Four factions. Two cabals. One 600-pound head.

In 2003, the universe got rewritten and the Comte de Saint-Germain — arguably the most important human to ever exist, the Once and Future Eschaton of the Invisible Clergy — got his brain scrambled. Now the race is on to retrieve the huge stone religious bust in which some of his memories are locked up.

That head was dug up and stuck in a museum in Québec, but now there are at least two different groups looking to steal it, another looking to steal it from whoever steals it first, and a fourth that would rather the head stay right where it is.

Can the players steal it? Defend it? Steal it back again? It’s all up to them.

Bring Me the Head of the Comte de Saint-Germain is a three-part mini-campaign for Unknown Armies by Greg Stolze. It reveals (and revels in) some of the deepest secrets of the setting and has several really cool features:

• It’s designed to be either seamlessly slipped into an ongoing campaign or picked up and run with zero prep using the deliciously well-developed pregenerated characters.
• The players actually swap roles between the protagonists and antagonists.
• There’s a really fantastic, full-featured heist scenario that kicks everything off.
• Multiple, flexible finales give the GM support no matter which way the players torque the adventure.

As the producer, I basically had nothing to do with any of this. It was a pleasure to just step back and let Stolze work his magic, while I focused on facilitating the presentation and design of the final book to maximize its utility and present Stolze’s work in the best light possible.

But if you take a peek at the credits page, you will notice that I do have an “Additional Writing” credit. This is for one very specific addition to the text, and like the extra in a Broadway play who walks through the background of a rainy scene and tells his parents the show is about a man with an umbrella, that’s what I’m going to be talking about today.

ON EXHIBIT

As I mentioned above, the opening hook and adventure for Bring Me the Head is a heist. Specifically, the PCs are stealing a huge stone head from Le Museé de la Civilisation Américaine in Québec. This was fully developed by Stolze:

• Blueprints (including a diagram of security cameras)
• Fully detailed security measures
• Detailed breakdown of entrances, locations, etc.
• Guidelines for handling likely methods of moving a 600-pound stone head

And so forth.

This is where my one addition comes in: I wrote up exhibit lists for each of the exhibit halls in the museum.

For example, here’s the one from the Autochtones des Plaines (First Peoples of Canada) exhibit:

• A stuffed bison
• Rifles used by Ojibwe and Dakota hunters
• TV playing videos of Ojibwe, Dakota, and Cree people, both contemporary scholars and interviews from the early 20^th century
• A child’s jacket with embroidered Dakota floral patterns
• Beaded bandolier bags
• Nooshkaachi-naagan (Ojibwe winnowing tray) for separating grain from chaff
• A turtle-style cekpa ozuha (umbilical cord pouch) which served as a child’s first toy and a lifetime charm against death

I even ended up doing one for the souvenir shop (with some tie-ins to the various exhibit lists):

• Tiny replicas of Augusta Savage’s busts
• Plastic Mixtec jewelry
• A poster facsimile of the Canadian constitution
• Commemorative coffee cups
• Stuffed bison and caribou toys
• T-shirt that reads “Je suis venu au Québec et je n’ai reçu que ce t-shirt français”

Unknown Armies uses a sidebar reference system, so these lists are positioned in the sidebars where they won’t clutter up the primary text, but are readily available to the GM while running the scenario.

I felt having these lists in the book was important because, based on playtests, it seemed that these specific details were:

1. Difficult for GMs to improvise on the spot (often resulting in generic responses like “there’s a lot of modern art in this gallery” instead of specific details); and
2. High-value in terms of improving play.

First, the specific details tended to make the museum feel more “real” to the players. It also provided some meaningful color to flesh out onsite surveillance ops and some well-defined, “Oh shit! The exhibits!” moments if/when fighting broke out during the heist.

Second, this kind of specificity can serve as a launchpad for player improvisation. I don’t know exactly what the players might cook up with the hodge-podge of stuff in the souvenir shop, for example, but it will be interesting find out.

Third, expensive items can provide temptation to PCs who might want to snag something extra during the heist. This actually pivots off a suggestion that Stolze had already made in the adventure:

How honest are your PCs? If the answer is “not very,” they might take the opportunity to steal secondary stuff, either to distract from the stone head, or to resell, or just because it seems nice. Anything of great value escalates the pursuit considerably. Stat up a private detective with no occult knowledge but lots of resources to dog the PCs’ tail.

(The text is in bold there because guidance for the private detective is also given as a sidebar reference.)

Having specific potential targets in the various exhibits makes it more likely that one of them will catch the eye of a PC (or otherwise become featured in their plans).

Ultimately, this adheres to the Principles of Smart Prep: Identifying high-value material that’s difficult or impossible to duplicate through improvisation.

And that’s basically it. It’s a small detail, but particularly when multiplied across the hundreds or thousands of GMs who will run these adventures, I think it can make a big difference.

PDF – Print

Magical Kitties Save the Day is the new roleplaying game from Atlas Games. The first edition was created by Matthew J. Hanson and published as a PDF-only release on DriveThruRPG. Michelle Nephew, one of the co-owners of Atlas, encountered the game at a local game convention, immediately bought a copy, and began running a multi-year campaign for her kids. It was an incredibly fun game, and back in 2018 we realized that Atlas was perfectly positioned to bring the game to a much larger audience.

Michelle, Matthew, and I began work on the game’s second edition, which would be designed for print and worldwide distribution.

But I wanted to do more than just print a copy of the game as it already existed: Not only had we all learned a lot from running and playing the game, we also had the opportunity to create a truly unique game for all-ages that would not only introduce roleplaying games to new players, but also teach new players how to become game masters for the first time.

I’ll probably talk more about those features at a future date. For today, I’d like to take a peek at the Magical Powers in Magical Kitties.

See, in Magical Kitties Save the Day you play a magical kitty. Every magical kitty has a human. And every human has a Problem. You need to use your Magical Powers to solve those Problems and save the day. (The trick, though, is that kitties and humans all live in hometowns which also have Problems — things like vampires, time-traveling dinosaurs, and alien invasions. These hometown Problems make human Problems worse, so if you want to help your human solve their Problems, you’ll need to solve their hometown Problems, too.)

The first edition of Magical Kitties Save the Day featured eighteen Magical Powers for the kitties. For the second edition, I wanted to expand this to thirty-six powers.

Why thirty-six?

This was primarily determined by two of our design goals:

First, I wanted a fast method of character creation, which meant a default method featuring random generation. (I talk more about why this is important in On the Importance of Character Creation, but the short version is that nothing hooks a new player like actually creating their character; it gets them thinking about all the cool things they’re going to do with their magical kitty. But for this to work well with new players, character generation should be quick, fun, and comprehensible.)

Second, we wanted the game to only use six-sided dice. I’m a big fan of the polyhedrons, but limiting the dice to just one type would (a) allow us to provide dice in the boxed set for a relatively low cost (so we could invest more in other features) and (b) provide a more familiar experience to players in our core target audience six to twelve year-olds.

As a result, during character generation you roll two six-sided dice and read them like percentile dice, generating thirty-six results from 11 to 66, to determine your Magical Power.

Some of you might be balking at this: The core audience is six to twelve year-olds and you want them to understand how to read non-standard percentile dice?

I shared those concerns. But then I did some research. It turns out that educational studies have not only indicated that kids in this age range can mentally comprehend these concepts, but understanding two-digit place value is part of the Common Core math standard for 1^st graders (i.e., six-year-olds).

So if you’re pushing out of the core range and play with four- or five-year-olds, you’ll probably need to help them out a bit. (You might also consider using the optional Kitty Cards, that not only serve as fully illustrated references during play, but allow you to create a new character mostly by just dealing out a hand of cards.) But beyond that, it will be at worst a great learning opportunity.

POWER BALANCE

When it came to actually developing and playtesting the new Magical Powers, however, I found it to be a more unique challenge than I’d anticipated. Because each kitty has a unique Magical Power (before unlocking additional powers as they gain levels), the game inherently lacked some of the balancing elements that often find in other RPGs featuring powers. I couldn’t, for example, make one power Level 1 and another power Level 3 to reflect a difference in their strength or utility as I would in D&D; nor assign them different point values like I’d do in a game like Hero.

This meant that some powers that I initially thought would be really cool ultimately needed to be tossed out because they just couldn’t be given enough oomph to stand on equal ground with other powers in the game. In other cases, limitations needed to be found to pull back a concept that would otherwise be too powerful.

A further complication came in the form of Bonus Features. As a special effort, magical kitties can add a Bonus Feature to their power, making it more potent than usual. As they level up, they can also permanently add these Bonus Features to their powers. It was not only important that the Powers remain balanced with each other as Bonus Features were added, but essential that a Power could have awesome Bonus Features for kitties to unlock. (This meant that some powers that were fine in their basic form didn’t make the cut because there wasn’t a suitable upgrade path for them.)

I developed a couple rules of thumb:

First, no Magical Power could completely overlap another Magical Power. If both powers were being played by different kitties in the same session, I didn’t want one of the kitties to rendered obsolete. Bonus Features could “nibble” a bit on another power’s uniqueness, but the Bonus Features of the other power needed to give it a unique upgrade path.

For example, Super Strength lets a kitty pick up anything weighing as much as a horse or less. With the Bonus Feature of Heavy, Telekinesis can do the same thing (and better since you can lift it from a distance). But the kitty with Super Strength will have Bonus Features allowing them to eventually Pick Up a Whale and, later, Pick Up Anything. Telekinesis can never lift anything larger than a Horse, but has its own unique upgrade path allowing multiple objects to be manipulated simultaneously.

(Most powers don’t even get this close to each other. It’s an extreme example.)

Second, a Magical Power should have an active use: Part of the fun of the game is for players to think up creative and crazy ways that they can use their powers. Players shouldn’t have to passively wait for the GM to cue them.

There are two exceptions to this: Energy Deflection and Force Field. These are both kind of iconic powers that players wanted, but they’re innately passive. To some extent this is OK because adventures tend to bring threats from which protection is desired (so you’re unlikely to end up in a situation where the GM just fails to ever cue up your power). But we also made these work by making sure their Bonus Features unlocked active powers: Thus, Energy Deflection allows you to target things with the deflected energy. And Force Field can be used to create things like invisible bridges.

As you can see, limiting Magical Powers so that they all needed to be in balance with each other came with some sacrifices and some tough design challenges. But the advantage of this approach was a robust, streamlined simplicity: Players don’t need to spend a point budget or juggle powers of different tiers or whatever.

This also allows character creation to easily manage different levels of mastery: A completely new player can rapidly roll up a new kitty in just a couple minutes, but those who familiar with the game can skip the random generation and design just the kitty they want by simply making choices at each step of character creation.

Adversary Roster from Infinity: Quantronic Heat

Adversary rosters are one of the essential tools in my GM’s kit. In 2016, I wrote that I considered them my greatest “secret weapon”:

They allow me to run dynamic scenarios of considerable complexity on battlefields that can easily sprawl across a dozen areas with a relative simplicity which still leaves me with enough brainpower to manage varied stat blocks and clever tactics […] permanently disrupting the staid rhythms of “kick in the door” dungeoncrawling in your campaign. Adversary rosters are also a great way for running stealth missions, heists, and covert ops.

Of course, I have no interest in actually keeping them secret. Since writing that essay in 2016, I’ve introduced them to an even larger audience through my remixes of Dragon Heist and Descent Into Avernus; taught them as an essential tool in the Infinity Roleplaying Game core rulebook; and used them prominently in Over the Edge: Welcome to the Island.

I’d first mentioned the concept of the adversary roster here on the Alexandrian all the way back in 2011, referring to them as a “monster roster” and using G1 Against the Giants as an example of how they could be used. But by that point I’d already been using them for years.

While discussing this history with Robb Minneman on Patreon, I ended up delving into my old game notes in an effort to figure out when I’d first used an adversary roster: I knew that Against the Giants had actually been one of the earliest rosters I’d developed (which is one of the reasons I’d used it as the example in my 2011 post). And I also remembered using them in Forge of Fury around the same time.

As I sifted through my notes, though, I discovered (or, I guess, re-discovered) a far more nuanced development process. Adversary rosters are, in many ways, such a simple concept that one might think they would have sprung full-blown from the brow of Zeus. That was even more-or-less how I remembered it happening, but it wasn’t true.

So I thought it might be interesting to take a detailed look at the actual development process to see how this concept evolved.

THREE DAYS TO KILL

Around 2000-02 I was running (or attempting to run) three D&D 3^rd Edition campaigns:

• The Quest of the Seals was a fetch-quest campaign using a mixture of original and published adventures. I launched the campaign with John Tynes’ Three Days to Kill (Atlas Games).
• Freeport was a heavily modified version of Chris Pramas’ Freeport Trilogy (Green Ronin), placed at the northern tip of the Teeth of Light (a chain of islands in my home campaign setting) and studded with some island-hopping adventures.
• The War of the Giants, was a campaign I wanted to run that would start with G1 Against the Giants, but rather than transitioning to drow-related shenanigans, it would have instead escalated into a full-scale humans vs. giants war on the northern frontiers. (This never really got off the ground and didn’t progress beyond Against the Giants).

If you’re familiar with the history of D&D, then you’ll know that Three Days to Kill and Death in Freeport were the first two third-party adventures published for 3^rd Edition, both being released on the exact same day the Player’s Handbook was released. It’s not really a coincidence that my first two full-fledged 3^rd Edition campaigns launched with those scenarios: I’d scooped them up at Gen Con 2000.

In terms of how adversary rosters developed, The Quest of the Seals was the most important of these campaigns.

I’ve talked previously about how John Tynes, in Three Days to Kill, boils down the essential elements of a raid-type scenario. As noted in that discussion, part of a raid-type scenario is that “the defensive forces should be designed to respond as an active opposition force.” This is what that looked like in Three Days to Kill:

Now, this is not an adversary roster. But what it does do is separate the bad guys from the room key and, once again, emphasize that they’re going to be actively moving around the place.

When I prepped the adventure, I created a cheat sheet for the villa:

You can see that this is also not an adversary roster: It’s just a brief summary of the information from the module. When I ran the adventure, though, I really liked this: I liked the dynamic foes. And I liked having this information all on a cheat sheet that I could easily reference.

THE SUNLESS CITADEL

Three Days to Kill ends with someone (probably the PCs) accidentally opening a portal to Hell. For the purposes of my campaign, I basically upped the ante on this. As I noted in the campaign journal:

Behind you, the Blood Temple crouches upon the side of the mountain, pulsing and screaming into the night. A fiendish red light floods the heavens, obscuring the pale stars which shine down upon your retreating forms. The maw of Hell has been opened, and if there is a power which can shut it… you do not know what it might be.

The Quest of the Seals was, in fact, a quest for the three seals required to shut the portal to Hell: I placed one in The Sunless Citadel, another in the Forge of Fury, and the third in a homebrew module called the Monastery of Light. I then positioned these locations at opposite ends of my campaign world, so that the PCs would have to criss-cross the map on their epic journey.

But I digress. The important bit is that the next adventure on the docket was The Sunless Citadel.

And in my prep notes for The Sunless Citadel there’s this page:

Now, this looks a lot like an adversary roster. But this is only partly true. Do you see the entries for “Total Kobolds” and “Total Goblins”? That’s because this was actually a worksheet for tracking casualties.

See, The Sunless Citadel is occupied by a clan of kobolds and a clan of goblins at war with each other. As written, this conflict is kind of a cold war (with the kobolds occupying one set of rooms and the goblins occupying a different set of rooms). But I wanted to make this an ACTIVE conflict, with the goblins and kobolds actively feuding, raiding, and fighting. The casualty sheet was designed so that I could track this in real time.

This becomes even clearer with some stuff I designed for the group’s second session in the Citadel. The PCs had allied with the kobolds and fallen asleep in a side chamber. I decided to launch the second session with them being awakened by a major goblin raid on the kobolds.

I actually prepped the outcome of the entire fight if the PCs didn’t get involved. This was sort of like prepping a scenario timeline, but mostly misguided because it continued far past the point where the PCs were likely to intervene and change everything. (On the other hand, it was really four separate timelines — one for each room which had been assaulted — so this was mitigated somewhat: If the PCs intervened in Area 15, for example, I could use the timeline to easily keep track of what was happening in other rooms. Looking back with 20+ years of experience with 3^rd Edition, though, it would have made a lot more sense to reduce the number of rounds involved here by at least a third.)

In concert with this timeline, I also had a more specific casualty tracker:

In practice, that cheat sheet listing the locations of every goblin and kobold in the place did result in me beginning to haltingly use it like a proto-adversary roster (moving goblins and kobolds around to reinforce various areas), but the concept hadn’t fully gelled yet.

THE DEPTHS OF RAGE

As the PCs left The Sunless Citadel and headed west towards The Forge of Fury, one of the adventures they had along the road was “Depths of Rage,” a scenario from Dungeon Magazine #83 by J.D. Wiker that I combined with some material from Carl Sargent’s Night Below campaign.

Wiker’s “Depths of Rage” is a really cool scenario where the PCs delve into a goblin lair and then, when they’re at the deepest point of the dungeon, an earthquake hits and causes large parts of the dungeon to collapse. Now, with the dungeon completely transformed, the PCs need to crawl back out!

So this is a really cool, dynamic dungeon where the key entries and monster locations shift pre- and post-quake.

Night Below, on the other hand, includes notes in its key about how the monsters will dynamically react to the PCs’ presence and attempt to alert monsters in other locations (and also how the current location will be different if they have been previously alerted). For example

5. Thief Guards

[…]

If the wyvern watch at area 4 goes off, alerting them to the presence of intruders, Tinsley slips away towards area 10 to alert the fighter guards in the lower caverns (area 12), while Caswell hides behind one of the many columnar rocks.

I kind of combined these two ideas in an effort to make the dungeon even more dynamic and reactive. What I ended up with was an adversary cheat sheet that looked like this:

Which was… interesting.

No, not really. I mean, it worked. The adventure was great. But trying to program my prep notes like a computer game was a terrible idea — pure contingency prep instead of tool prep.

The last thing I prepped as part of this adventure, though, was a tracking sheet. Basically just a list of every area in the scenario so that I could actively track which goblins were where as a result of the various Alerts being triggered:

When I’d filled out this tracking sheet, what I had, of course, was something that looked a lot like the proto-adversary roster from The Sunless Citadel (i.e., Area 16 – 4 goblins), with the key difference being that this had been specifically developed to move the goblins around.

You’ll also notice that I had chunked the dungeon into sections: the Western Caves and the Eastern Caves. This was a natural division in Wiker’s design of the caverns, and breaking the goblin forces into these two separate chunks I kept each chunk to a manageable level of complexity.

THE FORGE OF FURY

Which brings us, finally, to my prep notes for a radically expanded Forge of Fury. It’s here that all of these ideas gel into the adversary roster. It looked like this:

Following in the footsteps of the goblins & kobolds of The Sunless Citadel and the east & west caves of “Depths of Rage,” you can see that I’ve chunked Forge of Fury into factions. This, obviously, is the adrak faction.

You can see that I’m still including a separate list of everyone in the faction. I did this for the purpose of tracking casualties, just as I had done in the previous two adventures. (Shortly thereafter I realized I could just track casualties directly on the area roster so that I wasn’t trying to do double-entry bookkeeping in the middle of a session.)

You might also note that I was indexing by AREA instead of by ACTION GROUP. (Compare to the roster from Quantronic Heat at the beginning of this article.) This is really a legacy of how the adversary roster evolved out of a traditional dungeon key (i.e., I’m literally going through the module and listing all the monsters in Area 15, then all the monsters in Area 16, etc.) and it persisted in my notes for many years even when I wasn’t adapting published adventures.

Reviewing my other campaign notes, it looks like I made the swap around 2009, probably as part of the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign.

(Why is the swap important? Conceptually it puts the focus on the adversaries you’re actively playing rather than the area they’re currently in. More importantly it makes it A LOT easier to use advanced techniques like variable areas, patrols, and the like. It also makes doing roster updates easier. See Art of the Key – Part 4: Adversary Rosters.)

In any case, the pay-off for these adversary rosters in Forge of Fury was immediate and spectacular at the table: Things kicked off with a truly epic siege as the PCs sought to break through the goblin defenses at the Mountain Door. After getting through the door itself, the PCs were able to strategically test the goblin defenses, while the goblins were able to move their reinforcements around.

Later, the PCs became trapped in the depths of the dungeon, cut off by the movement of enemy troops on the levels above them. You can read the conclusion of those adventures in Tales from the Table: In the Depths of Khunbaral.

The whole thing remains one of the coolest and most memorable dungeon adventures I’ve ever run, and the experience immediately cemented the adversary roster as a technique for creating awesome games. Having run hundreds of sessions since then using adversary rosters, I have only become more convinced that this is the case.

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!

On page 33 of the Infinity roleplaying game, there is an “Advanced Rule” in a box:

As an advanced rule, instead of using a group pool for saved Momentum each PC can save Momentum and use it later individually. Players who have saved Momentum can spend it at any time to assist the actions of other player characters (or NPC allies) and otherwise influence the scene. At any given time, a player can save a maximum of six Momentum. In addition, any single action can benefit from a maximum of six saved Momentum. (For example, if two players had both saved four Momentum each, they still wouldn’t be able to spend all eight Momentum on a single action.) During Momentum depletion, each character loses 1 Momentum.

This is presented as an optional rule, but the truth is that, in my opinion and based on countless hours of playtesting, it is the only way that people should be playing the 2d20 System.

Let’s back up for a second and talk about how Momentum works in the 2d20 System, which was created by Jay Little for Mutant Chronicles and then also used in Infinity, Conan, John Carter of Mars, and Star Trek Adventures. When you resolve an action test in 2d20, you determine a target number based on Attribute + Skill and then you roll a pool of d20 dice — generally starting with 2d20, but expandable to 3d20, 4d20, 5d20, etc. You generate one success per die that rolls under the target number, plus an additional success if the roll is under the pertinent skill’s Focus. (So even if you’re only rolling 2d20, you’re often capable of generating up to four successes.) You succeed on the check if you score a number of successes equal to the difficulty of the task — so if the difficulty is 2, you need to generate two successes to succeed.

Here’s the final wrinkle: If you score MORE successes than you need to succeed at the task, those extra successes are converted into Momentum, which can be spent to enhance the current action or saved and spent later to gain bonuses to future checks, create obstacles for opponents, and other special effects.

At first glance, this seems fairly unremarkable. But in actual practice, it’s a really interesting system to GM for. As I wrote in the GM advice section of Infinity:

…setting a precise difficulty level is not a significant feature of the game. In fact, at least 95% of the time you will basically be deciding whether a task is of Average (D1) difficulty or Challenging (D2) difficulty. (The higher difficulty ratings of Daunting, Dire, and Epic obviously exist, but can be incredibly difficult or even impossible for some characters to achieve under normal circumstances. As such, they should be rare in their application.)

The reason for this is because the Infinity system is far less interested in the simple binary of passing or failing a check, and is instead intensely interested in the quality of your success, which is measured and leveraged through the use of Momentum.

So whereas a GM running D&D or Numenera or Feng Shui 2 is often giving a lot of thought to what the specific numerical value of difficulty for a particular test should be, the GM of a 2d20 game is instead generally just asking, “Is this check unusually hard?” If yes, then difficulty 2. If no, then difficulty 1. The mechanical focus of the game is (or, at least, should be) all in how Momentum is used after the check.

GROUP vs. INDIVIDUAL MOMENTUM

This brings us to saving Momentum. As noted, any Momentum generated by a check that isn’t immediately spent can instead be saved to be used in the future. The mechanical difference we’re talking about is whether you:

• put your saved Momentum into a group pool, from which any player can pull Momentum to spend; or
• put your saved Momentum into a personal pool which you control

The distinction between these points has little or no impact on game balance. Personal pools can theoretically allow a group to save more total Momentum, but in practice this rarely happens, it’s counterbalanced by the fact that every pool ablates a point of Momentum at the end of each scene (so the group loses saved Momentum faster), and the amount of saved Momentum that can be spent on a single check is capped at the same amount.

(We also playtested a variant which was completely equivalent mechanically: Total saved Momentum in the group is capped at 6 and the group collectively chooses which saved Momentum is lost during scene ablation. This makes bookkeeping more complicated and also tends to result in a pointless little “Momentum dance” where players spend their saved Momentum in order to open up cap space for the current player to save their Momentum.)

So if it’s basically mathematically equivalent, what’s the big deal?

Primarily, off-turn player engagement.

Consider a typical combat system: Everybody rolls an initiative and, when their initiative comes around, they take their turn. What happens when it’s not their turn? They just wait for it to be their turn again. The longer the wait, the more likely it is that they will become bored or tune out.

You can counteract this by giving players off-turn engagement. I discuss one example of this in The Design History of Saving Throws: D&D saving throws mechanically engage a player (i.e., let them roll dice) when it is not their turn. It’s a very basic form of engagement and doesn’t involve player agency, but it is physically engaging and that’s enough to break up the routine “it’s not my turn” cycle of tuning out.

When you used a group pool of saved Momentum that anyone can pull from, the player generating that Momentum gives up ownership of it. The only player engaged when the Momentum is used is the active player who is choosing to pull from the pool.

But if you use personal pools, then the player who controls the saved Momentum has off-turn engagement when they spend it to help the active player. This is off-turn engagement with the dial turned all the way up, because even when they’re not actively spending Momentum, the player is constantly looking for the opportunity to do so.

The other factor here is ownership. When a player dumps Momentum into a group pool it is almost immediately anonymized. When that Momentum is later spent by another player, the original player doesn’t feel any ownership over that; they don’t feel the direct connection between the thing that they did and the thing that the current player is doing. When Momentum is spent from a personal pool, on the other hand, the player has immediate and visceral agency. This usually also bleeds into the game world, with the player spending the Momentum explaining how their character is actually contributing to the current action.

This sense of collective contribution to success creates a group camaraderie that, once again, tends to transcend the specific moments in which Momentum is spent: The group is mechanically encouraged to view their successes collectively and take action collaboratively instead of focusing on individual accomplishments.

DESIGN HISTORY

So if I feel this strongly about personal pools being the correct approach for Infinity, why is it pushed off into an optional sidebar?

That’s a complicated question.

When I first became the Lead Developer for the Infinity RPG, the only 2d20 game in print was Mutant Chronicles. I was handed a mechanically complete lifepath system (that needed setting content slotted into it, but should otherwise not be touched) and a half-finished system that needed to be finished. So I spent a couple of months doing that and then turned my attention to developing the setting material for the core rulebook and the scenarios for Adventures in the Human Sphere, Quantronic Heat, and other supplements.

It was at this point, however, that the development process hit several problems. Basically, right around the time that I was declaring Infinity to be “system locked” (like picture lock for a film, I think of system lock as being the point where the mechanics are nailed down to the point where you can confidently develop supplementary material) there was a simultaneous project inside Modiphius to develop an internal 2d20 SRD that would create consistency between all published versions of the game.

In developing the Infinity version of the 2d20 System there were a couple key design principles I had established.

First, because we were going to be developing full-fledged systems for Warfare, Infowar, and Psywar, I felt it was important to streamline and simplify the core of the system. The complexity of the game would come from having these robust scenario/game structures, and therefore other sources of complexity in the system should be smoothed out.

Second, the 2d20 System in Mutant Chronicles — like the pre-Genesys system Little had designed before it — features a set of core mechanics designed to empower players and give GMs tools for making powerful, robust rulings, but then surrounds those mechanics with a ton of mechanically crunchy specificity. The core mechanics of the Momentum system, for example, are beautifully designed to empower player creativity and improvisation, but then the system works relentlessly to lock that down by providing a laundry list of specifically defined ways that you’re allowed to spend the Momentum. My own design predilections, on the other hand, lean the other way: Ditch all the hand-holding and just leave the powerful core structures.

These two principles worked well with each other: Focusing on cruft-free core structures simultaneously simplified the mechanical core so that it could be developed through the new functionality of Infowar and Psywar rather than a lot of situational rules.

But the principles didn’t work well with the new guiding principle of unifying all 2d20 System design to match the new SRD. The result was a tug of war for the heart and identity of the game, complicated immensely because we had a dozen freelancers working on supplemental material that had to be constantly revised every time the core mechanics were violently yanked in a new direction.

I won some of those battles. I lost others. In the end, the only way I could keep the personal Momentum pools that I felt so passionately about in the game was as an optional rule, and even that was a fight.

But, seriously, if you’re running a 2d20 game — any 2d20 game! — swap to personal Momentum pools.

Buy!