scale is probably too large. If you find yourself with a lot of empty districts, your scale is probably too small.)

THE URBANCRAWL LAYERS

Over the top of this foundation – the gazetteer and the map – you’re going to layer in your urbancrawls.

Unlike a dungeoncrawl, the goal of an urbancrawl doesn’t default to treasure hunting. It defaults to finding something interesting. If the PCs are fairly ignorant of what the city has to offer (or are simply looking for new opportunities), then this idea of “finding something interesting” can remain fairly generic. But as the PCs learn more about the city, the action will inevitably become contextualized: Instead of saying, “Let’s see what’s going on in the Longbotttom neighborhood.” they’ll start saying things like, “We need to find out if there’s a blood den near Powderhorn Park.” or “Maybe we can figure out what the Halfling Mafia has been up to.”

Each urbancrawl layer basically boils down to one way in which the content of the city can be contextualized. In a given city, for example, you might have separate urbancrawl levels for:

• Vampire blood dens.
• Patrons who can give them jobs.
• The activities of a criminal gang.
• Potential targets for lucrative heists.
• Purely random encounters that provide “color”.

Each of these urbancrawls would (ideally) have interesting material keyed in every district of the city. So if the PCs go poking around the Longbottom neighborhood they might find the local vampire den. Or get contacted by agents of Lord Melbourne. Or run into mafiosos hassling local businesses. Or discover that a local merchant family currently holds the Neferelli Diamond. Or get their pockets picked by goblin urchins.

(Having five full layers like this would probably represent a really dense urbancrawl. It would require a lot of prep, but it would also deliver hundreds of hours of play. My guess, though, is that you probably only need 2 or 3 layers to get a really dynamic urbancrawl started.)

THE THIRD DIMENSION

This basic structure of urbancrawl layers is probably sufficient for running a simple urbancrawl. But I’m going to propose that you can add significant depth to your city by extending its urbancrawl layers into a third dimension.

You’re going to take one of your existing urbancrawls and you’re going to add layers to it. These deeper layers won’t necessarily be complete (in the sense that they’ll fill every district in the city with content), so it may be more convenient to think of them as “hidden nodes”.

The idea is that these hidden nodes can’t be directly or immediately accessed by anybody ‘crawling the city. Instead, they can generally only be accessed in one of two ways:

First, districts in the “lower levels” of the urbancrawl may contain clues that will point directly at these hidden nodes. For example, PCs raiding a vampire blood den may discover correspondence from Count Ormu implicating him as a vampire lord.

Second, these hidden nodes can be “exposed” to people ‘crawling the city if certain conditions are met. These conditions would generally take the form of “clearing” lower level nodes. For example, if various adventuring parties take out three of the blood dens in the city, Count Ormu’s network may be sufficiently disrupted to expose his involvement.

This second condition is particularly important for open tables because it solves the “I didn’t get the clues from the first half of this mystery” problem: If you’ve got the clues pointing at Count Ormu, great. If you don’t, but the blood den networks have been sufficiently disrupted by other groups, then Count Ormu becomes available to you through general ‘crawling.

In conceptualizing these hidden nodes, it may be useful to reflect once again on Kenneth Hite’s Conspyramid from Night’s Black Agents, which provided the most immediate inspiration for this added dimension:

You don’t necessarily need to engage in the same rigid hierarchy or chains of communication (the geographic component of the urbancrawl will cover a lot of the same bases), but it also can’t hurt, right?

Of course, the third dimension of some urbancrawls will be more conceptual rather than organizational: Different targets for heists, for example, may not be directly connected, but you can still add additional levels to a heist-based urbancrawl layer (representing the attention of more powerful clients or security arrangements which have been exposed or simply a pacing mechanic for heists over time).

Go to Part 11: The Investigation Action

“Futurese: The American Language in 3000 AD” is an interesting extrapolation of where linguistic trends will take the language over the next 1,000 years. It’s a useful reminder that the English we speak is in a state of constant change.

One thing I will note, however, is that “Futurese” seems to be postulating a shift in English over the next 1,000 years that’s fairly equivalent to the shift in the language over the last 1,000 years. In doing so, I think it’s ignoring two vital factors:

First, the advent of print and widespread literacy had a significant effect in slowing vocabulary shifts.

Second, film and television seem to have had a massive arresting effect on pronunciation shifts.

William Shakespeare provides a valuable example of the former: His works are 400 years old and are definitely filled with archaisms. But the differences between modern English and Shakespeare pale in comparison to the differences between Shakespeare and the stuff written in 1200 AD. In fact, the vast majority of the shift away from Shakespeare’s English happened in the 100-150 years after his death: You can read commentators in the mid-18th century and the vast majority of the passages we have difficulty with in Shakespeare today are the same passages they were having difficulty with then. At the midpoint between us and Shakespeare is Jane Austen, whose English is essentially modern.

The baseline for the second point is obviously much shorter and might just represent a coincidental lull period in the evolution of pronunciation. But I don’t think so. I think the fact that we are regularly listening to words spoken 50 or 80 years ago is providing a consistent pressure that prevents (or at least radically slows) significant shifts in pronunciation which were common prior to the advent of sound recordings.