The Gambler (Bookhounds of London)

First, housekeeping: I shall be in New York for a few days and so will not post on Sunday. It’s my Christmas trip. I’m hoping to see the Boy & the Heron while I’m there. 

On to the subject!  

Taken from Adventures in American Bookshops, Antique Stores and Auction Rooms by Guido Bruno, published 1922. 

The Gambler 

On Thirty-fourth, near Lexington Avenue, Jerome Duke has opened a bookshop of a peculiar sort. It is not exactly a book shop because there are antiques and curiosities all over the place. The books are thrown together topsy-turvy, Latin authors, modern novelists, theological books, old French tomes and German philosophers. I asked the proprietor about his books and his answer was: 

“I don’t know anything about them. I never read books and would not be bothered with them. I buy them at a certain price and I try to sell them at a profit. In fact, I intend to buy anything I can get cheap enough, no matter what it is. I went into the book game in order to gamble and I am going to gamble on anything that people bring in here. 

“There is one thing I have just refused to buy because the man wanted too much for it. He said that he had recently returned from Europe, had been a soldier, and wanted to sell me the embalmed finger of a German general. I forget the name of the general, but the man said that it was authentic and that he would sign a document before a notary public, swearing that he had been present at the time the finger was cut off of the general’s hand. Now, if he had asked fifty cents or a dollar, I would have been willing to take a chance, because it would make a good window display in this time of war; but he wanted five dollars, and I couldn’t see my way clear. That’s too much of a chance, to stake a five-spot on an embalmed finger of a German general. So I bought a slipper instead. It belonged to a Madame Jumel, and she is supposed to have worn it on the day that she got her divorce from Aaron Burr. I paid a dollar for it and I consider it a pretty sound gamble.” 

“How so?” I asked. 

“Well,” he answered, “because Aaron Burr was the second Vice-President of the United States.” Of course that argument was final, and I wished him luck with his purchase. 

Gutenberg can be a useful source of inspiration.  

They’re not all winners, but you can find some historical oddments and useful architectural drawings. The great thing is, even if it’s nonsense, it’s period nonsense told by the folks who were there, in their own words.  

Take that German general’s finger. I have absolutely no idea if any World War One generals lost a finger. Or, for that matter, two fingers. I couldn’t tell you which generals fought in the war. Not even Wikipedia can tell you that, though it does have a list of colonel generals if you’re at all interested. 

As a rule generals don’t die on the battlefield; they tend to succumb of some disease or other, safely behind the lines. At least, that’s the case for modern generals, and World War One is sufficiently modern for death by ouchie to be less of a risk. Lord alone knows how that finger came to be severed. Odds are pretty decent that it belonged to someone of less consequence than a general officer.  

However, as a period souvenir it ticks all the boxes. War plunder? Sure, why not. There might even be a little testimonial from someone who was there when the finger took flight. Trench art flourished during the war; I have a couple ashtrays made of artillery shells, for instance. People did make trench art out of body parts, and it’s within the realm of reason that someone might have made a reliquary out of bits of shrapnel. 

Plus, there’s the enterprising Jerome, who strikes me as a perfectly good foil for any Bookhounds game.

With all that in mind: 

The Duke’s Mess. 

Duke’s Head is the informal name for a bookshop in [pick a district] recently opened and getting a reputation. It’s a bit of a catch-all place; you can find anything there. About one step above a junk shop, really. No organization, no method. Some book scouts favor it as a hunting ground because the owner, Jerome Duke, apparently has no head for books – though some scouts say this is all a ruse, and Jerome knows more than he’s telling. 

Jerome Duke is an American, a former serviceman settled in London after the war. He says his people used to be Cockneys and he’s just reclaiming his roots, but his Noo Yawk accent is as thick as boot leather. He’s a manic gambler, card sharp and risk-taker. Cop Talk knows his shop is a well-known gambler’s house, with all kinds of illicit games in the back room after hours. It’s a regular shebeen, but so far Duke has avoided any consequences.  

Duke’s Head is best known for its collection of History, foreign Languages, and Craft. He does have some Occult texts but he doesn’t specialize in that stuff. He just picks up whatever’s on offer.  

The other thing Duke’s is famous for is trench art. He brought in a few things from his time in the trenches but after a while his collection grew and grew. If you want some odd bit from the war made of bullet casings and shrapnel, Duke is the fellow to see. He’s also the fellow to see if you want to offload trench art, and even ten years after the war there’s a plenitude of the stuff to get rid of. 

Duke’s collection includes an odd reliquary with a crucifix made entirely out of bullet casings. Inside the home-made reliquary is a mummified finger. Duke made this one himself and he won’t tell a soul how he got the finger, or why he thought it was a good idea to seal it up in this peculiar little artwork. 

Option One: Ghoulish Tendencies. Duke is a ghoul, made such by his experiences in the war. His American persona is one he adopted early on, and it stuck with him. He has other disguises, but Duke is the one he comes back to again and again – out of habit more than anything else. The finger is a memorial to his first official meal as a ghoul. 

Option Two: Megapolisomantic Guru. Duke speaks the language of cities and listens to their secrets. He settled in London because this is the best place to practice his craft. He may be willing to teach the art, or other Magick techniques, to people willing to devote themselves to London and its story. The finger is an artefact he’s crafted, which holds 4 points of Magick he can call on to help his castings. The pool can be refreshed every full moon, if he leaves the reliquary out in the moonlight. 

Option Three: Things Just Happen. Duke is one of those people who attracts problems. Occult problems. Mysterious problems. Maybe he just has one of those faces, or maybe he has a Drive that points him in the wrong direction. Take that finger, for instance. He cut it off himself, from a monster he says he encountered in the trenches. The monster – a vampire – would like it back but, so far, the vampire hasn’t been able to track Duke down. So far … 

Jerome Duke: Health 6, Scuffling 6, Fleeing 8, Firearms 4. Honest face, complete with Abraham Lincoln chinstrap beard; does not like loud noises; a friend to horses everywhere.  

Not Quite Review Corner: Never Going Home (Wet Ink)

The setting is the real Earth and the characters are all humans. A terrible new element has been added to the war, but the true horrors of the real war are part of the story as well. The game is set in the years between when the Veil was torn in 1916 and when the war really ended in 1918. The focus is on the front-line soldiers who are fighting and experiencing the worst of the magic and monsters. There is some mention made of, but little exploration of, the “home fronts” of any of the belligerents and civilians only appear in passing …

Wet Ink Games

First published via Kickstarter this has since become a multi-volume horror RPG setting. I never knew about the KS; I picked up some (but not all) of the books via DTRPG.

This is a folk horror setting that presumes the belligerents all discover – whether by accident or design – occult powers which they instantly weaponize, shortly after (during?) the battle of the Somme. Their continuing abuse of those powers causes catastrophe, as those occult powers start taking over the armies of the world. Your allies become your enemies. Your officers are now leading the forces of the abyss. There’s still a war on; you’re just not sure who you’re fighting for.

The only thing you know for certain is you’re never going home …

The idea intrigued the hell out of me when I saw it on a friend’s bookshelf but I wasn’t that keen on picking up physical when .pdf would do nicely, please and thank you. Having read, I’m still intrigued, but a little more puzzled than intrigued.

It’s a strong idea. It just doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

The main book lays out the basic premise and then gives you three scenarios, presumably meant to be an introduction to the setting: the Belly of the Beast, the Lamps, and Sword Quest.

Sword Quest?

Sword Quest.

The whole thing’s only about a hundred pages so it can’t cover everything, which is a pity because the war alone could eat up several thousand pages. About 28 pages go on background material – no man’s land, allies, central powers, world at war – and another 30-ish pages go on rules stuff. The rest is adversaries and scenarios. The other books go into more detail (I particularly like Tears in the Sea, which focuses on U-Boat adventures) but in the main book much of the war is sketched in. There isn’t much attention paid to the air war, for instance. Tanks are essentially a McGuffin in one scenario but don’t otherwise affect the narrative. There’s almost no mention of any location other than France; this is all about the Western Front. (the Japanese appear to be missing in action). There are other sourcebooks; I’m focusing on the main book.

Want to shoot something? Roll 1D6 per dot of training in Ranged; two dots, say, equal 2 dice. If you roll 5 or 6 on a die, that’s a success. If your number of successes meets or exceeds the Target Number (the system’s way of designating Difficulty) yay! If not, boo. 

You can adjust your result by manipulating the roll, using a relevant attribute (Guts, Smarts, Brawn). Add extra dice, push a failure to a success, reroll dice. Pray you have sufficient attribute to make a difference when the chips are down.

What will you be shooting at?

Oh, dear. Whatever it is, it can probably tear your face off with consummate ease.

This is where the game really starts to shine: superlative antagonist design. Hideous, nightmarish Silent Hill types which stagger out of the Veil to do harm. Everything from mischievous little trench Gremlins to the shambling Skin Thieves and Cackling Horrors, these long-leggedy beasties will have your players wishing they were anywhere but here.

All of which seems very Purist, to borrow a Trail of Cthulhu term. This isn’t one of those games where your characters turn up, mow down fools with their machine guns, then retire for tea and biscuits. This is a game where even if you win, you probably die. Or become part of the cults and groups of madmen who want to take over the battlefield and, by extension, the world.   

Then there’s the scenarios, and I can feel the wheels beginning to fall off the wagon.

Belly of the Beast is interesting. It introduces the main dilemma of the ongoing narrative – the occult is creeping in, and our superiors are embracing it – and reinforces it when the characters’ officer orders them to do something unspeakable. So far, so in keeping with the central idea.

Then there’s the Lamps, where cultists gather victims to power a ritual to summon a giant bat.

Hm. Giant Bat, eh? It’s certainly .. monstrous … but I can’t help but wonder if we’ve lost focus. The other scenario was tied directly to the war. This one could be taking place anywhere in any system or setting; I can picture it in any standard D&D scenario book, and you wouldn’t need to change much, if anything. Put it in Baldur’s Gate and the only variable would be which character decides to seduce the bat.

Then we have Sword Quest, where Merlyn entices a PC to pull a magic sword from a something-or-other to become the King of all Blah-blah. Which is where the wagon loses its last remaining wheel. 

It looked Purist. Then Ash Williams showed up and Purist went out the window.

Deathwatch

The Bunker

Up to this point I’ve been picturing this as a kind of creepy Deathwatch, Bunker, R-Point, Dog Soldiers kind of setting. Horror with a strong dose of noir. The setting is by definition larger than the characters; if they fail, it’s usually because they were crushed and beaten by the situation. That’s still the case; the characters are going to be crushed and beaten by the situation.

What is the situation? 

This is the first mechanized war, the first modern total war. The flowering of the propaganda machine. Motorized transport brings millions to the lines. This is a war where cruise liners were repainted and armed for conflict; where the German liner Cap Trafalgar engaged the British liner Carmania in a gun battle near Trindade and Martim Vaz archipelago, and the remains of Cap Trafalgar with all its finery, crystal and sun gardens is at the bottom of the ocean even today as a reminder. A war where giant gasbags floated over London and dropped bombs in the heart of the city. Where Paris woke and went to bed with artillery fire ringing in its ears. Where troops from all over the world were brought to a place they’d never heard of, to die. Where the Newfoundland Regiment was wiped out in 15 minutes at the Somme, almost to a man.

It makes perfect sense that all the belligerents would adopt occult methods to attain their war aims if they were proven even somewhat effective. After all, they used flamethrowers and poison gas, trench guns and mortars. They took the Wright Brothers’ gift to mankind and turned it into an engine of death. What difference do a few demons make to that bubbling cauldron?

Sometimes this works. The Disfigured, Trench Gremlins, Blightworms, Carrier Pigeons, Flaming Aces, Hellfighter Tanks – these work with the setting and design intent.  Others … well, they could be in any horror game. 

I’m just not sure were the giant bat fits in. Or the Arthurian quest for Welsh magic swords. (Arthurian? Really? Why? We’re not even in Brittany.) There’s a strong central concept here bursting with horror, but I wonder if everyone involved in the project got the memo. Where’s the war? The grinding, mechanized, bloody-teeth war? Is it hiding under the bed?

It feels at times as if the war is just an excuse for gribbly beasties to slaver a bit so the characters can shoot at them. Not so much horror. A little D&D-ish. The mission design doesn’t help. The characters are given a mission: go here, do this. They go there and do that. As a result there is another mission: go here, do another thing. And so on and on. There’s not much investigation, not much input from the players at all, really; they go there, do that.

All that aside: I do like the idea, and I like the setting. Some of the antagonist design is the best I’ve seen in a horror product. I would definitely run this as a one-shot. 

There’s just not as much there there as I would like.

The Building 2 - Events (RPG All)

This will be the last post for a short bit, as I shall be off island. Hopefully New York won’t be too cold … 

I’ve been noodling a few campaign ideas for Wraith: the Great War. I don’t know if I’d ever get to play them; Wraith isn’t the most popular World of Darkness setting, and it wants players who a) understand the rules system and b) are willing to get put through the mincing machine, which … I mean, people like that exist, it’s getting them in the same room for several hours on consecutive weekends that’s’s the problem. 

However, expanding on a previous post about the Building, I thought I’d talk a little about RFC Conty. 

The TL/DR of the Building can be summed up as: 

The Building is that area in which you, as GM, expects plot to happen. For plot to happen, the GM needs to populate the Building, either with people or events with which the players can interact. It is player interaction, not NPC action, that makes plot. 

The last time I talked about the Building I focused on the people in it. This time I want to talk about events. But first, a bit of prologue.

RFC Conty is a Royal Flying Corps air base operating out of the village of Conty, not far from the Somme shortly before that battle is about to begin.  

The action in Wraith: The Great War is loosely supposed to take place in the 1920s shortly after the Great War’s end. It presumes that during the War, sparked by the colossal slaughter that was the Somme, a spectacular outburst of spectral armies shredded the Hierarchy, the Wraiths’ nominal form of government, and as a result of that chaos one particular faction, the Legion of the Grim who represent those who died of violence and especially murder, step into the breach and attempt a coup. That goes about as well as you might expect given all the other carnage that’s taking place, and it’s this cesspit of violence and its consequences that kicks off the main plot. 

I’ve always thought it would be interesting to have a kind of prologue event to all this, hence RFC Conty. That’s the main hub of the plot for this opening chapter. The action takes place prior to the Somme hence prior to the main spectral outburst that kicks off the main event. Think of it as a kind of backstory to the devastation to come.

RFC Conty is the base for Sparrowhawk Squadron, No. 7 Sqn RFC, which flies DH2 single-seater pushers out of Conty. The DH2, popularly known as the Spinning Incinerator, is a recent arrival intended to take on the Fokker Eindecker head-to-head and put an end to the Fokker Scourge. It’s not a bad plane but lack of experience meant that many of the early intake span down to the ground, hence ‘spinning incinerator.’ Some of the RFC’s early aces cut their teeth on the DH2, notably Lanoe Hawker (one of Richtofen’s kills) and James McCudden. 

For settings like this which rely so heavily on real-world details I find it helpful to turn to history, and in this case An Infantry Subaltern’s Impressions of July 1st, 1916, by Edward Livening, which I nicked off of Gutenberg. He describes the area roundabout, just before the battle: 

The country in that part is high-lying chalk downland, something like the downland of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, though generally barer of trees, and less bold in its valleys. Before the war it was cultivated, hedgeless land, under corn and sugar-beet. The chalk is usually well-covered, as in Buckinghamshire, with a fat clay. As the French social tendency is all to the community, there are few lonely farms in that countryside as there would be with us. The inhabitants live in many compact villages, each with a church, a market-place, a watering-place for stock, and sometimes a château and park. Most of the villages are built of red brick, and the churches are of stone, not (as in the chalk countries with us) of dressed flint. Nearly all the villages are planted about with orchards; some have copses of timber trees. In general, from any distance, the villages stand out upon the downland as clumps of woodland. Nearly everywhere near the battlefield a clump of orchard, with an occasional dark fir in it, is the mark of some small village. In time of peace the Picardy farming community numbered some two or three hundred souls. Gommecourt and Hébuterne were of the larger kind of village. 

OK, so that gives me a bird’s-eye view of what Conty is probably like. Clay earth, used to be a corn field, a large community nearby, probably an orchard nearby (apples, why not – it’s cider country after all). A chateau, always good for plot. Anywhere that long-lived is bound to have a hidden history that the current population don’t know about or remember, and hidden histories are meat and drink in Wraith games.  

What about the Squadron? 

Total aircraft: 15, in three Flights, of which 12 are in the air at any one time and the others – the knacker’s yard – used by replacements or if one of the flight is too badly damaged to fly. 

Commander:  Major Bob Lennox 

Flight Commanders:  Captains David Lynch-Hardinge (A Flight), Robinson ‘Mule’ Fairbrother (B Flight), Eustace ‘Skipper’ Wainwright (C Flight) 

Flight: Leftenants Eric Quarry, Norman Fitzhugh, Daniel Rutledge (A Flight);  

                Andrew ‘Crasher’ Lacy, Geoffrey Vine, William ‘Billy’ Mason (B Flight);  

                Victor Crawthorpe, Harold ‘Crackers’ Parrot, Percy Warnock (C Flight) 

Also present, though No. 7 Sqn has no knowledge of this, are two relic aircraft. One is a Fokker Eindecker, and the other is a SPAD SA two-seater recon aircraft. These fly daily, keeping an eye on events on the battlefield and reporting back to Hierarchy higher-ups on the ground. 

Pilots & Observers: Otto Rall (d. 1916, Eindecker); Arthur Bonneton (d. 1915, SPAD Pilot) Sir John Fastolf (d. 1459, SPAD observer)   

Additional Hierarchy support on the ground at No. 7 Sqn is provided by the Office of Maelstrom Preparedness which has an outpost in what is now the munitions store and was a barn. This small Iron Legion outpost is led by Chevaleresse Marie Allard (d. 1804) who employs a small number of scouts, couriers and administrators kept constantly busy by the changing tide of events on the battlefield. 

Ammunition Store: Seems constantly ablaze (burnt down in a fire), has spectral horses (plasmics, always screaming), wraiths coming and going at all times of day and night. I see the Ammunition Store as having been built on the remains of some past tragedy, the burning down of a stables, hence the spectral horses. Places like that have a lot of energy humming away.  

In Conty I’ve already placed a few people but haven’t gone much further than names and nicknames, because this time around I want to talk about events. 

Events don’t have to directly affect the players. However, events happen whether the players get involved or not, and the consequences that flow from those events are also things that might affect plot.  

An event in its simplest form is a thing that happens, and the great thing about a setting that involves real world situations is that you have some events baked in. If this was about the Titanic or the Lusitania disasters, there’s a predetermined sequence of events; the iceberg or the torpedo always arrives at such-and-such time on such-and-such date. In a battlefield situation as GM you know roughly when the battle starts and stops, but beyond that there’s a whole smorgasbord of events you can pick from. 

The Somme has a defined start point: 1 July, the Battle of Albert. That’s when the Maelstrom kicks off, with massive exhalations of spectral energy. From my perspective, that’s where the Chronicle ends. 

I mentioned RMS Lusitania a moment ago. She went down in May 1915, after being torpedoed by U-20. That sounds like a good start point for the Chronicle; it provides a meaty inciting incident and is exactly the sort of thing that might kick off an uptick in Maelstrom activity. An outburst of spectral activity inspired by the sinking is exactly the sort of thing that might inspire the Iron Legion to set up its Office of Maelstrom Preparedness outpost at Conty. 

The OMP is a small organization at this point; the main book describes it as being a couple hundred field researchers. Sounds like a great group patron for the sort of miscellaneous vagabonds who make up the average Chronicle. 

The story begins with the sinking of the Lusitania, in which one (or more) wraiths are killed. They have fetters in Conty – we can thrash out the whys and wherefores in session 0 – so they snap to that location after the tragedy. That’s where they meet Chevaleresse Marie Allard, who at that point is just setting up the Office that her superiors have asked her to create.   

[For those not familiar, fetters are things that link wraiths to the living world. They can be anything from a favorite doll to a house but are usually small personal items of one kind or another. When a wraith dies, assuming they don’t disincorporate altogether, they go to a fetter. That's how these wraiths get to Conty from the murky depths of the Atlantic.]  

Right there we have events Zero and One. Zero being the sinking, One being the snap to Conty and the initial meeting with Chevaleresse Marie Allard. Those are fixed points, and they have to happen for plot to proceed. In theory they can happen in session 0 and not involve dice or any kind of ability check; it can be their introduction to the setting and the world at large. 

Broadly, a fixed point is something that has to happen. Think of it like a Core Clue in Gumshoe. The players will always be given Core Clues since without them the plot can’t proceed. The same principle applies here. Fixed points have to happen because without them the plot can’t proceed.  

Whereas a floating point is something that may/may not/will happen at some point, but don’t have to happen directly to the characters. The death of Major Bob Lennox may/may not/will happen at some point and the characters may be affected by that death, but it does not have to happen to them directly. A big party in the officer’s mess, a sudden uptick in maelstrom activity, a raid by the Grim Legion, the last ride of the ghostly coach-and-four that’s been going up and down the Conty road since the 1700s, the arrival of a group of pretty Irish nurses, the card game that nets Crackers Parrot a significant sum, a bombing raid – all these things are floating events. They provide useful background to what’s happening on the main stage, or they become the main stage, depending on whether/how the players interact with them. 

As GM you don’t need to go chapter and verse on every single event. That way madness lies. However, it can be very useful to go over the calendar month by month and pencil in a few things. That way even if the players never interact directly with, say, the last ride of the coach-and-four, you at least know when it happened and can work out what affect it may have on the plot. Perhaps it deeply affected Chevaleresse Marie Allard, or robbed the OMP of a useful resource, or its end somehow brought Major Lennox’s career to a premature close. Or maybe it just provides water-cooler gossip for a few weeks.  

An event can be absolutely anything. The day the sewer backed up is an event. The day the house got painted is an event. Its significance may be anything or nothing; often the things that seem the smallest to those on the outside matter a great deal to those intimately connected with the event. 

There’s a sad moment (one of many) in Capt. J.C. Dunn’s WWI account, The War the Infantry Knew, in which a number of trees in the village of Le Nord are cut down to make gun limbers. An old woman watches it happen. ‘Soon there will be no trees in Le Nord,’ she says. A small event or a large one – who can say, except those who were there and experienced it? 

Point being, it’s worth having a few floating events to hand either to have the players bounce off them, creating plot, or at least as hints dropped for future plot. The players may not care that much about the coach-and-four, but if they care about Chevaleresse Marie Allard then they care about what happened to the coach-and-four. That means plot. It may also determine future plot.  

If this wasn’t Wraith, if this was a fantasy setting without a Gregorian calendar much less the fixed points described here, what then? 

Exactly the same. You frame it differently. You might say that this happens in Spring, this Summer, this in Autumn and this in Winter. The crops are planted in spring, the crops harvested in Autumn. Or the great storm that shatters the old oak tree happens in Summer, or the taxes go up in Winter, or the wizard turns all the children into mice in … and so on.  

The process does not change. There are still fixed points, and floating points. The difference is in the description, but not the details. 

Enjoy! 

I'll be back later in December (briefly) to talk about New York and will probably take a hiatus after that until January when we'll pick up the weekly posts.

Battlefield 1 Reveal Trailer - Historical Jibber Jabber

It's rare I have something drop in from the mystic land of videogames that's so firmly in my wheelhouse as Battlefield 1, the latest iteration in the warfare FPS franchise from Electronic Arts. As I'm busy working on an Esoterror project - more later - I thought I'd use the trailer as a mental cleanser, popping in from time to time to give my thoughts on it when I want a break from the project.

Little is known about the game itself. It's set in the Great War. It's already been revealed that the Harlem Hellfighters, the black American (or perhaps that ought to be French, since the Americans wouldn't let them fight under the Stars and Stripes) regiment, will be a significant part of the game. Allegedly you'll be able to pilot tanks, planes and battleships as well as engage in ground combat. Not entirely sure why, since naval warfare really wasn't a thing in the Great War; everyone stayed home after Jutland. It might have been more interesting to give the players submarines. But what the hell.

With that in mind, the trailer:

First thought: the music's OK, but I would have preferred at least a nod to the tunes of the time rather than leap in with White Stripes. Eh, whatever.

0.08: trench warfare. Looking accurate so far.

0.09-11: desert warfare. Cool, the game's looking beyond the usual Trench Warfare stuff. Apparently that's a woman riding at the charge. Fair do. Not sure about the henna face tattoo; I thought that mehndi was more of a festivals/weddings tradition, than a 'let's stab people up and look good doing it' thing. Also, face tattoo? Is that what traditional mehndi's for?

0.14-0.17: back to the trenches again. Not sure when this is. I'm going to cross my fingers and say  1917-18. It's remarkable that everyone's striding around upright given the snipers, shrapnel and machine gun nests everywhere.

0.18-0.21: only one flyer used an all-red crate, and he didn't crash into what looks like a desert outcropping. Also, triplanes in the desert, what the hell. There was air warfare in the desert, but they used clapped-out hand-me-downs from the Western Front, not the latest and most modern kit. Plus I'm getting muddy about the timeline. If that's a tripe then this is probably 1917. So what's that remarkably intact building doing there? Why does everything look comparatively nice and not bombed to hell and gone?

0.25: Tanks? In the desert? Bullshit. Plus, if those are tanks, then this is 1918. They're working remarkably well, under the circumstances. The early tanks didn't like mud; God knows what those delicate little darlings would have made of sand, sand, sand as far as the eye can see. It's bad enough trying mechanized warfare in the desert in the present day. Those things would have gone two foot, coughed, and died.

0.034: I have absolutely no idea where we are. Italy? Maybe? It's the only explanation for why everything looks so green and verdant.

0.36: onwards, yeah, forget it. Not a clue. Most of it's trench warfare, some of it's sea warfare - again, that all came to a halt after Jutland - a chunk of it's air warfare, and I couldn't begin to tell when or where this is meant to be. Except there are tanks. So presumably 1918, Western Front. Except those are British tanks attacking what seems to be a British, or possibly American, position. Well done, lads. Medals for everyone. Historical note: the Germans did have tanks, but they never really got the chance to use them, except for one inconclusive little scrap in April 1918.

0.54-56: A zeppelin? What on earth for? Those things were a joke by 1918. You might as well send in Charlie Chaplin.

1.01: well, it's all over now, and I don't have to listen to that Godawful music. Thank Christ.

Impressions: it's traditional at this point to scream 'no gameplay' at the top of your voice, but in this case I think the criticism isn't as on-point as it could be. This is EA, after all, and Battlefield is one of its showcase warfare FPS titles. Unless someone screws up dramatically the gameplay will be solid but uninspired, because it is always solid but uninspired. Equally if there was anything really interesting it would be in the trailer, and it isn't. So nothing to look forward to, or to worry about.

It's just cinema, and not even very interesting cinema. It's unusual to see a Great War themed game, but there have been a few of those recently - Valiant Hearts, for instance - so it's not a complete shocker. I predict a bland and uninspiring single player experience tacked onto what is probably intended to be a multiplayer extravaganza that will last until the servers go dark. So maybe two years.

It's odd. There's been a bunch of multiplayer titles recently - Destiny, the Division, whatever that bloody silly mecha titans game was a year or two back - and all of them seem to be aiming for roughly the same market. Presumably someone out there is praying for a Team Fortress 2 success-level title, rather than the withered fruit that drops off the twig these days. But these things cost a fortune and if they're all leeching from the same customer base I don't know how the hell they're meant to make a profit.

Mind you, these are all made by the same small handful of AAA developers, and that might be the point. As the audience for Titanfall dwindles repurpose the servers for whatever Battlefield title is coming up the pipe, and that way you seldom have to worry about underutilized assets.  

Final verdict: historically wobbly justification for what's very likely to be Just Another Shooter. Collector's Edition pre-order at $220-odd (Jesus Wept), but that includes the statue and other gimmicks which nobody in their right mind needs, and you know in your heart that any DLC in the pre-order will eventually be released for everyone to buy sometime after launch. I note that the Desert War and Red Baron packs seem to be separate assets, so presumably if you just buy the core game you only play in the trenches.

Incidentally what the hell is it with pre-order rubbish? I liked feelies back in the day; the cloth map you got with Ultima III Exodus was part of the fun, and had in-game relevance. But the monkeys have taken over the zoo. Who needs yet another dust-bunny up on the mantelpiece, gawping down at the living room like a senile relative at a bar mitzvah? Just how stupid is the average consumer, anyway?

Don't answer that.

Not-Quite-Review Corner: Sid Meier's Ace Patrol

This is a review of 2K Games' iOS free-to-play turn based strategy title, Sid Meier's Ace Patrol, a Great War air combat game. First, a disclaimer: although I write for the Escapist - in fact, I wrote this news post about the game - this review has nothing to do with the Escapist. It's completely my own thing. I'm drawn to this game in particular because I wrote this RPG scenario for Pelgrane and, as luck would have it, was tweaking the air combat rules not so long ago for the collected Great War Trail of Cthulhu setting.

Sid Meier is someone you should all have heard of by now, but on the off-chance you haven't, he's the guiding mind behind the Civilization game franchise, the man who took us to the stars in Alpha Centurai, the man who made Pirates! - also out for iPad, incidentally - and a host of other strategy titles. This latest effort fits right in with Meier's strategy aesthetic, being easy enough to get to grips with, but tricky enough to test your brain. It boasts 120 different scenarios and asynchronous multiplayer, all set in the hostile skies above the Western Front. You play as one of four nationalities - French. British, American and German - commanding a squadron of four eager pilots. Your job is to wage a successful campaign against the enemy, which means you need to fight the enemy four times in a series of scenarios, and then fight the concluding battle. Once that's over, the next campaign begins. Best of four campaigns wins the match.

Sounds simple? Well, it is ... except you can't just beat the enemy. You need to prevail while at the same time preserving your squadron. Each time a plane gets too badly damaged, its pilot has to sit out the next one or two missions. If a pilot gets shot down, they're injured for five missions, if this happened on your side of the lines. If this happened on the enemy's side, they're captured, which means they're out for the rest of the campaign, until they get handed over in the Christmas prisoner exchange. Remember, you only have four pilots. Most missions require only two, some insist on one, so you can afford to be a pilot down for a mission or two. But the concluding scenario of the campaign requires all four, so if something's gone very badly wrong and you only have one or two healthy pilots left, you're going to get trounced.

Aesthetically, this is a very pleasing title. Visuals are clean and fit the period very well. The sound and music are (mostly) spot on, though I'm prepared to swear on a stack of Sopwiths that someone borrowed a musical sting from Pirates! It just sounds too familiar. Strategic minds may be reminded of games like Avalon Hill's Knights of the Air, or Wings of War, as this title has a very similar aesthetic. Your pilots start off with the basic maneuvers and bags of optimism, but later on will be pulling off Immelmanns like seasoned professionals. Which is just as well, since their flying coffins are never very sturdy at the best of times. No single scenario takes much longer than ten minutes to play through, before the fallen are scattered across the landscape like crispy pigeons. Moreover the AI knows its business well enough to pose a significant challenge. If one of your pilots manages to get caught in a one-on-one against an AI ace, be prepared for pain, unless your man has as many tricks up his sleeve as the AI does.

Don't expect complete historical fidelity. The aircraft are well designed and in period. The pilots' continual survival is a bit odd; despite being shot down, shot up, set on fire, or imprisoned on the enemy's side of the lines, each lives on to fight another day. I'm torn. I'd almost rather there was permadeath, and have the dead pilot replaced by a rookie. Not only would that be historically valid, it would add a new layer of complexity, particularly late game. The presence of female pilots on the battlefield may upset some purists. The title gives you some customization options - you can change the pilot's name, and add some color trim to the pilot's plane - but ultimately you're stuck with a more or less interchangeable, and unchangeable, smiling face, male or female, to take into battle. Female pilots I don't mind, but I do find it slightly odd that - though there are one or two non-Caucasian faces - there don't seem to be any black pilots. After all, there were at least two black warbirds, one American, one Turkish, who actually fought, one of them on the Western Front. Why not have them in the game?

The 120 different missions boast is a bit of a misnomer. Mathematically, there may be that many, spread across the British, French, American and German campaigns, but in practical terms there are perhaps twelve different mission types in all. The Germans have one less than everyone else, since they have a zeppelin for the Allies to blow up, whereas the Allies don't have anything quite as cool for the Germans to shoot at. Some missions are essentially copycats; there isn't a substantial difference between blowing up a train, and blowing up some trucks. Most of the time you'll be playing through the same handful of missions, with the only difference between one campaign and the next being the relative difficulty of the enemy pilots. You may get bored quickly, given the level of repetition. Multiplayer is, I strongly suspect, where this title expects to enjoy longevity.

Whether or not that appeals to you is down to personal preference, but be warned: you may need to spend some cash. Though the title is technically free-to-play, only the tutorial missions in the British campaign are free; if you want anything else, you'll be spending money. It's $1.99 per campaign, or $0.99 for the rest of the British campaign. If you want your pilots back from hospital or the prison camp soon after they get shot down, that'll be cash on the barrel head, presumably each time you do it. I haven't been mad enough to spend money on that, at least not yet, though I wonder if that might not be the only way to successfully complete the game at its highest difficulty levels. There are also aces for purchase, special pilots who start the game with their own unique abilities, either bought singly or as part of the 'ace pack.' I do not know if the aces are allowed in multiplayer matches, but if they are, I pity the poor sod who goes toe-to-toe with the Germans. The special bonus for von Richtofen is 'inflicts more critical hits' and Immelmann 'starts with one ace maneuver', both of which abilities are ever so slightly savage. Pride of place has to go to Frenchman Rene Fonck's chance of a single-shot kill, though his companion Guynemer's ability is a bit naff, and anyone who spends good money on the American aces wants their head examining. I wouldn't take balloon-buster Luke on a bet, and Rickenbacker's ability to avoid critical hits isn't that wonderful, not when you consider that it's your ability to shoot down other people, not avoid getting shot down yourself, that will ultimately win the match.

Ultimately this title does tick all the necessary boxes: it has clever strategic play, and a compelling just-one-more turn single player campaign. Game play itself is smooth and swift, and while you may be tempted to go in bull-headed at first, it's clever strategy that will win the day. You do need to think one or two moves ahead, and if necessary take a few losses on the chin. It's the campaign that matters, not the skirmish, and it does you no good to win a match only to lose half your squadron doing it. Where it falls down is in its limited mission options, and a fairly aggressive monetization model that seems determined to wring pennies out of the player. It's not as aggressive as it could be; technically you could get by with just the British campaign, at $0.99, thus getting a pretty addictive strategy title for cheapsies. However it's unlikely that most players will stop there, and I've no doubt 2K Games knows it.

Recommended for: strategy nuts, Great War enthusiasts, those who remember the old Avalon Hill games fondly.

Not recommended for: people looking for a 100% authentic Great War experience, people who can't stand microtransactions.

Necessity is Somebody's Mum

Now that Sisters of Sorrow is out, I can talk a little bit about how that scenario came to be.

The Great War has always fascinated me, both as a historical period and as a setting for RPG scenarios. It seems uniquely suited to a horror setting, as well as being a conflict that, from a Keeper's perspective, involves so many different potential ideas. You could literally do anything, anywhere; a Great War scenario set in Africa, or the Pacific, is as feasible as one set in the trenches on the Western Front. A Keeper could set the scenario set entirely aboard a zeppelin, or a cruise liner, could have spies infiltrating the New York docks, a conflict in the Italian mountainside, Japanese soldiers in a bayonet charge, or German internees awaiting their fate after the Siege of Tsingtao. Any nation, any setting the Keeper can think of, and the War provides it.

I hadn't intended becoming Pelgrane's go-to for Great War scenarios, but they're a lot of fun to do, and I hope to make more of them. That said, there are times when I run smack against a scenario problem that takes some thinking to solve, and Sisters of Sorrow was one of those times.

I had intended to write a completely different kind of scenario, something more on par with Red October.  It would have been a haunted house at sea, with the players creeping around the once-familiar corridors of the U-Boat, never entirely sure what they would find around the next corner. I had the rough idea sketched out in my head before I started the research.

If this incident taught me anything, it's to do the research before coming up with any clever ideas. There was a glaring problem with my plan, and that problem was, there isn't enough room aboard a sub of the period to swing a cat. It's difficult to get hold of a comprehensive sketch, but Submarine Warfare of Today and Diary of a U-Boat Commander, both hosted by Project Gutenberg, give pretty reasonable accounts of life on board a submarine. I can't believe even for a moment that the Diary is genuine, bearing in mind how it's written and what happens in it - Polish spies, ye Gods! - but some of the scenes are probably accurate enough, as far as setting goes.Submarine Warfare was much more useful to me, and many of the illustrations in it could prove helpful to a Keeper running Sisters. 

But I had a problem: there was no way the complicated haunted-house story I had in mind could play out on a tiny little thing barely fifty foot long. If every single crewman stood up at once - assuming they could - they'd fill the boat from end to end. The very idea that someone could get lost in one was silly; it'd be simpler to imagine someone not being able to find their way out of a public toilet.

In some ways, scenario writers are crippled by a reliance on historical accuracy; it prevents them taking advantage of an idea, and seeing how it could play out. Yet there's no way a Cthulhu audience would tolerate any significant deviation from historical fact, not when the facts are available to anyone who cares to look. It's odd, when you consider that Lovecraft's U-Boat story featured not just portholes, but also diving suits and the means of deploying them, that players insist on strict accuracy. But then, I suspect there aren't that many who really like The Temple. Incidentally, for those who enjoy coincidences, the real U-29 sank on its first voyage in 1915, thanks to prompt action by HMS Dreadnough.

Meanwhile the real UC-12 had seven patrols to its credit, when it was sunk by its own mines in 1915. All of its crew went down with the boat, most - if not all - probably killed in the explosion.  

However the problem presented me with its own solution. A situation in which people are crammed together in a stifling, small space, helpless in the face of danger; that breeds paranoia and fear. It's not unlike Night of the Living Dead, funnily enough, but the interplay of characters was what made that move really interesting ... and then I realized I had my solution, ready-made.

Of course, I don't intend to discuss that here. Read the scenario, if you're interested in finding out what happens next.